Proto-Protestantism: The Rich Young Ruler, Law, and New Covenant Supremacy (II)

05 July 2025

The Rich Young Ruler, Law, and New Covenant Supremacy (II)

So if the Rich Young Ruler had (in faith) obeyed the commands of God, his works would mean something. This does not suggest he could earn his salvation but rather it would be a testimony to the Holy Spirit working within him. Instead, he was an idolater and his understanding of the law was of the letter not the spirit. He had no real faith to speak of and when standing before Christ and receiving a face to face invitation from Him - he turned away. He wasn't interested.

Christ then explains how riches are a hindrance to faith, a point emphasized over and over again throughout the New Testament. This is also in contrast to the Old Testament which in its typological context allowed for a kind of glory to be associated with riches as the worldly power and status of Israel was meant to be a picture of the glory of God's coming Kingdom. Now we have the Kingdom. We are citizens of it by being baptized in Christ and by the Holy Spirit we experience an earnest of that eschatological life. The Kingdom is in Heaven where we are called to lay up our treasures and as such we don't lay them up on Earth. They serve no typological purpose any more and are a snare to faith.

For some Hyper-Calvinists, the fact that Mark reports that Jesus 'loved him' indicates that he must have been saved at some future time. Some even suggest the Rich Young Ruler was Paul himself. This could be, but there's no warrant to believe this from the text and I think it more likely this would be reported by either Paul or one of the gospel writers. Some might say it was understood by way of custom just as some believe the youth in Mark 14 is John Mark himself.

The Anabaptist notion that if he had simply followed through - he would be saved is true in one sense, but not as they mean it. They don't view it as a hypothetical. It exhibits a very low view of sin and its effects, grace, and the nature of the exchange.

This also touches on the much larger question of how Christ kept the law - or fulfilled it and how this ties in with questions of the atonement. This is another issue that some see in simplistic terms. While penal substitutionary atonement is true and the evidence for it is fairly pervasive - there's more to the question. There are some dynamics at work that complicate the question and render it a little more complex than how it is commonly presented. There are questions regarding forgiveness and mercy (and whether the full systematic doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement is implied in every case) as well as some Scriptural evidence for the concepts of ransom, satisfaction, as well as the Christus Victor idea.

The question of law is multifaceted and thus necessarily complicated and as such I can be sympathetic to the pastor in question who was trying to navigate all this and present these questions in an intelligible way to a very mixed audience. It is akin to a camel threading the eye of a needle if I may borrow from a different metaphor. Redemptive history is the place to start and provides the answers. The New Testament interprets the Old and helps us understand the purpose of the law, what it testified to, and how it failed. It pointed the way to life but in light of the Fall was turned into a pathway leading to death. The New Testament re-frames these concepts in light of eschatology - raising the bar (as it were) but at the same time elevating grace. Many have been misled not only with regard to the law and the structure of the Bible, but with regard to the gospel and even basic concepts of faith. These terms are so familiar but few deeply reflect on what they mean, how they're used in Scripture, and their implications for our lives. Tradition has clouded terms like justification and sanctification - at times splitting hairs and boxing in these terms in a way that cannot be justified in light of the God-breathed text (2 Tim 3.16).

Many would point to the Rich Young Ruler episode and rightly suggest it magnifies the grace of God and dashes any hope of legalistic righteousness. And yet how few take the warning seriously? Riches present a mortal danger to faith. That's not a popular message in modern Western Christianity. And sadly, this same skewed and decadent Western Christianity has been exported to other parts of the world and has all too often translated into a gospel of prosperity and dreams of middle or upper class life - sadly equating this worldliness and compromise with Christian faithfulness, virtue, and reward.

One of the New Testament 'laws' is to lay up treasures in heaven. Likewise we're told not to love the things of the world. Friendship with the world is enmity with God. Do we just shrug our shoulders? Because we undoubtedly will fail to follow through as well as we might on these points, should our disobedience and the apathetic posturing of our hearts not trouble us? Are we simply relying on forgiveness? Have we made grace cheap? Is there a risk of self-deception? The Scriptures are abundantly clear on these points - and the answers provide no support or comfort to contemporary Evangelicalism. We would do well to heed the apostolic warnings and exhortations to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling and to make our calling and election sure.

For all their theological flaws, the Anabaptists are on to something when it comes to the Sermon on the Mount. If they're approaching these things in the sense of, 'I'm able to keep these commands, I should, and if I do (with God's help) I'll be saved' - then they are in danger, for that's a Pharisee's faith. In their case their epistemological pre-commitments blind them - just as it does those who bury the commands and wonderfully dynamic teachings of the New Testament under the suffocating weight of scholastic theology.

But if the Anabaptists in question look to these commands and understand them as obligatory to the point of pain and death, all the while knowing that we can never actually keep the commandments properly, then that's something else. We will be disobedient in our hearts even when we do follow them outwardly - like Paul in Romans 7 and the Parable of the Two Sons in Matthew 21.

