Interaction with Owen Strachan on “Legalism”

A Recent “Twitter” Exchange with Owen Strachan on the Subject of “Legalism”.

Mr. Strachan had made the following comment on his Twitter (X) account:

“Don’t think for a hot minute that legalism is better than lawlessness–legalism is of the devil just as lawlessness is of the devil.”

I responded with the meme above. Mr. Strachan replied as follows:

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“Friend, there are indeed many practices of the past that we don’t observe today. It’s important to remember that just because our “Reformed ancestors” did something, that doesn’t mean we must do it. Our “Reformed ancestors” help us see that we must measure everything by Scripture.

Sadly, legalism gets smuggled into the church today through this kind of approach. “If the Puritans did it, we must do it!” is the argument. We revere and learn much from the Puritans (and Reformers), but they are not equivalent to Scripture. They never can be. Only Scripture is Scripture. Only Scripture has the power to bind the conscience. Nothing else does.

The book of Galatians is so good on legalism. I encourage you to read it and really grapple with it. Legalism is a subtle trap of Satan. It binds us where we are meant to have freedom. Breathe the fresh air of the gospel, friend!”

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(I’m replying to Mr. Strachan here, in as much as X severely limits the size of reply, and I felt his commentary so epitomized the modernist screed on “legalism” and exemplified the ignorant statements generally made about it, that I’d put up a reply here on the site. To some my reply will seem severe. Mr. Strachan certainly attempts to look cordial, and I don’t reply in kind. Such courtesies, however, are couched in a condescension that fully deserves the reply below tendered, but more importantly, because they slander the nature of the Christian gospel with a smile.)

Mr. Strachan… You suggest I read Galatians. Is that a book of the bible?  😆 I’d likely read Galatians many times before you were born. And if you’d read Galatians carefully you’d have known that it’s talking of false teachers seeking to enforce circumcision and other fulfilled ceremonial aspects of the law upon NT saints. Did I miss the parts of the ceremonial law prohibiting movies, vulgarity, and make up, etc., that the gospel did away with by the sacrifice of Christ? 😆 You clearly have not deliberately evaluated the passage, as you admonish me to do, but are just parroting traditions you hear modern bone headed theologians regurgitate, which you admonish me not to do with the antiquated.
You think those with historical views can’t allow themselves to question antiquity, when you can’t question modernity, but swallow its most asinine theological novelties without chewing.

You say this: “If the Puritans did it, we must do it!” is the argument.” Except that no one made that argument. No one but a papist believes that tradition proves obligation, as you assert without any cause at all. My meme neither said nor implied any such thing. What my meme exposes is the hypocrisy of modern wannabe Puritans who loath and belittle such as yet think like them in their own times. They build the sepulchres of the prophets and their fathers killed them. (Lk.11:47)

And there’s the next point. They’re not your fathers in the faith when you despise their teaching and manifest intolerance for it. You would have rebuked the Puritans like Laud did, not praised them like their own people did, because that’s what you’re doing right now to contemporaries who yet think like them.  It’s hypocrisy for modern “Reformed” to shower Puritans and the ensuing Evangelical movements with praise and moderns who agree with them with condescension and disdain, all while trying to posture as their spiritual descendants. That’s the MO of the papacy, in it’s bid to posture as the true church.

What would you think if I told you my pastor said that if you knew the love of God and understood salvation that you’d no more go to a movie than you’d stick your head in a burning wood stove? That would be a legalistic cult, right? Of course it would. But that was a quote from George Whitefield (modernized) and you live in your hipster little world where all the other hipster preachers pat you on the back for all spewing the same hipster folly, and think thus that the true church started in the 1920’s when Christians started jettisoning all the furniture of the good ship sanctification, and thus finally resigned their cult status as “legalists”, where alone your “true church” was born. Because what you don’t know is that the entire church of history embraced what ignorant myopic moderns would only esteem to be a “legalistic cult”. But now our all wise age of moral apostasy has arrived on the scene to enlighten 20 centuries of how Christians viewed SCRIPTURE, and if you want proof of it just wait a month or so and I’ll send you a copy of a book I’ve written full of similar quotes. That is not to appeal to tradition, but to appeal to the unlikelihood that the church was born in 1920.

You likely see yourself as holding a Reformed view of sanctification simply because you see it as the effect not the cause of justification, but forget that changing what sanctification IS is denying sanctification itself and not just it’s cause. And that’s being the antinomian you think you’re not.

Biblically we have no liberty to love the world. Being under the grace of God means that Christian believers have no condemnation for sin, not that we have no obligation to eschew it. That’s the devils gospel, not Jesus Christ’s. “For sin shall not have dominion over you because ye are not under the law but under grace”. You see, Mr. Strachan… not being under the law sanctifies those who are so granted remission of sins through grace. The gospel of Christ does not relax or eliminate the standard of obedience… it frees us from condemnation over our many failures to keep that good standard, and renews the whole man through regeneration, where despite remaining sin, all things are made new, (IICor.5) and despite all that remains despicable within, he is indeed kindly indwelt and changed, and made a true seeker of God, who mourns when he grieves God’s gracious patient Spirit, and covets God’s near presence.

