Excessive and inappropriate use of a law. Person who is concerned with applying explicitly and literally the laws, whether human or religious, putting himself before everything. In religion, a legalist has the belief that by having identified all the laws of God and obeying them as his commands, they can solve everything in life since the Bible for these people is a compilation of the rules, which they consult and find the appropriate ones to each process and circumstances that are presented to them in daily life, as a legal directory of consultations, especially in regard to moral issues and problems since they identify legality as morality and everything that is bad is prohibited, what is well they judge it according to biblical mandates.
One of the considerations of being a legalistic person is the tendency to forget that the right thing to do not only consists of being blindly obedient to the laws and being an extremist if the actions are accompanied by a double intention, such as the one that gives help and you want him to be recognized in a public way as a very generous being. The legalist feels secure in his condition that he can exclude others, giving their own interpretation of the laws, taking specific parts of it for their own benefit, giving it the meaning they want it to have; believing that stopping doing or avoiding things is not a guarantee of salvation or of not making mistakes in life. Three types of legalist can be mentioned, the one who uses the law to achieve salvation, the other who tries to maintain it because he already has it, and the one who uses it to despise others for their saved condition.
Throughout history, a civil war called the legalistic revolution is known, which occurred in Venezuela on March 6, 1892, led by the rebel troops, the legalist Joaquín Crespo, rising up against the continuing government of President Raimundo Andueza Palacios who wanted to extend his government for two more years.
