The Spirit Makes Keeping Possible

The last claim of this part of the book is neither an argument from a verse nor a dream. It is something people say quietly, often after years of trying:

“Even after believing in Yeshua and receiving the Spirit, God’s commandments are too hard to keep in full.”

There is no pride in that sentence. It usually comes from someone who has tried, failed, tried again, and grown tired. It deserves a gentle answer, but it also deserves a true one.

Part Two of this book has already considered whether the commandments can be kept. We heard John say that they are not burdensome and Yeshua say that His yoke is easy (Chapter 21). We met Zacharias and Elizabeth walking blamelessly in them (Chapter 22). We heard Moses say that the commandment is neither too hard nor far off, and Paul say that God is at work in us both to will and to work (Chapter 20). There is no need to cover that ground again.

This claim, however, adds one phrase those chapters did not face directly: “even after believing in Yeshua and receiving the Spirit.” That phrase is the subject of this chapter.

The Verse That Is Not There

We begin with a simple search. Look through the whole Bible, Old Testament and New, for a sentence like this one: “They believed and received the Spirit, but the commandments were too hard, and they could not keep them.”

No such sentence exists, whether in the Prophets, the Gospels, Acts, or any letter. Scripture does honestly tell the stories of people who failed. Yet no verse describes the Spirit coming into a person and the commandments then proving too much for that person. The only verses we have say the opposite.

What the Spirit Is For

God Himself said why He would give His Spirit:

Ezekiel 36:26-27 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit (ruach רוּחַ roo'-akh) I will put within you; and I will remove the heart of stone out of your flesh (basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr'), and I will give you a heart of flesh (basar). And my spirit (ruach) I will put within you, and I will cause you to walk in my statutes (chuqqim חֹק khoke), and you shall keep my judgments (mishpat מִשׁפָּט mish-pawt') and do them.

We looked at verse 27 in Chapter 8. Here it should be read with the verse before it, because verse 26 tells us what God does first.

“I will remove the heart of stone out of your flesh (basar), and I will give you a heart of flesh (basar).” The word for heart is lev לֵב labe, the inner person, where choices are made. God does not promise to coach the old heart. He promises to take it out and put in a new one.

Verse 27 then says what the new heart and the Spirit are for: “I will cause you to walk in my statutes (chuqqim), and you shall keep my judgments (mishpat) and do them.” The word for “keep” is shamar שָׁמַר shaw-mar', to guard, to watch over. The Spirit is given so that the commandments are kept.

Picture a man who has had a heart transplant. For years before it he could not climb a flight of stairs. Now the surgery is done, the new heart is strong, and the doctors tell him to start walking. Yet he sits at the bottom of the stairs and says, “I can’t. My heart is too weak.” He is describing accurately the heart he used to have, but not the heart now beating in him.

The claim does the same thing. It says, “I have received the Spirit,” and then speaks of the commandments as if the believer had not.

What the Law Could Not Do

The claim is right about one thing, and Scripture says it first: the flesh cannot keep God’s law on its own.

Romans 8:3 For what was impossible for the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) — in that it was weak through the sarx σάρξ sarx(flesh) — God, by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful sarx(flesh) and concerning sin, katakrino κατακρίνω kat-ak-ree'-no(condemned) sin in the sarx(flesh),

Sarx (σάρξ) is flesh, human nature left to its own strength. On this point Paul agrees completely with the tired believer: left to the flesh, it cannot be done.

But the sentence goes on, and its subject is not the flesh but “God.” What was impossible, God dealt with “by sending His own Son.” The sentence that begins with “impossible” goes on to tell what God did, and the next verse, which we read in Chapter 43, tells what that leads to: the requirement of the law “fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the sarx(flesh) but according to the pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit).”

It is true, then, that the flesh cannot. But the claim stops in the middle of Paul’s sentence and takes the middle for the end.

Not in the Flesh

Paul next turns to the very people the claim is about, those who have received the Spirit:

Romans 8:9 But you are not in the sarx(flesh) but in the pneuma(spirit), if indeed the pneuma(spirit) of God dwells in you; but if anyone does not have the pneuma(spirit) of Messiah, this one does not belong to Him.

