“If someone looks at [God’s commands] in the wrong way and says that they are heavy to bear, he is merely revealing his own weakness.”—Andreas Presbyter, Catena on 1 John 5:3

When I was in college, I was required to read G.K. Beale’s edited volume, The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts? Essays on the Use of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994). That title has always stuck with me as a mantra for exegeting Scripture, preaching the Word, and writing books. You can preach and teach the right doctrine, but do so by stretching the language of the wrong text.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Tullian Tchividjian stretched Scripture in such a way in his May 18, 2014 post “Unburdened.” This post first appeared at The Gospel Coalition, but since also his content was removed, it took me quite a while to find this old post on The Wayback Machine. He took as his text 1 John 5:3, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.” Tchividjian especially focused in on the latter half of the verse: “his commandments are not burdensome.”

After mentioning the 613 mitzvoth (“commandments”) of the Old Testament, the Sermon on the Mount, as well as our own pet laws we try to keep, Tchividjian wrote, “The idea that God’s commandments are not burdensome seems to diametrically oppose our experience: to us, they feel super burdensome.” All of have this experiential problem. He then juxtaposed this with Jesus’ promise of rest and a light burden in Matthew 11. Tchividjian put the problem this way: “How do the obviously burdensome commandments of life become not burdensome? How is it that Jesus’ yoke is easy when he is the one asking us to be perfect?” Here is how Tchividjian reconciled the conundrum:

“The answer, though incredibly profound, is actually quite simple. Though the commandments are indeed burdensome, that burden has been laid on the shoulders of another. Jesus Christ, who demands that we be perfect, achieves perfection in our place. Jesus Christ, the culmination of the Old Testament story, fulfills the Old Testament laws. That same weight that threatens to break our backs actually did crush our savior.

God’s commandments are not burdensome because we do not carry them. The weights that we bear every day are simply aftershocks of our human attempts to save ourselves. The weights we feel are a phantom; they’ve already been taken to the cross, carried up the Via Dolorosa on Christ’s back. We are free. We are, in Christ, unburdened.

This is true today, and every day.”

This is right doctrine, wrong text:

• The right doctrine—Christ’s vicarious obedience and suffering justifies us from the burdensome curse of the law.

• The wrong text—the newborn child of God’s has a newfound joy in sanctification.

Notice the context of 1 John 5:3. Robert S. Candlish said verse 3 “is not an incidental remark merely; it is of the essence of the apostle’s argument.” What is that argument? Matthew Poole summarized it as John teaching that those who believe in Jesus with a “lively, efficacious, unitive, soul-transforming, and obediential faith” have been born again or regenerated by God himself (v. 1). Because we have been made new in Christ we now love God and therefore love our fellow born again believers (v. 1)—“our true love to them supposes our love to him, and is to be evinced by it.” John then gives the evidence of this love for our brothers and sisters in Christ: love of God and obedience to his commands (v. 2). He then defines this divine-ward love of the child of God: “that we keep his commandments” (v. 3). Then the key phrase: “and his commandments are not burdensome” (v. 3). How can John say this? Not only because the “holy and righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12) law of God contrasted with the “heavy burdens, hard to bear” of the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23:4; Luke 11:46), but “because the new life imparted to members of the family of God carries with it a new desire to do His will and a new power to give effect to that desire.”

Here a question for us to consider is this: is there any hint in the text that John is describing the doctrine of the active and passive obedience of Jesus Christ to justify us? No, there is not. On Tchividjian’s reading, he turns a description of the child of God’s relationship to God’s commandments into a description of the active and passive of obedience of Christ. If this were true, the pericope should be read to say:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who since Jesus loves the Father he loves whoever has been born of him. By this we know that we Jesus love[s] the children of God, when because we he love[d]God and obey[ed] his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we he kept his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome to us because Jesus took their burden.

Changing all the descriptions above from us to Jesus is silly, isn’t it? But in our hyper-sensitive Reformed world, some do this in order not to be branded a legalist, moralist, neo-nomian—or worse yet, “Puritan.” Because the doctrine sounds right, this sort of exegesis and homiletics passes as “rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15). 

