God, creation, and the moral law:
1. While God's will (ad extra), broadly conceived, concerns all things other than God, the moral law is God's will with respect to one creature in particular, the human being created in the image and likeness of God.
1. While God's will (ad extra), broadly conceived, concerns all things other than God, the moral law is God's will with respect to one creature in particular, the human being created in the image and likeness of God.
2. The moral law prescribes the path to this particular creature's flourishing in the presence of God. Human beings can no more flourish outside the bounds of the moral law than they can flourish outside the bounds of their given nature.
3. The law can only therefore be a burden to the human being who has turned against both God and himself by transgressing the law, disabling himself from fulfilling God's will, disabling himself from arriving at the goal of the law, i.e., human flourishing to the glory of God.
4. The gospel of Jesus Christ relieves us from this burden, not by relieving us of God's moral law, but by providing pardon for our transgressions and power to fulfill God's moral will. The life of human flourishing that the law "proposes," the gospel "bestows" (David Yeago).
(The preceding points are drawn in part from David Yeago's excellent article, "Grace and the Good Life: Why the God of the Gospel Cares How We Live," in Root and Buckley, ed., *The Morally Divided Body: Ethical Disagreement and the Disunity of the Church*.)
5. To tie the past few days of tweets and threads together: The Sabbath is the eschatological telos of God's moral law, and also of the creature made in the image and likeness of God. The Sabbath is the eternal day in which human flourishing to the glory of God is realized.
6. The gospel no more abrogates the Sabbath than it abrogates God's moral law, or than it abrogates the creature made in the image of God.
