If you believe in Jesus Christ alone as your Savior, trusting Him entirely with your salvation, are you then free from the law? There’s an awful lot of “yes but” vacillating on this question. Many Christians seem to quail at the concept, wondering what, if we are free from the law, would keep us under control. Many churches either sidestep the issue, or they point to the creeds and confessions that confuse the matter by saying that we’re not under the law but it is still a rule of life and is our duty. So, I want to show you what the Bible plainly teaches about whether Christians are free from the law, and I want to explain what the Bible’s answer means for us.
Why the World Came Under Law and Condemnation
The connection between humanity and law stems all the way back to the Garden of Eden. For a complete discussion of this, see “What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?”
God Made Adam and Eve Innocent but Susceptible to Sin
Briefly, when God first made Adam, He did not immediately put him under any law. Also, contrary to what some confessions allege, the Bible neither expressly says nor implies that God created man with the moral law written on his heart, or that the Creator made man righteous and holy. Instead, God merely created man without any law and, therefore, man was innocent of the knowledge of good and evil.
Since Adam was not under a law, and the law defines sin (1 John 3:4; Romans 3:20b), Adam could not sin. This was the only sense in which “God made man upright” (Ecclesiastes 7:29).
If God created man upright in the sense that the confessions say—that is, God created man righteous and holy with the moral law written in his heart—then we’re left with a dilemma. How could a righteous and holy Adam, who had the moral law written in his heart and had never previously sinned, have committed the first sin? The ability to sin requires a moral failing, a flaw. The answer to the question is that it is based on false premises. God did not create man righteous and holy with the moral law written in his heart, and the Bible never says that He did. God merely created Adam without sin—innocent of sin—but Adam’s flesh and blood nature made him capable of sinning.
Because of their flesh and blood, Adam and Eve had the potential to be corrupted right from the beginning of their creation. Notice what Paul says:
The first man is of the earth, made of dust. The second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the one made of dust, such are those who are also made of dust; and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. As we have borne the image of those made of dust, let’s also bear the image of the heavenly. Now I say this, brothers, that flesh and blood can’t inherit the Kingdom of God; neither does corruption inherit incorruption.
1 Corinthians 15:47-50
God Gave Adam One Command
Genesis 2:16-17 tell us that, after God took Adam and put him into the Garden of Eden, God gave him one command: “The LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
It’s important to know that Adam’s freedom to eat from any tree included the tree of life (Genesis 2:9). But, as we’ll see, Adam never ate from it.
After this, God created Eve (Genesis 2:21-22).
In Genesis 3, we read the famous account of how the Serpent, who is also Satan and the devil (Revelation 12:9; 20:2), tempted Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and she sinned by doing so. Adam then also ate and sinned. So, prior to God’s command, Adam and Eve were innocent of sin. But when God gave them a command, they broke it and sinned, showing that God made Adam and Eve sinless but predisposed to sin.
Some will still insist that Adam and Eve were holy and righteous, and that it was only because the serpent tempted Eve that she sinned. But this doesn’t hold water. The same being—Satan the devil—tempted Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). Yet, Jesus never gave in to the temptation because He really was righteous and holy. Theologians call Jesus’ inability to sin the impeccability of Christ. Obviously, then, Adam and Eve were not impeccable.
Despite the assertions of many writers and speakers, the Bible never says that God created Adam and Eve righteous and holy. It says God created them in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27).
Since God cannot sin, and Adam and Eve did sin, being in the image and likeness of God cannot mean or include being righteous and holy. What do “image” (tselem) and “likeness” (demûth) mean? Notice that they are associated in Genesis 1:26 with man having dominion over the other creatures of the earth. Tselem refers to images of things and derives from a word meaning “to shade.” It is also related to the word tsêl often translated as “shade” or “shadow” in the Old Testament. Demûth also means “likeness” or “similitude.” It’s difficult to distinguish the words.
