“We Are All Nomians”

When Jesus proclaimed that a person could not serve two masters (Matt. 6:24) without hating one of them, He was alerting His people that their lives would involve conflict. Too many believers today bemoan the obstacles and oppositions we face. I’m not suggesting we should love problems, but throughout His ministry, Jesus made it clear that the Christian life would involve being hated by those who hated Him. These were not words of apology as much as they were words of preparation. What’s more, those who have been called into the family of God know not to shy away from the attacks and conflict with His enemies. In essence, He called us to be antinomian when it comes to the world system.

Rushdoony notes,

We are all of necessity nomians, advocates of law, and antinomians, anti-law. The only question is, whose law do we advocate, and whose law do we oppose? All too many today live by the state’s law and grace, and shall perish from it, instead of looking to the Lord and His grace and law.

Grace and law are inseparable. Our salvation in Christ is an act of law: it is Christ’s satisfaction by His atonement of the law and justice of the triune God. As our substitute and representative man, as head of the new humanity, Jesus Christ pays our death penalty from the law. He frees us from the penalty of the law, from the law as an indictment and death sentence, to free us to a way of holiness, the very law of God now written on our hearts and an aspect of our new nature.

As fallen men, we sought salvation by our works. We believed that man, as his own god, could determine, in his private, social, and statist life, good and evil, or establish law, for himself. This was our depravity, and our original sin, our sin in Adam and as members of his humanity or race.

In Jesus Christ, we know by grace that we have been freed from that hostility to the Lord and His law, from antinomianism in relationship to God. We are now antinomians with respect to Satan’s program (Gen. 3:5), and every church or state which seeks to promote and develop Adam’s rebellion against God. The early church, knowing that grace, refused to submit to Caesar’s licensure, regulation, taxation, or control. They grounded their resistance on obedience to God: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” For them, Caesar was an antinomian, in rebellion against Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords. They prayed for Caesar, sought to convert him, obeyed him wherever God’s Word permitted, but they rendered obedience “for conscience sake” only, in terms of God’s Word, never in violation of God’s Word and sovereignty.[1]

The days ahead will give us ample opportunity to assess whose law we follow and to whom we owe our allegiance. God’s Word never promises us the easy road, but it does promise that God will never leave us nor forsake us as we are faithful to it (Deut. 31:6, Heb. 13:6).

To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them (Isa. 8:20).

[1] R.J. Rushdoony, “Antinomianism versus Dominion,” in An Informed Faith, vol. 1 (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2017), 103-04.