As a pastor of a congregation that is typically full of young Christians, newly Reformed evangelical Christians, along with many Westminster Seminary California interns, I know it is attractive to revel in the active and passive obedience for justification and forget all about the new birth, the Holy Spirit, and sanctification. I know it is attractive after hearing law and gospel so muddled in evangelical preaching that it was unpalatable to read every Scripture as either law merely in its pedagogical use or gospel. I know how powerful it is to hear that Christ has removed the curse of the law from me once for all; but Christ has done more. That “more” is often left out. “Christ” has also sent his Spirit into my heart and “is also renewing us by his Spirit into his image” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 86). First, he rescued me; now he’s begun to renovate me from the inside out. Therefore, in the aforementioned post, Tchividjian does not offer a responsible reading of Scripture. He, and any who would interpret such a text similarly, offers a model of ministering the Word unlike the pattern of our forefathers.

Let me encourage you—especially young seminarians—to read John Calvin’s exegetical comments on 1 John 5:3 in light of Tchividjian’s and ask yourself: who has the right doctrine and the right text? Calvin said John added the line in question “his commandments are not burdensome” because of how easy it is for our zeal in serving God to be dampened: “For some who have followed a godly and holy life with a cheerful mind and great enthusiasm, afterwards grow weary, finding their strength inadequate. Therefore, to stir up our efforts, John says that God’s commandments are not grievous.”

Calvin then dealt with the seeming contradiction or practical difficulty of the law being described as an unbearable yoke in one passage (Acts 15:2) and that it was spiritual in another (Rom. 7:14). He said this meant “there must be a great difference between us and the God’s Law.” Was Calvin’s reconciliation, though, to say 1 John 5:3 is all first use of the law that Christ fulfilled? No. Listen to Calvin: “this difficulty does not arise from the nature of the Law but from the vice of our flesh. And Paul expressly declares this; for, after he has said that it was impossible for the Law to give us righteousness, he immediately puts the blame on our flesh.” As born again, justified believers, our enemy is not the law, but our sin nature. He then elaborated with the comparison between David in the Old Testament and Paul in the New, brining it full circle to John’s text:

Paul makes the Law the minister of death, declares that it works nothing but the wrath of God, that it was given to increase sin, that it lives that it may kill us (II Cor. 3.7; Rom. 4.15). David, on the contrary, says that it is sweeter than honey and more to be desired than gold, and among other commendations, he says that it cheers hearts, converts to the Lord and quickens. But Paul is comparing the Law with man’s corrupt nature, and this is where the conflict arises. But David shows how they are affected whom God begets again by His Spirit. Hence the sweetness and delight for which the flesh has no relish. And John has included this difference, for he confines these words, God’s commandments are not grievous, to God’s children, lest anyone should take them generally. Thus he suggests that it is through the power of the Spirit that it is not grievous or vexatious for to us to obey God.

Calvin recognized, though, that even this did not fully answer the question since even as those “ruled by the Spirit of God…wage a hard contest against their own flesh. And however hard they struggle, they perform hardly the half of their duty; nay, they almost fail under their burden, as if they lay between the anvil and the hammer.” Sounds like the “normal” Christian experience, doesn’t it? Then Calvin said this:

I reply that the Law is called easy in so far as we are endowed with heavenly power and overcome the lusts of the flesh. For however much the flesh may wanton, believers feel that there is no delight save in following God. We must also observe that John is not speaking of the bare law, which contains only commands, but joins with it the fatherly kindness of God, by which the rigour of the Law is softened. When we know that we are graciously forgiven by the Lord if our works do not satisfy the Law, it makes us far quicker to obey; as it is said in Psalm 130.4, ‘But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.’”

So, are we “unburdened” from the curse of the law by the wonderful work of Jesus Christ? With Tullian Tchividjian and all the saints, we say, “yes!” Praise God! Amen? This is right doctrine. But, in Tullian Tchividjian’s post, he posits it from the wrong text. That text—1 John 5:3—says that we who are unburdened are also blessed—blessed to be the born again sons and daughters of God; blessed that the ascended Lord Jesus Christ has given us his Holy Spirit to love God’s law because it is no longer a burden but a delight (Ps. 1:1–2; Rom. 7:22); and delighting in that law “with all seriousness of purpose, [we] do begin to live according to all, not only some, of God’s commandments” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 114)—loving our God and loving his people.

To the praise of God’s glorious grace!