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Commentary on "A Love Response"
Day 5: Wednesday, June 6, 2012 - The Legalism Trap
At the risk of sounding trite, SDA authors should be experts at discussing the legalism trap. Except that even when SDAs think that they have broken free of legalism, their doctrinal teachings trap them. The lesson provides an example of how the false idea that nothing is ever truly free has infiltrated Christian thinking. Yet this concept is central to the Investigative Judgment. According to traditional teachings of the Investigative Judgment, your sins aren't really freely forgiven and totally forgiven until you have spent a lifetime demonstrating that you deserve to have these sins forgiven. Failing to sufficiently demonstrate this means that at the completion of the IJ, your sins will be placed back on you.
The legalism trap, or the idea that nothing is truly free, is interwoven throughout SDA doctrine. I would describe SDAism like this: "it doesn't require any works on our part in order to initially receive salvation and forgiveness. But once we have received these, it requires our ongoing works in order to keep our salvation and maintain that forgiveness." Salvation is like a payroll advance. Sure, SDAs can claim that they are saved by grace and not by works in that their initial conversion didn't require any works. But, once you have this great "gift" you learn that you have a series of works you must do in order to keep that gift. So it isn't really a free gift, there are strings attached. This is legalism just as certainly as claiming that you must do the works before the initial gift, both attach works to having the "gift". And once the gift requires works, it is no longer a gift but a wage (Rom 4:4).
The lesson really sums up the foundation of legalism that exists in SDAism when it says that "obedience to law is so central to our understanding of what the gospel is all about." The law is contrary to the Gospel. That is the point made repeatedly throughout Gal 3. You simply cannot avoid the trap of legalism when you start with the idea that the gospel is all about obeying the law.
Because SDAism can't distinguish between the law and the gospel, it remains in a trap that it may not even notice. The calls to having the right motivation in one's actions are still firmly entrenched in legalism.
Copyright 2012 BibleStudiesForAdventists.com. All rights reserved. Revised June 1, 2012. This website is published by Life Assurance Ministries, Camp Verde, Arizona, USA, the publisher of Proclamation! Magazine. Contact email: BibleStudiesForAdventists@gmail.com.
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