The Law of God
“If ye fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well: but if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors. For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all* For he that said. Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transg ressor of the law. So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty. For he shall have judgment without mercy, that hath show ed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment” — ST JAMES iL 8-13.
/^ OD always uses such means as are best suited to the work He has on hand — carpenters, architects, mechanics, in employing various kinds of tools, but copy the great Maker and Monarch of all. Long ages ago — ten thousand, perhaps ten hundred thousand years ago, when God was preparing this world for the abode of man, working on rough materials, He employed agents of tremendous power. What fires they were that fused the solid rocks; how they roared and flamed, when — as science teaches and the Bible tells — “the hills melted like wax at the presence of the Lord!” We talk of stormy seas and mountain billows that toss our stoutest ships like feathers on the wave, and round the rattling shingle as it is swept up and down the foaming beach; but what waves were those that, surging up the valleys, broke on the tops of our highest hills, and flinging their spray in the face of heaven, left the plains covered with immense beds of gravel, and our glens with those granite boulders, whose rounded forms speak of long ages during which they had been rolled about on the shores of tremendous seas! Who reads the pages of the book of Nature cannot doubt that, like man, our earth had been born naked — not clothed as now with soil and verdure. And what forces of ice, of iceberg, of glacier, were they that ground the surface of the rocks to dust, which, borne off by rivers, was spread out on the bottom of the ocean to form the forest lands and corn fields of future continents! And when in the course of time these were ready to be raised, how tremendous the power that heaved up, for example, the Alps, the Andes, this island, from the bed of the sea, and gave the rocks around which fish once swam and sea monsters sported, to be the home of the eagle — for clouds to girdle and snows to crown!
These forces have disappeared. They have done their work. And now God in Nature works by other and gentler agencies — soft falling dews, summer showers, the silent light, the feathery snow, the golden clouds, the ebb and flow of tides, and seas that — turned by sails and steam into the high road of distant nations — man ploughs as safely almost as he ploughs the land — “He is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working!”
In His spiritual kingdom, in the dispensation of grace, as well as in the department of Nature, we find God also selecting instruments suited to the work He has in hand — using rough or gentle means according to the subject he has to work upon. And in turning our attention to the law of God, I may remark that this accounts for the circumstances in which the moral law was delivered to the children of Israel at Mount Sinai.
These circumstances were of a kind to rouse the attention of the most stupid, and strike terror into the stoutest hearts. Two days of preparation have passed, since Jehovah announced His intention of descending on the mount; and many an eye is turned on Sinai, that, with its gray head lifted calm and peaceful against the evening sky, wears no sign of the approaching event. If any asked, Where is the promise of His coming? the third morning sealed the lips of cavillers and set all doubts at rest. A burst of thunder that shook the earth and heavens roused the sleeping camp; and brought old and young to their tent doors to gaze with pale faces on Sinai. Wrapt to its feet in a sable mantle, it stands up a mass of solid blackness. Lightnings played around it: pierced it: and streaming from it, mingled many peals into one long, continuous, stunning roar of thunder. The mountain, as if kindled by these fires, vomited forth a smoke that, spreading a lurid cloud over the sky, darkened the face of day; and the earth, as if infected with the terror of the people, began to tremble beneath their feet. The thunders cease — but to give place to sounds still more awful. Out from that terrible darkness, loud and long, louder and still louder, till it rung like the summons that shall wake the dead, pealed the notes of a heavenly trumpet. Next, as I read the story, the trumpet ceases; and the people who, struck with a panic, had fled from the borders of the mountain, and were standing afar off, heard a voice. It issued from the dark bosom of the cloud; and audible not to hundreds, nor thousands, nor tens of thousands, but to the millions of that mighty multitude, it rang out loud and clear those ten commandments which, forming the moral law, expressed the will of God, and should ever prove the rule of man. Overwhelmed, half dead with terror, ready to exclaim with Jacob, How terrible is this place! the people ran to Moses, crying, Speak thou with us, and we will l86 THE LAW OF GOD.
hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.
