+ Larger Font | - Smaller Font
Lectures by principal Fairbairn et al.
David Bryce & Co., 129 Buchanan Street
Glasgow 1866.
BY THE REV. ROBERT BUCHANAN, D.D.
"Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law."--Rom. iii., 31.
The relation of the law to the Gospel is one of the most important questions of theology. To misunderstand it, is to misunderstand the whole theory of the Divine government, and the whole plan of redemption. It needs not to add that it is, in a very marked and special sense, one of the questions of the day. Views regarding it have been recently, and ostentatiously promulgated, which cut far deeper into the foundations of both morality and religion, than is at all perceived by multitudes of those who favourably listen to them, or even by some of those who adopt and teach them. The object of the present discourse is to call attention to this vital subject.
In his lectures on the Jewish Church, Dr. Stanley, with all his wonted and well known pictorial power, describes the coming up of the tribes of Israel, through the rugged defiles of the Peninsula of Sinai, to meet with God. He represents them, when drawing nearer and nearer to the place where this solemn interview was to be held, as deeply wondering within themselves, under what form the Most High would appear. They had been long familiar with the idolatries of Egypt. In what way would the God of Israel distinguish himself from the gods of that house of bondage! What shape would He assume! Would He take the "likeness of male or female--the likeness of any beast that is upon the earth, or the likeness of any fowl that flieth in the air, or the likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground, or the likeness of any fish that is in the waters under the earth." At last, in the very heart of that mountain land--shut in and secluded among the everlasting hills--they reach the spot where the manifestation of the Divine Presence they were looking for, was actually to be made. "There were thunders, there were lightnings, there was the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud,"---but on the Mount itself--that Sinai, beneath whose frowning steeps they stood--there was a thick cloud: darkness and clouds, and thick darkness. This was all. No form of any kind appeared. They found themselves, in a word, in the presence of an invisible God. "This," says Dr. Stanley, "was the marvel which the Jewish worship presented"--a marvel which the Israelites were slow to understand; but which proclaimed, notwithstanding, a great and glorious truth --a truth which lies at the bottom of all real religion, because it lies at the bottom of all right conceptions of the one Jehovah--the truth, namely, that God is a Spirit.
This representation, however, of God's method of revealing himself to Israel in the wilderness, important and impressive as it is, and true so far as it goes, does not by any means bring out the noblest and sublimest part of that manifestation of God which the Israelites there received. They knew well what kind of gods they were that dwelt in the pillared and painted temples of Egypt. They knew that within those rock-hewn structures, whose colossal architecture astonishes and over-awes the traveller with its gloomy grandeur to this present hour, the gods of Egypt were adored under the likeness of beasts and birds, and of even the vilest creeping things. And we know that within the shrines of heathenism, it is the same spectacle that is exhibited still. The Hindu on the plains of India, enters the holy places of his religion, and beholds the object of his worship in some monstrous and misshapen idol--suggestive of nothing but the darkest deeds and foulest passions of the worst of men. How different--how gloriously different--was the aspect and character in which the God of Israel showed himself to His chosen people at Sinai. They saw, indeed, no similitude. He revealed himself by no material image or likeness of anything, either in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. Not only on the flaming Mount was no form of the Deity displayed: but when in the midst of the camp, the tabernacle had, by Divine command, been reared--and reared on very purpose to be the dwelling place of their covenant God--even there no outward form met the eye. In its innermost recess-- in that holy of holies that was meant to represent the very presence chamber of their God and King--there was nothing to be seen but the ark: and within that ark there was nothing to be found but two tables of stone!
But when or where--save in Eden itself--was there ever seen or heard before, such a revelation of God as was made by the words written on those tables, by God's own finger! The law of the Ten Commandments thereon inscribed, presented a view, not simply of His being, as the one only living and true God; but of His character and will, as a God of infinite holiness and justice, goodness and truth, such as could have emanated from no other but himself alone!
In these Ten Commandments was contained the sum and essence of all the law that was given unto Israel. Everything else in the way of law, that was delivered to the chosen people, had its foundation in those moral principles and precepts which the Decalogue contains. This law laid down the rule of man's obedience,--the righteous and immutable rule which defines and regulates his duty to God on the one hand, and to his fellow-creatures on the other.