Given the context of dominion in Genesis 1:26, I believe these word may refer to man being an image of, shadow of, type of God in man’s relation to the other creatures. I also believe man’s similarity to God lies in humans having not only bodies but also rational souls, minds, and spirits that enable us to be reasonable beings. Like God, we think rationally. But, due to our also being flesh and blood, we don’t always come to correct conclusions.
The Two Trees
To truly understand whether we are now free from the law, we should understand the typology of the two special trees God put into the Garden of Eden. What was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What did it represent?
As God’s name for it implied, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil gave Adam and Eve and their descendants the knowledge of good and evil. What specifies good and evil? The law. “…For through the law comes the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20b; see also Romans 7:7). So, by choosing to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve chose to come under law. This knowing good and evil—as both the serpent (Genesis 3:5) and God agreed (Genesis 3:22)—made them like God in that respect. But they also broke the law and lost their sinless innocence. They sinned and came under the condemnation of the law, and “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23a).
Adam and Eve’s sin brought the world under law and its condemnation. Since Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—law—and to not eat from the tree of life—freely given eternal life—they doomed the world to live under law, sin, and death.
The Gentiles, “who don’t have the [Mosaic] law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying with them, and their thoughts among themselves accusing or else excusing them” (Romans 2:14-15). That law written in their hearts doesn’t come from man’s original creation but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve ate from.
The law written in the hearts of humans is not a perfect or even correct understanding of God’s law, something that is obvious from this fact: Jeremiah wrote of a time yet future to him when God would make a covenant “with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33; see also Hebrews 8:10). This is speaking of the New Covenant that God made with spiritual Israel, all people who trust in Jesus Christ. If all of the people in the world already had God’s true law in their hearts, Jeremiah 31:33 would make no sense. All that people inherited from Adam and Eve’s sin was a basic, corrupt version of law that the various peoples around the world adapted to their cultures.
After the Flood, in the Noahic Covenant, God refined man’s understanding of law (Genesis 9). But it was never God’s true law written in their hearts. Even to the one nation that God chose as His nation under the Old Covenant—Israel—He only gave them a sort of kindergarten version of His true law. He did not write it in on their hearts, but in stone. Like all people, they broke the law, and it condemned them.
Yes, Dear Believer, You Are Free from the Law
Paul, in Romans 7:1-4, uses the “till death us do part” of marriage law to explain the principle of how we are free from the law. “…the law has dominion over a man for as long as he lives” (Romans 7:1b). Therefore, when a man dies, his wife is freed from the law of her husband, and she can then remarry (Romans 7:2-3). “Therefore, my brothers, you also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you would be joined to another, to him who was raised from the dead, that we might bring forth fruit to God” (Romans 7:4).
Paul’s point in verse 4 is not that Christ’s death, alone in itself, released us from the law. Before His death, we weren’t married to Christ. We were married to the law. What frees us from the law is that when Jesus Christ died, He took us with Him—we died with Him; and when He rose, we rose with Him to a new life free from the law and married to Christ.
Many other places in the Bible explain this same fact: Through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ (see Hebrews 10:5; Colossians 1:22), we also died, and when He rose, we rose with Him (Romans 6:4-6; Colossians 2:12-15). Because we died and rose to new life, “…sin will not have dominion over you. For you are not under law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14).
Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ must stop committing adultery, even necrophilia, with the law and start being faithful to our husband, Jesus Christ! It is not through the law, but through our gracious relations with Jesus Christ that we can bring forth fruit to God (Romans 7:4; Galatians 5:22-25).
But without the law, won’t we fall into sin? No, just the opposite is true: “But sin, finding occasion through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of coveting. For apart from the law, sin is dead” (Romans 7:8).
Paul, therefore, can write:
There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who don’t walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death. For what the law couldn’t do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh; that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
Romans 8:1-4
To be under the law is to walk after the flesh. Jesus has freed believers from the law so that we walk after the Spirit.
In Part 2, I want to show that, not only are we free from the law, but also trying to live by the law only works wrath.
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