Such were the circumstances in which the ten commandments were first spoken to man; and looking only at circumstances — in which that law appears clothed and crowned with terrors, without reflecting on the reasons for them, or considering the peculiar nature of the case, we allow ourselves to associate the law of God with His terrors, and only the Son of God with His love — as if God in the law, and God in redemption appeared in different characters. Ask a man where the love of God is to be seen, he would never dream of pointing to the table of the ten commandments. He turns his back on Sinai, and his face to Calvary, saying, There, on that bloody tree, in its blessed burden, behold the love of God! This is a mistake; a very great mistake; a pestilent heresy. No doubt it is hardly possible to imagine a greater contrast than the scenes of Sinai, and those in which the Saviour of the world was born: — shepherds watching their flocks on the quiet uplands of Bethlehem; the calm night with its sparkling stars and soft falling dews; the world around
—the babe on its mother’s breast, and children locked in each other’s arms, all hushed in slumber; the deep silence broken by no sound save the baying of a watch-dog, the tinkling of mountain streams, or the distant murmur of a waterfall; a beautiful light far up in the deep blue sky, descending, brightening till the stars are quenched in its glory; then a gentle voice, sounding down from above to banish the alarm of these simple shepherds, and saying, Fear not, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy — then the whole sky suddenly bursting into light, and songs of sweetest voices singing, as they sing before the throne, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men.
Still, in delivering the moral law amid circumstances so different from these, the God of love was only using such means as the work required-True, they were circumstances of terror; but they were needed. Slavery had been for centuries the cruel lot of the children of Israel; and that — which John Wesley rightly called “the sum of all villanies” — had sunk the Hebrews, as it does every race it curses, into the lowest depths of l88 THE LAW OF GOD.
ignorance, stupidity, brutality, mental and moral debasement. Their history is crowded with proofs of that; they were a stiffnecked people, ever longing to return to Egypt — preferring its onions with bondage, to liberty with the bread of heaven.
In dealing with such a people God had the rudest materials to work upon. Rough work requires rough instruments: to use a figure whose appropriateness may excuse its familiarity, men don’t cut blocks with razors. It is with an axe the woodman fells the forest. It is with the strongest stimulants — in a case we knew of, pouring boiling water on his naked thighs — that the physician rouses one sunk into deadly stupor. Snow melts before the soft breath of spring; but rocks are only split by the stroke of lightning or the blast of powder. Gold is beaten into shape without the aid of fire — not iron: more stubborn metal, it has to be thrust into the roaring forge.
A dull, gross, animal, apathetic congregation requires a rousing preacher — that he who occupies the pulpit be no Barnabas but a Boanerges, a son of thunder. Even so, God having in Israel to deal with a hard-hearted and obdurate people, adapted His instruments to the material He had to work upon: thundered out His law in their ears, and sought by these circumstances of terror to impress it on their hearts. These, however, being but the dress it wore, do not properly belong to the law; nor are they the true exponents of the mind of the Lawgiver. There is the same love in the law as in the gospel — the difference is only in expression, as when I warn one against venturing into the roaring flood, and when, on his leaping madly in, I follow to save him. In the law Love warns, in the Cross it redeems. Both are, as I undertake to show, the true mirror of Him who thus defines His own character, “God is love” — “Fury is not in me.”
The spring of the law is love.
With its, Thou shalt not do this, and Thou shalt not do that, the law presents rather an ungracious aspect. We like ill to be bidden, but worse to be forbidden. But does Love never forbid? A mother, does she never forbid her child; but, on the contrary, indulge every caprice and grant all its wishes? How disastrous the fate and brief the life of a child denied nothing; indulged in everything — allowed to play with fire, or fire-arms; to devour the painted but poisonous fruit — to bathe where the tide runs like a race-horse, or the river rushes roaring into the black swirling pool. And who frets against the restraints of God’s holy law because it forbids this and the other thing, is no wiser than the infant who weeps, and screams, and struggles, and perhaps beats the kind bosom that nurses it, because its mother has snatched a knife from its foolish hands.
