Is obedience to God and His law a requirement?
In one sense, it is not and in another sense it is.
*Obedience is not required:
For justification, i.e. We are not, cannot, nor ever will be justified (in right standing with God) by our obedience to God's ³law.
To approach God's law in this way is saying we can make ourselves "right" with God through our efforts, i.e. we can be good enough to make (or cause) God to accept and love us.
If so, Christ wouldn't have needed to die and we could be our own savior and the cause of our salvation.
However, to be right with God requires a love, faithfulness, loyalty, and worship of God, that is equal to His beauty, majesty, and glory. God, being all glorious, rightfully demands and deserves a matching response.
We are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, because of who He is and how He loves. Anything less would be inappropriate and inadequate for an infinitely majestic, all-glorious being.
However, this ³can not occur for several reasons.
- Who among us loves God with all we are and have? Yet everything we are and have is from Him is it not? This alone demands our perfect loyalty, devotion, and respect, if not our affection, not to mention this being the greatest commandment.
To not love and honor God will all we have and are minimizes the beauty, majesty, holiness, glory, and infinite worth of God that justly compels and requires our perfect love and absolute faithfulness, loyalty, and worship of him for who He is - the infinitely beautiful, majestic, and all-glorious God. Nothing less than absolute, total loyalty and faithfulness is suitable or sufficient for the Creator, Giver, and Sustainer, of all things. He deserves all our devotion and rightfully desires no less.
- Only God is perfectly loyal in faithfulness, we are not. This is a problem since faithfulness and unfaithfulness in a relationship can not mix. This would be like a married couple with one partner being infinitely lovely and perfectly loving, loyal, and faithful while the other partner is off pursuing other "lovers." No normal and healthy relationship works this way.
- It nullifies the work Christ did to fully restore our broken relationship with God. Attempting to be in right standing with God by our efforts is an insult to Christ and His efforts. We are saying Christ's faithfulness to God - which was even unto death - was unnecessary; that I can be good enough and love God well enough to make myself right and acceptable to God without Christ having to do this for me. In effect, this is saying to God and others that Christ died in vain. His death was worthless and useless.
- We simply do not and cannot love/value God perfectly as He deserves, i.e. with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves without God empowering us. We are designed to respond to love and be the recipients and conduits of love. We are not the initiators of it. God alone is the source and cause of love. We love Him because He first loved us.
- And He will not empower us until the fallout (i.e. the harm and consequences) from our rejection of His beauty, majesty, and glory is addressed and accounted for and the veil of blindness that obstructs us from seeing him as He truly is, is removed. This occurs only when we are restored to a right relationship with God i.e. we are justified.
*Obedience is a "¹requirement":
If we are to partake of the fullness of God, His life, and bring Him maximum honor and experience our greatest flourishing.
This has nothing to do with our justification before God as our judge and everything to do with our communing with God and being in a harmonious and fulfilling relationship with Him as our loving Father. Having a "right standing" with God is only possible through Christ's efforts, not ours. Christ alone was perfectly faithful to God, not us - even unto death. However, being close to God and in a warm relationship with Him is up to us.
- Experiencing God in all his greatness and the full potential He created us for requires our maximum participation in who He is as our all-wise and loving Father and faithfully pursuing all he calls us to do. The essence of this is loving him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength as he rightfully deserves and loving our neighbors as ourselves (who, like us, are also in God's image).
- Our obedience does not cause God to love us but aligns us with Him and "plugs us in" to who He is - His heart-will - as the most lovely of all. Obedience is evidence of our love for him. It should match his love for us. It also ushers us into his presence more fully. When we draw near to him, ²he draws near to us.
- God is loving, good, kind, and wise. In Christ, we are his children. When we are aligned with Him, His love flows to us and empowers us so we also become loving, good, kind, and wise. This also reveals and reflects him to others through us i.e. It honors him. It brings him glory and also brings us the greatest joy.
In summary, obedience is a requirement as far as our maximum flourishing, experiencing God, and honoring Him, but not as far as our justification.
The Westminster Catechism asks...
What is the chief end of man?
The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. God's glory and our joy go hand in hand i.e. our greatest joy is in glorifying God.
"For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen." Rom 11:36
For a discussion on how we are inclined to earn God's love click here.
For a discussion on the difference between "Cultural Christians" and grace-driven followers of Christ, click here.
For a discussion on how God empowers us, click here and here.
For a discussion on the essence of God's Kingdom, click here.
For a discussion on how God's love is conditional and unconditional, click here.
For a discussion on whether our focus should be on morality or Jesus, click here.
For a discussion on what righteousness is click here
Footnotes:
¹I put "requirement" in quotes to distinguish it from justification. It is a requirement in the sense that drinking water or eating nutritious food is a requirement if we wish to stay alive and experience optimal health.
God is Life. All we are and have is from God. Partaking of, experiencing, and fully engaging Him is up to us.
Loving God with all we have and are and our neighbor as ourselves is to operate according to our design (and His will). Things work best when they function as they are designed to. This is especially true of us as creatures who alone are in God's image.
Even as God's child - through Christ - if we stop eating and drinking, we will still die. Nevertheless, we are no less loved by God because we violated God's design to physically sustain us through eating and drinking.
²Not in his disposition and posture of love toward us (Christ already fully took care of this and secured it for us) but in our disposition towards Him.
God's willingness, desire, and commitment to manifest himself to us and our being able to experience Him in all his love are perfectly secured for us by Christ.
But our full participation in all Christ has secured depends on us i.e. on our trust in God and faithful pursuit of Him as spelled out in the greatest command to love Him with all we are and have and our neighbors as ourselves.
³Not because we shouldn't obey the law or because the law is not good, but because we cannot without His love empowering us.