The judicial law which, by Divine authority, was separately and subsequently instituted, was nothing more than the application of the great maxims of the moral law, to the government of Israel, as a church and nation placed under theocratic rule. In the details of that judicial law, there were necessarily, in such circumstances, many provisions of a merely local and temporary nature--intended for that people alone, and for the peculiar economy under which they lived. But in all its leading objects and aims, the judicial law of ancient Israel drew its spirit and derived its highest authority, from the law that was written on tables of stone.
Nor was it otherwise in the case of the ceremonial law. That law of meats and drinks, and divers washings and sacrifices of slain beasts, and other carnal ordinances, was, no doubt, in its literal and outward form, a purely positive institution, which had no moral worth or efficacy in itself considered. But nevertheless, the moral law--the law of the Ten Commandments --lay underneath it all. To transgress the moral law was to sin against God. And what was the great end and design of the ceremonial law, but to make palpable the awful and momentous fact, that sin is the abominable thing which God hates; and that without holiness--the holiness which the moral law embodies and demands--no man shall see the Lord.
I repeat it, therefore, the law of the Ten Commandments was emphatically and pre-eminently "the law" which God gave to Israel. It had, in substance, been written before, on the fleshly tables of the human heart. That man was made, in the beginning, after God's own image, plainly and necessarily implied this. So made, God's law and man's moral nature, must have been in harmony with one another. But this does not alter the fact that, from the first, the moral law had an objective existence, outside and independent of man, expressing God's command and will concerning man-- binding its precepts authoritatively upon the conscience of Adam, and of all his posterity--and constituting the righteous rule, according to which, in the exercise of His moral government, God will judge the world.
Now, what is proposed in the present discourse, is to consider the relation of this law to the mission and work of Christ. If this be the very law whose righteousness Christ wrought out by His own proper and personal obedience -- if this be the very law whose penal demands he met and satisfied by His work of atonement--if this be the very law, to the righteousness of which His people, quickened together with Christ, are to rise with their risen Lord--then obviously, and beyond all question, it is a law which is, and must be, of universal and perpetual obligation--a law which Christ came, not to destroy, but to fulfil--a law which the Gospel, instead of abrogating, does, in every jot and tittle, establish and perpetuate--nay, which it invests with a majesty and awfulness of Divine authority, unconceived and inconceivable before.
I. In bringing out the relation of the law to the mission and work of Christ, the first thing to which attention must be turned, is the great and fundamental fact, that it was the existence of the law, and the necessity which had arisen for upholding it in all its integrity and honour, which brought Christ into this world. As saith the Apostle Paul, "Where no law is, there is no transgression." In the absence of law there could have been no sinner, and, therefore, no saviour. The proper and scriptural definition of sin is this,--"it is the transgression of the law." The object of law is to express the will and to assert the authority of the Ruler. The law declares this to be right and that to be wrong--this to be duty and that to be disobedience--this to be required and that to be forbidden. Where no law is, therefore, it follows of necessity that there is, and can be, no such thing as sin; for, as already has been said,--"sin is the transgression of the law." It is a contempt of the authority and disregard of the will of God. But that will cannot be disregarded where there is no law to express it; and that authority cannot be contemned, where there is no law to assert it. The fact that law did not begin, for the first time, to exist in this world when it was given on the two tables of stone to the people of Israel, was made conclusively manifest from this,--that there was sin in the world for ages before. Sin, as Paul tells us (Rom. v. 12), "is not imputed"--is not held to exist; that is, "where there is no law." But as death, which is the wages of sin, reigned universally among men, "from Adam to Moses," the conclusion is inevitable that law existed, and was in full force all the while. And I again repeat, it was the existence of this law, as a law, which man had broken, and under whose awful curse and penalty he had consequently fallen, which created the necessity for Christ's coming into the world, if man was to be saved.
It is this very truth which is explicitly proclaimed in those well-known words of the Epistle to the Gala- tians (iv. 4-5), "When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law" (or more strictly and literally "those under the law;" those, that is, that were, and those that are, and those that are to be, under the law), "that we might receive the adoption of sons."
