Read: Galatians 3
Pilgrim’s Progress Stage 1 Part 11

Relate: Christian follows the advice of Mr. Worldly Wiseman and turns toward the village of Morality. The path seems fine at first. It even seems like the right direction, the burden is the problem, and Legality has a reputation for solving that exact problem, so the logic holds. But as Christian approaches the hill on which Legality’s house is located, something begins to happen. The hill looms over him. It grows as he approaches it. Lightning flickers from it. The ground around its base is scorched. Christian stops. He is paralyzed by a terror far worse than anything he felt in the Slough. He cannot move forward. He cannot breathe. The hill is Mount Sinai, and the law that thunders from it does not lift burdens, it reveals them. It does not free you from guilt. It defines your guilt.

React: This is one of Bunyan’s most theologically precise moments, and it arrives quietly in the middle of what might otherwise seem like a simple misdirection story. The Law cannot save. It was never designed to save. It was designed to show us our need for a Savior. The Law holds up a mirror so clear and so unsparing that we cannot mistake ourselves for anything other than what we are. When Christian turns toward Morality, he is attempting something that billions of “good” people have attempted throughout human history. He is trying to fix the symptom (the burden of guilt) by improving the behavior (moral living) rather than addressing the root (the nature of sin and its need for atonement). The Law is holy, just, and good. It stands at the top of that hill and thunders its unanswerable verdict. You are not good enough… not even close.

I have known people who spent decades at the base of that hill. For eight years I lived in a country that demands people ascend that hill. I have known so many who genuinely believe that if they could just try harder, do more, live better, submit more completely, the weight would lift. Sometimes, for a while, it almost seems to work. The hill doesn’t fall on them immediately. But the burden never quite goes away. There is always one more thing to do, one more standard to meet, one more way in which this particular version of righteousness falls short of whatever impossible mark they have set. The Law is not the villain. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. But it was never designed to be the destination. It was designed to be the signpost that sends us, desperate and out of options, back to the road that leads to the gate.

Respond:

Dear God,
It is so easy to want to take things into my own hands. It is so easy to try and fix myself before coming to You. There is an appeal to turning my faith into a set of rules and laws and deeds, thinking that somehow if I just do enough, I will earn Your favor. Forgive me for this. Good deeds are great things. Morality is good. But it is a hill I can never climb without You. It will never fix my problem. I can never do enough to earn Paradise. No amount of good deeds can remove the burden of sin. Forgive me for even trying.
Amen