Paul says that the one in whom the Spirit of God dwells is “not in the sarx(flesh) but in the pneuma(spirit),” and that the one who does not have the Spirit “does not belong to Him.”

Set that beside the claim. “The flesh cannot keep the law” describes a person in the flesh, while “I have received the Spirit” describes a person not in the flesh. They cannot both be the whole truth about the same person. Having received the Spirit and being unable to keep God’s commandments do not belong in one sentence.

John says the same with a striking turn of a word:

1 John 3:9 No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, because God's seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God.

The claim says, “I cannot keep.” John uses the same kind of word and points it the other way: the one born of God “cannot keep on sinning.” The Greek is ou dynatai οὐ δύναται doo'-nam-ahee, he is not able. John does not describe the one born of God as unable to obey. What he says that person cannot do is keep on sinning, “because he has been born of God.”

The Lament and Its Answer

Some answer with Romans 7: “Paul himself said, ‘the good that I want I do not do’ (Romans 7:19). If Paul could not do it, how can I?”

We read part of that chapter in Chapter 43. This is how the lament ends:

Romans 7:24-25 Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? I give thanks to God through Yeshua Messiah our Lord! So then, I myself with my nous νοῦς nooce(intellect, spiritual domain) serve the nomos(law) of God, but with my sarx(flesh) the nomos(law) of sin.

The cry comes in verse 24: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me?” The answer comes in the very next breath, in verse 25: “I give thanks to God through Yeshua Messiah our Lord!” All of chapter 8 then unfolds that answer, with the Spirit of life setting him free.

To read the cry of chapter 7 as the lifelong condition of a Spirit-filled believer is to stop at the question and never read the answer Paul wrote in the next verse. It is like quoting a man who shouts for help from the water and leaving out the part where the boat arrives.

Never Beyond What You Are Able

Paul also gives a promise for exactly the moments when the claim feels most true:

1 Corinthians 10:13 No temptation has overtaken you but what is human; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it.

The word for temptation is peirasmos πειρασμός pi-ras-mos', a testing, a trial. Paul does not say that there will be no temptations. He says three things about them: they are “what is human,” not something no one has ever faced; God “will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able”; and with the temptation He “will provide the way of escape also.”

Read “beyond what you are able” beside “too hard to keep.” The claim says that keeping the commandments is beyond what we are able; Paul says that God is faithful and “will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able.”

The Swap

If “too hard” does not come from Scripture, it comes from somewhere else. It enters when one thing quietly takes the place of another: the work of the Spirit is set aside, and human strength is put in its place. The commandments are then measured against human strength, and of course they prove too hard. They were always too hard for the flesh alone, as Romans 8:3 said.

That was never the arrangement. Scripture’s answer to “too hard” is neither “try harder” nor “stop trying.” Its answer is “the word is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14), and “His commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3), because the One who gave the commandments has also given His Spirit.

The End of Part Three

That brings Part Three to its end. We began at a dinner table in Antioch, turned to two women and two covenants, and read Galatians line by line. Paul was not fighting God’s law. He was fighting circumcision demanded as the price of being justified, and a slavery the Galatians had known long before they heard of Moses. The days, months, and appointed times were God’s, and the Galatians were watching them with hostile eyes, not keeping them. The flesh they were being “perfected by” was a mark in the body to boast in.

Then we read the letters that stand beside Galatians. The fault was found with the people, not with the Torah. James’s mirror calls us to look and to do. The first covenant opened with “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out,” and its house was a gift. What grows old in Hebrews is the earthly priesthood, sanctuary, and sacrifices, while what the new covenant writes on the heart is the same Torah, and God had given His statutes and His Torah even before Sinai. Messiah’s keeping is the pattern for ours. Love gathers the commandments together; it does not dissolve them. The Spirit sets us free from the law of sin, not from the law of God. And no dream outranks the written word. And the Spirit is given so that the commandments are kept.

One thing remains before this book closes. Having spent forty-six chapters on claims about the law, many of them made in Paul’s name, we turn at last to Paul’s own words about the law, and to what he never said.