In His pre-existent state, as the eternal and only-begotten Son of God, Christ was not under the law. He was then in the form of God, and thought it not robbery to be equal with God. As such, He was not a member or subject of the kingdom of Heaven, but its Sovereign Head and Lord. He possessed, indeed, in that condition, the most absolute and perfect holiness; but it was not the holiness which consists in obedience. The law which is holy, and the commandment which is holy, and just, and good, was conformed to Him; not He to the law. His holiness was exercised as the lawgiver, in making the law, and in governing the world by it. But in undertaking, and entering on the blessed mission which brought Him down from heaven to earth, He "took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men." (Phil, ii. 7). By so doing, He placed himself "under the law;" the very law to which those were subject, whom He had come to redeem. Had they--that is, the human race--kept that law, His interposition in their behalf would not have been required. The law itself would have secured them eternal life. But having broken that law, they had both forfeited the rewards of obedience, and incurred the tremendous penalty of transgression. It was in this extremity that Christ came to seek and to save that which was lost: and this He did, by meeting, in the room and stead of His people--and as their substitute and surety--all the law's demands.
We have thus seen, as the first result of our inquiry into the subject before us, that the law stands, to the mission and work of Christ, in a relation of the closest and most fundamental kind. Take away the law, and you take away the gospel; for, in taking away the law, you take away the only adequate ground, or necessity, for such a work as Christ came into this world to accomplish.
This, however, will still further and more fully appear as we proceed to consider what that work of Christ really was. In doing so, it will distinctly appear that every part of the work which He accomplished, as our Redeemer, had respect to the law. His mission was indeed a mission of grace, but of grace "reigning through righteousness"--the very righteousness of God which that law reveals and demands.
That work of Christ naturally divides itself into three parts--His work of active obedience, His work of atonement, His work of renewing grace upon His people's souls. By His active obedience He wrought out, in perfection, the very righteousness which the law requires. By His atoning sacrifice He satisfied the penal demands of the law, and thereby vindicated its authority and took away its curse, from His people. By His renewing grace, in regenerating and sanctifying those whom His atoning blood has washed, and His imputed righteousness has justified, He brings them into personal conformity to the law; in other words, into that state of holiness without which no man shall see the Lord.
1. And first, as to His work of active obedience. In being made "under the law" He had become bound as the covenant head and representative of His chosen people, to fulfil all righteousness. The law under which He had thus placed himself, was obviously that very law which God gave to Israel in the wilderness. He could not redeem Israel from the law to which they were subject, by taking upon himself the obligations of some other or different law. They, beyond all question, were under the law engraven on the tables of stone; and only by taking up the same position could He meet the necessities of their case. Equally obvious and certain it is, that if the law as given to Israel was a merely Jewish law--if it was a law the obligation of which rested on that people alone, and which was to be done away so soon as their peculiar economy came to an end--then, and in that case, the obedience which Christ rendered to that law, could be of no avail to justify any but the Jews. On the footing of such a view of the law, Christ could not be, as He actually is, "the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth," (Rom. x. 4); but only to every Jew that believeth.