No doubt the law restrains us; but all chams are not fetters, nor are all walls the gloomy precincts of a jail. It is a blessed chain by which the ship, now buried in the trough, and now rising on the top of the sea, rides at anchor and outlives the storm. The condemned would give worlds to break his chain, but the sailor trembles lest his should snap; and when the gray morning breaks on the wild lee-shore, all strewn with wrecks and corpses, he blesses God for the good iron that stood the strain. The pale captive eyes his high prison wall, to curse the man that built it, and envy the little bird that, perched upon its summit, sings merrily, and flies away on wings of freedom; but were you travelling some Alpine pass where the narrow road, cut out of the face of the rock, hung over a frightful gorge, it is with other eyes you would look on the wall that restrains your restive steed from backing into the gulf below, Such are the restraints God’s law imposes — no other. It is a fence from evil — nothing else. I challenge the world to put its finger on any one of these ten commandments which is not meant, and calculated to keep us from harming ourselves, or hurting others. There is the same love in the law that there is in the gospel; and between them a harmony as perfect as the music of that heaven where the harps are gold, and the strings are touched by angels’ fingers. The hand, indeed, that wrote these commandments is the same that was nailed to the cross; and amid Sinai’s loudest thunders Faith recognises, though it speaks in other tones, the voice which prayed for mercy on murderers, and promised paradise, to a dying thief.
The spirit of the law is love.
By her subtle arts chemistry extracts from the crude and bulky substance its spirit, essence, essential element: offering us in a small phial of the costly attar the fragrance of a whole field of roses, and in a few drops drawn from the poppy juice, that potent element which dulls the sense of pain, and charms suffering to sleep. But no odour distilled from the blushing rose smells so sweet, no spirit drawn from the gaudy poppy soothes the smart of pain, as the spirit of love which Jesus finds in a law that so many regard with dread — fears groundless as those that saw in Himself a spectre of the deep, and which He laid, as His voice on another night did the waves, with It is I, be not afraid. With such reassuring, comforting words, God, as a God of love, comes to us in this dreaded Law. Jesus takes these ten commandments into His hands, analyses them, extracts their true essence and spirit — and what is it? It is love — love toward God, and love toward man. Whoever doubts it, let them listen to His answer, when a lawyer, tempting Him, came and said, Master, which is the great commandment? Jesus said unto him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; this” — not, thou shalt have no other gods before me; nor, thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image; nor, thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; nor, thou shalt not kill, or steal, or commit adultery — “this is the first and great commandment; and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself — and on these,” He adds, “hang all the law and the prophets,”
Take, for example, the second table of the law, those six commandments which respect our conduct not to God, but to our fellow-men. Do not these enjoin the very things which Love would prompt to; and teach us to carry into practice the golden rule, as it is called, that grandest maxim which ever fell on human ear, Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you? Who that loves his neighbour as he loves himself would steal from him, would kill him, seduce his wife, or swear away his fair name, his liberty, or life? Does not the loveliness and divine excellence of the law appear in this, that no man, however much he might wish to have liberty to break it for his
own pleasure against others, would wish that any
N should have licence to break it against himself? What villain coolly laying, devil-like, his snares to seduce another’s wife, sister, or daughter, would consent that others should have licence to seduce his own? Even thieves insist on honesty between each other. Traitors consign to death the man who turns traitor on themselves. Thus the worst of men pay homage to the law — it is sacrificed to their passions, but like the victims of old that were led to the altar crowned with garlands of flowers.
With their bad passions raging against it as the sea foams and rages against the shore that confines its waves within their bounds, men, like the fool who hath said in his heart, There is no God, have sometimes wished there were no law; and that every one was left, as in Israel when there was no king, to do what was right in his own eyes. No law! That wish were hardly granted when it would happen with them as with the man of heathen fable, who had sought and received from Jupiter the power of turning all he touched to gold. And when the bread he hungered for changed in his hand to gold, and the water he raised to his thirsty lips turned at their touch to gold, and the downy pillow on which he laid a weary head stiffened into a solid, unyielding, uneasy mass of gold, he besought the god to resume the grant, and relieve him of this fatal gift. Fancy what a world this would be, set loose from the restraints of God’s holy law — no written, no inner law — no conscience — no ten commandments — the reins flung loose on the neck of passion — all men and women left to obey every impulse of appetite, and do what was right in their own eyes! What a Sodom, Gomorrah, hell! Remove these restraints, and iniquity in such deluge as would pour on a neighbouring land were its sea-dikes thrown down, would drown the earth and destroy men from off its face.