You will say you believe all that, except that your explicit notion of “freedom” in your “gospel” is but freedom from a STANDARD, and not from the condemnation upon our many lamentable transgressions, and other than the abolishing of the ceremonial commands which prefigured the work of Christ, and which were THEREFORE fulfilled in the accomplishment of that which they prefigured, the standard has not changed at all. Your ideas of “freedom” are therefore manifestly of freedom from command and not freedom from wrath, and as such are an aberrant and heretical distortion of the gospel. And as Jesus rebuked the extreme blindness of the Pharisees for not realizing that the seventh commandment OBVIOUSLY forbade the lust of the eye, so the modern worldling cannot bring himself to rightly apply the law of God without esteeming it legalism, just as the following meme depicts:

You admonish me to “Breath the fresh air of the gospel”, but you manifestly misunderstand that gospel imagining that it’s freedom is freedom from obligation, not freedom from condemnation. I invite you to breath the sanctifying air of the gospel found in the bible, and to experience its liberty, not from obligation, but from the condemnation of the law that when truly experienced fills men with the love of God that makes them seek Him, and grieved to err from His will, or to injure the enjoyment of a close walk with Him, or grieve His Spirit from them, and who universally experience His chastisements as His true children when departing from that good way, and don’t wantonly run into it without His, sometimes severe, but always Fatherly, correction, lest they become the abandoned advocates of degeneracy. That is not “smuggling” in a foreign standard as your heterodoxy asserts. The lawlessness of the age has rather jettisoned the true understanding of the gospel, and I pray that true believers will be led away from the false teaching of the advocates of blinded men such as yourself.

The bottom line is, that “legalism” in the modern parlance, is identical to what all of Christian history has called “sanctification”, and thus when you say that “legalism” is no better than “lawlessness”, and that “legalism is of the devil”, what you’re really saying is that obedience is no better than lawlessness, and that obedience is “of the devil”, and this indeed is the final position of the modern ethically woke.

And as I’m making claims about it, let me leave you with but two examples from the coming book:

“The play houses, are they not nurseries of debauchery in the age? And the supporters and patrons of them are encouragers and promoters of all the evil that is done by them; they are the bane of the age, and will be the destruction of those that frequent them. Is it not high time for the true ministers of Jesus Christ who have been partakers of the heavenly gift to lift up their voices as a trumpet and cry aloud against these diversions of the age? Are they not earthly, sensual, devilish? If you have tasted of the love of God and have felt the power of God upon your souls, you would no more go to a play than you would run your head into a furnace.”
George Whitefield… you know… George Whitefield, that “legalist” who doesn’t understand Galatians. Like you. But who turned Britain and the early Colonies to Christ. Unlike you. You, who rather slander the sanctification of the bible as a heresy and devilishness. Unlike him. Or any in the army of Christ with him.

“How can any man, that ever felt in his heart the love or fear of so dreadful a Majesty, as the Lord of Heaven and Earth, endure to be present, especially with delight and contentment, at Oaths, Blasphemies, Obscenities, and the abusing sometimes of the most precious things in the book of God, (whereat we should tremble) to most base and scurrile jests? Certainly, every Child of God is of a most noble and heroic spirit, and therefore is most impatient of hearing any wrong, indignity, or dishonor offered to the Word, Name, or Glory of his Almighty Father.”
Robert Bolton

Because you see, Mr. Strachan… these are men who actually understood the gospel, unlike yourself who not only believes and holds a licentious view of it, but who most callously and brazenly advocate that licentious view to the church of Jesus, just like 99% of this apostate modern age of seminary-lobotomized preachers, thus attempting to join the backslidden saint with those who never once cared about eschewing evil anything more than in hypocritical appearances. Because, the whole modern pseudo-Christian world is present “with delight and contentment at oathes, blasphemies, obscenities, and the abusing of the most precious things in the book of God to most base and scurrile jests”, nightly at their TV, or at the movie theater, or in literature, or in other forms of media, and reprove as heterodox, if not damn to hell as one hoping in works, the one who actually loves God enough to be offended by such extremities of wickedness, having not destroyed and blinded his conscience with such abuse.

I do pray that you will see these things and “breath free” the true gospel, and in repudiation of this horrid darkness and join the saints of all ages in the precious experience and confession of the gospel that not only liberates from condemnation, but manifests that liberation by a love for God that is neither pedantic nor pretentious, but which lives and breathes in him with fullness of joy and worship for the love of God that saves, not just from the guilt of sin, but from its power. Nothing would bless the age more than someone like yourself turning from modernity’s love affair with the world, to advocate for the truth of the gospel, when touched of God to see it, and know the joyful sound, and to worship together with the brethren of like faith.