It is true, indeed, that the righteousness which Christ wrought out, went unspeakably beyond the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. It was the law as interpreted by the Sermon on the Mount, whose righteousness He fulfilled--a righteousness which looked not to actions merely, but to the motives in which they originated, and to the spirit in which they were performed--a righteousness which looked to the very thoughts and intents of the heart. But by the commentary upon the law which the Sermon on the Mount presents, there is not so much as one jot or tittle added to the law, as given to Israel at Sinai. That commentary showed the law to be "exceeding broad;" but the Psalmist, long before, had pronounced it to be so; and all that broadness was embraced in the Ten Commandments. That commentary showed the law to be "spiritual," as Paul subsequently testified that it is; but all that spirituality was inherent in it from the first. There may be a show and semblance of putting honour upon Christ, in disparaging the Decalogue--the law as embodied in the Ten Commandments,--and in speaking of the law as abrogated, or at the very least absorbed by the Gospel. But so to disparage the Decalogue, is simply to disparage the work of Christ. It was the righteousness of that very Decalogue which He fulfilled. It was that very Decalogue, the sum and essence of all whose commandments, the Lord was setting forth, when He said by Moses to His people of old--"Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might," (Deut. vi., 4, 5). And was it not of His own perfect obedience to that very command Christ was speaking, when He said to His disciples, beside the well in Samaria--"My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work," (John iv. 24). Christ had no other gods before that one only living and true God. He worshipped that God in spirit and in truth. He hallowed that God's name. He remembered the Sabbath-day to keep it holy- He honoured His parents according to the flesh. He loved His neighbour as himself--for he went about doing good--and in all the relations of life, He was holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners. What David said typically, Christ could say in the strictness and fulness of literal truth, "I delight to do Thy will, O my God: yea, Thy law is within my heart," (Psa. xL, 8). It is impossible, in a word, to point to so much as one solitary act or utterance of that holy and spotless life which He led on earth, from the cradle to the cross, that is not included in the righteousness of the law as given to Israel on the two tables of stone. It was that law that was in His heart; and it was that law, the holiness, justice, and goodness of which was exemplified in His life. In Him "there was no sin," because in Him there was no transgression of that law's commands. And it is in virtue of His perfect obedience to that law in our stead that this is the name by which He is called--"the Lord our Righteousness."
2. But next: by His atoning sacrifice He satisfied the penal demands of the law, and thereby vindicated its authority and redeemed His people from its curse. When God commanded the man--our first parent-- saying, (Gen. ii. 16, 17), "of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,"--when God issued that command, He declared, once for all, that absolute and unconditional obedience to the divine will, is the law of the moral universe--a law, the penalty of transgressing which, is death. It is not, let it be noted, as a mere Creator or universal parent that God rules the moral world. In such a character He might easily be conceived of, as allowing opposition to His will to go unpunished,--as satisfying Himself with some expression of penitence, or effort at amendment, on the part of the offender. This, in point of fact, is the only character in which, by a certain school of theology, God is recognised as acting in His dealings with men. And hence the radically unsound and erroneous views which prevail in that school, upon the subject of the atonement. A late teacher of that school--Robertson, of Brighton--speaks contemptuously of the very idea of a vicarious atonement for sin as "redemption by a figment of law." And no wonder. The rejection of the atonement as a sacrifice for sin, follows of necessity from their views of law. Under such a constitution of things as they assume te exist, an atonement, properly so called--that is a vicarious sacrifice for sin--could have no place; and that, because in the Scripture sense of the word, sin, under such a constitution of things, could have no place. Sin, as already stated, is the transgression of the law. But law implies a law-giver--it implies that He who made the law is himself bound by it-- bound, that is, in the sense of having pledged himself to carry it into effect, both by bestowing its covenant rewards upon the obedient, and by enforcing its threatened penalties upon transgressors.
There might, indeed, be law of a kind to which these conditions would not apply. A universe in which there was nothing but physical law--law in the sense of a certain character impressed on all things, and on human nature among the rest--would not involve, or even admit of, punishment properly so called. Under such an arrangement there might be great calamity,--there might be great suffering. By deviating from the law of their nature,--by acting in a way at variance with it,--men might bring themselves into grievous trouble and profound unhappiness. But these painful results would be simply the outgrowth and development of their own proceedings; and not the consequence of any exercise of punitive justice on the part of the Creator of their being. The fact of their having so departed from this subjective law, impressed by Him on the nature He had given them, might involve, on their side, ignorance and error; but it could not involve sin. For sin, involving guilt and the consequent desert of punishment, implies the transgression of authoritative law: of law, that is, made by God as a moral Ruler, and imposed by Him on men as His rational and responsible creatures. It is only when we conceive of God, as acting in the character of a law-giver in his dealings with this fallen world, that Christ's work of atonement becomes intelligible. As a lawgiver it is not merely His own honour, but the safety and welfare of the universe He rules, which demand the punishment of the law's transgressor. It was for the safety and welfare of the moral universe the moral law was made. It is founded, not on a mere fiat of God's sovereign will, but on that eternal distinction that subsists between right and wrong--- between good and evil. To allow it to be dishonoured, and set at nought, therefore, would be to subvert the very ends for which His moral government exists and is upheld. And seeing that the human race have universally broken His law, the question arises--can God be just and yet the justifier of the ungodly? If not--if these two things can no how be reconciled--the punishment of the transgressor is inevitable. The law must take its course; justice must be executed; and mankind must perish for ever. The law itself had no power to save them. It could do nothing but condemn them. Unless, therefore, some deliverer should be found, able and willing to interpose between the law and its victims, there would and could have been nothing before our fallen race but "a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation." Hence that solemn and awfully significant saying, that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins, (Heb. ix. 22).