And the moment we follow one of these commands, any righteousness we might have is immediately destroyed by our pride. Nevertheless, by the Spirit we walk in the Kingdom way, take up the cross, and seek to follow God's commands - not in our own strength or to our own glory but because it is right. Because we have been saved. Because we want to walk with God and honour Him and know Him by walking the paths of righteousness. We never look back and think of how well we've done. Quite the opposite. We look back and realize that apart from the Spirit we would have no hope and that by God's grace our flawed, marred, and polluted attempts are acceptable to Him. We have nothing to boast of. We've earned nothing. We are owed nothing.

The Scriptures speak of rewards and some wrongly apply all such works and law-related passages to the question of extra-salvational reward. A closer look at these passages reveals that this is rarely the case. I have not here addressed the role and influence of Dispensationalism and the common Free Grace and often Semi-Pelagian framework these questions are dealt with. The Anabaptist position is more extreme but also more consistent. Dispensationalism tends to muddy the waters by means of its convoluted framing of redemptive-history which (at this point in time) has been so modified and chopped up, the system itself no longer retains any coherence and indeed some are writing obituaries for the system as a whole. While we can hope for that day, we're not there yet (as the news from the Middle East so painfully testifies) and more likely than not its adherents will simply turn either to the Lutheran or Reformed framework or some kind of hybrid which incorporates aspects of Anabaptist Pelagianism.

The promise of rewards is real but once again I would stress a quantitative approach is misguided as all works are evaluated in terms of faith and truth. There are many 'soul-winning' pastors that think their caps are full of feathers who are going to find out that while they meant well, their efforts were misguided and in some cases even destructive. They may have been viewed as super-saints in their day but that won't prove true.

Meanwhile, there may be some that have little to show outwardly and yet lived by faith and trust and obeyed when Providence placed obstacles and challenges in their path. Sometimes the greatest work can be to fall on one's knees in prayer in not only times of trial but times of joy. The world may not see their worship and works but God does and such piety bears witness to the heavenly hosts. This aspect of works is also important as it significantly departs from popular perceptions and yet is mentioned on numerous occasions in the New Testament. Quiet faithfulness, obedience, and patience, are works and testimonies to the Spirit-wrought life. We are engaged in tasks and a war that the world cannot see - nor can they understand.

In an age of social media, there are even more opportunities for works to become confused with pride and ostentatious display. And while riches were mentioned, it needs to be understood that wealth, pride, and power all go together and these works have nothing to do with the fruits of the gospel and a life in the Spirit. Instead they tend to choke faith, deceive, and destroy.

Generally speaking the 'rewards' framework embraced by some Evangelicals is simply a means to explain away the dozens upon dozens of passages that condemn their shallow soteriological paradigm and counterfeit gospel presentation. Trusting and obeying should be more our concern than counting up rewards or finding ways to justify unfaithful behaviour.

These are weighty matters and the discussions are laden with lots of tradition and even culture-driven epistemological bias.

I'll close with a reiteration - the best course is to read the New Testament and understand how it interprets the Old. Christ is the key to all promises and fulfilments. And by Christ we must include His Kingdom. He is not just the King of Israel. He is Israel. He is our inheritance and we find eternal life in Him. Woe to any theology that refuses to recognize this - especially those that believe Biblical Israel is a contemporary Levantine nation run by murderous nationalists.

And while we may celebrate the fact that some contemporary Confessionalists have embraced redemptive-historical theology, their commitments to scholastic-philosophical theology and the confessional tradition undermine their ability to follow through and apply these categories to both theology and practice. While the Early Church and the Medieval Dissenters did not use terms like redemptive-historical theology, they grasped something of it in how they interacted with the Old Testament and how the New was given not only priority and preference, but authority.

I have chosen to embrace the often pejorative epithet of Biblicism as opposed to the Sola Scriptura claims of the Magisterial Reformation tradition which were subsequently lost and buried under the weight of controversy, scholasticism, confessionalism, and the later pursuit of a unified theory, a holistic epistemology that could govern a society - often referred to as worldview.

Likewise contemporary Evangelicals claim to follow the 'Bible Alone' but repeatedly demonstrate their commitment to Enlightenment epistemology and a rejection of Scripture authority in all things ecclesiastical. Their understandings of Scripture are at odds with the Sola Scriptura of the Reformers, and all too often the same can be said about their framing of the gospel, along with their understanding of questions such as regeneration and assurance. And needless to say the Charismatic movement pays lip service to Scripture but has functionally replaced it with subjective tools of interpretation and an ever-changing and unreliable set of parallel oracles.

The Rich Young Ruler passage has its challenges which are made all the more difficult by the layers upon layers of theological and traditional fog.