Question:
When the Bible says, “We are not under the law but under grace” (Romans 6:14, 15), is “the law” referring to the Ten Commandments or to something else?
Answer:
It includes the Ten Commandments, but also encompasses all of the law given to Moses and could also include any law or rule of life that we might put ourselves under.
Not being under the law does not mean that we are free to do all the things that were once prohibited by the law. Rather, we are set free to have an entirely new and fresh focus for our lives. We no longer obey God’s commandments solely out of fear of His judgment. We no longer make resolutions to do better, only to break them the next day. We no longer try to find loopholes in God’s commandments so that we can do at least a little bit of what we want to do without feeling that we have sinned. We no longer are satisfied with simply carrying out the letter of God’s law.
Under grace, our focus turns to Christ, whose wondrous love and grace, whose infinite sacrifice for our sakes, attracts our hearts to Himself. The love and grace of Christ now motivates us to want to do everything possible to please Him, to obey Him, to serve Him, to bring Him glory. We want to do His will in all things, and we want to become like Him.
We do these things, not in our own strength or through the pressure of keeping resolutions, but through the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Under the law there is a tendency to do the minimum we can get away with—if even that much; under grace we are set free to do God’s will in every part of our lives, because of our great appreciation for Him and His work on the cross and His present work in the glory for our sakes.“For the love of the Christ constrains us, having judged this: that One died for all, then all have died; and He died for all, that they who live should no longer live to themselves, but to Him who died for them and has been raised” (2 Corinthians 5:14, 15).