Blessed be God such a deliverer was found. "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life," (John iii. 16). "Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of Hosts: smite the shepherd," (Zech. xiii. 7). Nor was the love of the Son less than the love of the Father: "Lo! I come," said He, "in the volume of the Book it is written of me," (Psa. xl. 7). He that was in the beginning with God, and that was God, " was made flesh." "Behold," said His forerunner, John the Baptist, pointing to Him, as He stood by the banks of Jordan, amid the throng of the Baptist's disciples, " Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world," (John i. 29). For this great end He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. He bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. He suffered, the just for the unjust. He was made sin for us, though He knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.
By this great sacrifice of himself, which Christ offered, without spot, unto God, He magnified the law and made it honourable. In bowing His anointed head to receive the stroke of that law-avenging sword, which shed His infinitely-precious blood, He paid a homage to the law and justice of God, greater far than if that stroke had fallen on ten thousand apostate worlds. "Thus," says the Apostle Paul, "hath God set Him forth to be a propitiation, through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God, to declare at this time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus," (Rom. iii. 25, 26). In these words we are expressly told that the death of Christ upon the cross declares the righteousness of God; reveals, that is to say, clearly and fully, what the typical sacrifices of the Old Testament had, till then, but dimly shadowed forth, that God had been acting righteously all along, in pardoning the sins of those who trusted in His promised mercy; that He never at any time had relaxed the penal demands of the law, but had only, in His forbearance, stayed the execution of those penalties against the proper offenders, until their surety und substitute had taken their place, and had been wounded for their transgressions and bruised for their iniquities.
3. What now remains is to show that the law as given to Israel is the very law to the righteousness of which His people, quickened together with Christ, are to rise in, and with, their risen Lord.
God's great end in sending His Son into the world, was to bring us back to Himself. We were all as sheep going astray. We had turned every one to his own way. We had become enemies to God in our hearts, and by wicked works. Not only were we utterly destitute of that righteousness which God's law requires, but our guilt, as wilful transgressors of that holy, just, and good law, demanded, for the satisfaction of divine justice, that the law's penalty of death should be enforced against us. Nay, more, our very nature--corrupted and depraved by sin--had become utterly incapable of keeping any one of the commandments of God.
We had thus built up, with our own wicked and impious hands, a wall of separation between us and God, which neither we nor any created being in the universe could remove. If ever we were to return unto God, every one of these obstacles must be taken out of the way. In order to this, the claims of the law as given to Israel--the law which reveals the righteousness of God--must be met to the full. To meet these claims was accordingly the very object of the mission and work of Christ, as sent of God to seek and save that which was lost. We have seen, accordingly, how this object was, so far, accomplished, by His becoming man, being made under the law, and, in our room and stead, fulfilling all righteousness in His own holy life; and by His offering himself a sacrifice without spot, unto God, to make atonement for our sins.
But had this been all--our return to God had been still impossible. In virtue of what has been already described, provision had been made for securing our complete exemption from the law's curse, and for investing us, by imputation, with that perfect and all- sufficient justifying righteousness which the law requires of all those who are to obtain its rewards. But had Christ's work and mission terminated at this point, there would have been still entirely awanting in us that personal conformity to the law without which we can have no communion with God, and God can have no communion with us. Hence the necessity for that work of grace by which, through the Holy Ghost, Christ regenerates and santifies all those whom His atoning blood has washed from their guilt, and whom His imputed righteousness has made legally just. When, by this power of the Spirit of God, the sinner is born again, there takes place, in him, that spiritual resurrection by which, in and with Christ, he is raised "to newness of life"--that is, to a new life of willing and loving obedience to the holy law of God. Hence that saying of the apostle, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature," (2 Cor. v. 17). From the moment that, by the Holy Spirit, this vital union between the sinner and the Saviour is formed, the old man, which is corrupt, begins to be put off; and the new man, which is created in righteousness and true holiness, begins to be put on. The new life on which the converted sinner thus enters, is the very life of Christ. It is a life formed upon that divine model, for God hath predestinated all His spiritual children --all who are thus born from above--to be conformed to the image of His Son. Now, as it has been already shown, that the righteousness of Christ--the righteousness which He wrought out in the days of His flesh, for His people's justification--was the righteousness of the very law to which they were by nature subject, it follows of necessity that the righteousness which he works in them, by His renewing and sanctifying grace, is, and can be, no other than the very same righteousness by which He himself fulfilled the law. To the work of Christ, therefore, in sanctifying the sinner, the law stands in a relation as close and intimate as that in which it stands to His work in justifying the sinner, and in saving the sinner's soul from death. It stands to it in the relation of revealing the very righteousness, according to which, as a child of God, the believer in Christ is bound to live--bound, not indeed by the terror of the law's condemnation, for from that condemnation he has been for ever freed by the blood of Christ; but bound, by his very nature and condition as God's rational and responsible creature, and by that love of God which, in the very act of redeeming him, at so great a price, from death and hell, lays the obligation to obey God's law upon his conscience with greater force than ever. In other words, to the natural and indefeasable obligation to obey that law which lies, and must ever lie, upon the believer as a creature--as a rational and responsible subject of the moral government of God-- there is now superadded that special obligation to which the Apostle Paul referred when he said (2 Cor. v. 14, 15) " The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, thus were all dead: and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them and rose again."
Such considerations as these, while they serve clearly to bring out the meaning, they, at the same time, serve amply to vindicate the truth of the answer the apostle gives, when, to the question, "Do we make void the law through faith?" he so promptly and pointedly replies, "God forbid: yea, we establish the law."
That strong expression, "God forbid," is well known to all who are familiar with Paul's epistles, to be a form of speech which he frequently uses, but never, save when disclaiming and repudiating some sentiment or conclusion which he regards as not simply untrue, but as pre-eminently dishonouring to God. For example, when--in setting forth broadly, and unequivocally, the great doctrine of election--he is met with the idea that it involves injustice, he repels that idea instantly and with abhorrence: "What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid," (Rom. ix. 14). When, therefore, he employs that expression for the purpose of putting away, and putting down, the notion that the Gospel makes void the law, we may be sure he does so because he sees, in that notion, an error of a very deep and deadly kind.
If those, indeed, who speak of the Gospel as having abrogated the law, mean simply that the Gospel has taken away from the law all its power to condemn the believer in Christ, there would be no other fault to find with their statement but this, that it is a very incorrect and deceptive mode of expressing what they intend to say.
All evangelical Christians are, of course, agreed that to them that are in Christ Jesus, there is now no condemnation. But this exemption from the law's curse did not begin to take effect, for the first time, after the New Testament dispensation begun. The law had as little power to condemn the believer under the Mosaic economy, as under that of the Gospel. It had as little power to condemn Moses, as it had to condemn Paul. From the moment God gave His great promise of mercy, through the promised seed, faith in that promise took away the law's power to condemn even the chief of sinners.
There is, therefore, a double error involved in thus speaking of the Gospel as having abrogated the law. In the first place, it involves, as we have seen, the error that the law had power to condemn the believer till Christ actually died upon the cross; and, in the second place, by a gross misnomer, it calls that an abrogation of the law, which was, in fact, the most awful and impressive confirmation of the law.
But again: If those who speak of the Gospel as having abrogated the law--the law as given to Israel-- mean simply, that in consequence of that clearer revelation which the Gospel makes of the love of God, and of those more abundant communications of His grace for which the Gospel has opened the way, the law is now, to the believer, less a yoke of bondage than, before Christ came,--again, we have to repeat that there is no other fault to be found with the statement but this, that it is a very incorrect and deceptive mode of expressing what they intend to say. The dispensation of the Gospel is pre-eminently the dispensation of the Spirit, and "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," (2 Cor. iii. 17). By making us, through Christ, better than before to comprehend with all saints the love of God, the Gospel more completely delivers us from that guilty fear which hath torment. Animated by this love, Paul learned to say, "To me to live is Christ." Not the terror of the law, but the grace of the Gospel, was the grand motive power which prompted him to deny ungodliness and all worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in the world.
But here again there is a double error involved, in speaking of this state of things as amounting to the abrogation of the law. It involves, in the first place, the assumption that, under the Old Testament, the terror of the law was the only impelling motive to cease from sin and to learn to do well; and it involves, in the second place, the further assumption, that grace has entirely done away with law, under the Gospel. But neither of these things is true. Is it not the Psalmist who says: "O how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day ... I have refrained my feet from every evil way, that I might keep Thy word. I have not departed from Thy judgments, for Thou hast taught me. How sweet are Thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth," (Psa. cxix. 97, 101--103). Such language shows unmistakably that under the Old Testament, grace had written the law on the Psalmist's heart, and had made it, to him, a law of liberty and love, just as grace does in the case of the believer under the Gospel. The difference, therefore, between the two dispensations, as regards the prominence of law under the one, and of grace under the other, is a difference only of degree. Law had more of outwardness among God's ancient people. It was not only placed before them on the tables of stone, but many of its statutes and judgments were made binding upon them by penalties of a temporal and earthly kind. They had, by a special and solemn engagement made between them and God at the foot of Sinai, pledged themselves to keep the whole law under pain of forfeiting the distinguished privileges and blessings which, as a nation, God was conferring upon them. In such circumstances it was of necessity that a certain character of legalism should have belonged to the dispensation under which they lived. And it being also the well known fact, that while, on the one hand, law thus stood out continually before them, in a form so pronounced and so peremptory, grace, on the other hand, was as yet shadowed forth only under the types, and figures, and promises of Old Testament times, it could not be but that law--simply and nakedly no law-- should have been felt to press, and even to frown, upon the Old Testament believer, with an air of terribleness, from which the Christian is, in a far greater measure, set free.
It is to this very state of things the Apostle Paul refers in his Epistle to the Galatians (iv., 1, 2) when he says, "That the heir, so long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all: but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed by the father." Contrasting with this state of comparative bondage or servitude of the Old Testament Church, the superior liberty of believers under the Gospel, the apostle goes on to speak of God as having sent forth the Spirit of His Son into their hearts, crying, Abba, Father. But still this difference was not absolute, but relative only. The standing of the Old Testament Church, after all, was as really in grace as is that of the New; and though less easy before Christ came than after it, it was nevertheless quite possible all along, for the true believer to know and feel that he was not a servant but a son--and, as such, consciously to enjoy the glorious liberty of the children of God.
There was, therefore, grace as well as law under the Old Testament dispensation; and there is law as well as grace under the New. And to speak of the mere fact that the believer's true relation to the law, and his freedom from its curse, are more clearly revealed and more fully realised under the gospel than under the dispensation of Moses--as if this amounted to anything that could be called an abrogation of the law--is a mere abuse of words. To the Christian as much as to the Jew, the law of the Ten Commandments--the law as given to Israel--is still the revelation of the righteousness of God--of that, righteousness to which he must continually strive through grace, to have his whole life conformed.
Let it be distinctly understood then, that if all which is meant by those who speak of the law as being abrogated by the Gospel--who speak of the Ten Commandments as having been buried with Christ in His grave,--if all they mean by this strong language be, either, first, that the law has lost, by Christ's death, its power to condemn the believer; or, second, that by Christ's coming and work, the love of God has been so much more clearly revealed, and the grace of the Holy Spirit so much more abundantly procured, that the law, as a stimulus to forsake sin and to follow holiness, is now neither felt nor needed in the same degree as in Old Testament times,--If all that they mean be no more than either, or both of those two things, we have no quarrel with the conclusion at which they have arrived, but only with the language they employ to express it. We adopt the conclusion with our whole heart and soul. It is the conclusion at which all evangelical Christians, from the apostolic age till now have arrived, and which they have ever most firmly held. But instead of admiting for a moment that, therefore, the law has been abrogated, we repel the assertion in the solemn words of Paul, "Do we make void the law through faith? God forbid: we establish the law."
In reality, however, although those who speak of the law of the Ten Commandments as abrogated by the Gospel, may sometimes seem to mean no more than has now been explained, in reality, they do mean much more; and, most unquestionably, the words they employ mean much more; and the theological school to which this sort of language belongs, mean much more. I am very far, indeed, from supposing that any of them mean, by speaking of the Decalogue as abrogated, to overthrow all moral obligation, and to assert that the Gospel virtually licenses men to live as they list. I have no doubt that, instead of intentionally sanctioning Antinomianism, or anything like the impious and abominable wickedness that follows from it, some of those to whom I now refer persuade themselves that they are promoting a morality of the purest and highest kind. But with the views and intentions of those who contend that the Decalogue is no longer in force--that, as a law of commandments, it has been buried in Christ's grave--I have nothing whatever to do. I am not their judge.
That which alone I have to do with is the doctrine they teach, and which too many may be tempted thoughtlessly to receive. That doctrine I believe to be false and dangerous. In the form in which it is most commonly held by those who maintain it, it amounts substantially to this: that the law of the Ten Commandments, in that authoritative and preceptive form in which it was delivered to Israel, is dead and buried: that, as existing in that form, it was purely Jewish, and, as such, has been entirely abolished, with the economy under which it was given: that, in consequence, there is not only no such law as the Fourth Commandment in existence under the Gospel, but no such law, in a statutory form, as any of the other Commandments which the Decalogue contains. What they do hold to exist is simply the moral element which may be found to underlie any of those laws. As Archbishop Whately, who is probably the leading authority with the more recent promulgators of these views, describes this law-abrogating theory, "the Mosaic Law was limited both to the nation of Israel and to the period before the Gospel. But, on the other hand, the natural principles of morality which, among other things, it inculcates, are, from their own character, of universal obligation, and that Christians are bound to obey the commandments it contained, not because they are Commandments of the Mosaic Law, but because they are moral." That which alone is binding, then, according to this theory, let it be carefully noted, is "the natural principles of morality," and these are binding, not as being part and parcel of an express and authoritative law given by God to man, but only "because they are moral." They are binding, therefore, only in the same sense in which any human law is binding, which is in itself right and good. Now, in the first place, this is to remove law from its high and commanding place as an authoritative declaration of the mind and will of God--as a revelation of the righteousness to which He requires us, as the rational and responsible subjects of His moral government, to conform our lives--it is to remove law from that high place and to lower it to the level of a kind of mere physical law, belonging to the nature of things. But in the next place, it is to make man himself the judge of what is moral--whether in the Mosaic Law or anywhere else --and thus to constitute him his own law-giver. And who that has any spiritual discernment, and who calmly reflects on the subject, can fail to see how wide a door such a system opens for Antinomian license on the one side--and for rationalistic and gospel-subverting views of sin on the other. If, instead of having his duty set before him in the shape of a law of commandments given him by God, man is left to find it out by applying the test of his own reason, or of his own moral instincts, to any such indications of the right rule of living, as can be gathered from the sources of information laid before him, it needs no argument to prove how ruinous to both morality and religion the consequences must inevitably be. Morality, on such a footing, will be one thing to you, and another to me; and the infraction of it will seem a very small thing to us both. And assuredly, the religion which is built on such a view of man's relation to God would leave no place and no need for such an awful event as the atoning death of God's incarnate Son. Rightly understood, therefore, and fairly followed out to its logical and legitimate results, the doctrine which abrogates the continuing and universal obligation of the law as given to Israel, is a doctrine which subverts both the law and the Gospel--is a doctrine equally adverse to practical godliness, and to Christian truth.