On one occasion the barons of England addressed their king, saying, We do not wish the laws of England changed; and we have only to fancy what a dreadful world this would become, without the restraining influence of these laws of God, to say, We do not wish one of them changed 1 Not prisons and police, not the baton of the constable or the bayonet of the soldier; but these are the bond of society; the shield of virtue; the pro-
».
tection of innocence; the strength of weakness; the guardian of public morals and domestic peace. And nothing but the base bad passions that spring from our corrupt nature, hinders any from saying with David, Oh how love I thy law, O Lord: it is my meditation all the day — teach me thy statutes — the law of thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver — therefore I love thy commandments above gold, yea, above fine gold: and esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to be right
The sacredness of this law.
The apostle St James says, “Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, is guilty of all.” This seems hard measure — to make a man offender for a word — to treat him for breaking one commandment as one that had broken all the ten. It looks at first sight as if the unprofitable servant who hid his master’s talent in a napkin, had some reason for speaking of him as an “austere” man. How do we justify that? We might leave God to justify Himself. We might ask, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? And leaving this, with many other mysteries, to be solved at the last day, or in that world where, with eyes purified from the mists of sin, we shall see as we are seen, and know as we are known, we might answer with St Paul, “Who art thou, O man, that repliest against God? Shall the thing made say to him who made it, Why hast thou made me thus?” But the case is not without a parallel in our own judicial proceedings — and as done in our courts of law who thinks the practice wrong? A witness, for instance, sworn by Almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is giving evidence in a case where a man is on trial for his life. He states many, as lawyers say, damning facts, and makes out a case against the accused clear as daylight. What need of further witnesses? The jury lay down their pens, the judge throws himself back in his seat, and the spectators, turning to the poor, pale wretch at the bar, look on him as a dead man, feeling as sure that he will be hanged as that the sun shall rise to-morrow. And yet he is not hanged — the tables are turned in an instant; and like one in battle from whose head the sword has shorn his nodding plume, the man escapes — escapes, as the Bible says, by the skin of his teeth. The witness whose evidence had brought him to the scaffold, and to the very brink of ruin, tells a lie; one clear, deliberate falsehood. It may be on a very small point; it does not matter. All his other evidence may be true as the gospel — it does not matter; that one lie nullifies all his other testimony — blotting it clean out — reducing it to nothing. Convicted of perjury on one point, his evidence is dealt with as if he had been guilty of perjury in all; and that for this good reason — that one capable of swearing to a single lie, is capable of swearing to twenty. Even so — though you may start at the bold assertion, and when you think of some gross and horrid sins may be ready to exclaim, Is thy servant a dog that he should do such a thing? — the man who is capable of breaking one of God’s commandments, is capable of breaking them all; in mind and spirit, he that offendeth in one point is guilty of all.
There are degrees, no doubt, of guilt as there are degrees of glory; there is a descending as well as an ascending scale; there are higher places in heaven, and hotter places in hell. It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for Jerusalem sinners: and more tolerable for Jerusalem sinners than for the sinners of our land and cities, — for us if we reject or even neglect the great salvation. Still there is no degree of guilt but is fatal; sin is a poison of which the smallest drop kills; the law is so sacred that one offence, one breach of any of its commandments, exposes us to the wrath of God as certainly as a thousand. The case finds its apt illustration in yonder arch which spans the waters that reflect its bending beautiful form — drive out not ten stones, but one, and the whole pile tumbles into a mass of ruins. Or to vary the figure, a woman’s virtue is as certainly lost by one fall as by twenty; and he is as certainly a thief who steals a penny as he who steals a pound — who filches but a farthing from a ragged beggar, as he who plunders a bank of its gold, or robs a king of his crown. “He who offendeth in one point is guilty of all.”
Tried in this balance, who is not wanting? Tried by this test, who can stand the ordeal? Well is it said, “If thou shouldst mark iniquity* O Lord, who shall stand?” You have not been great sinners! What of that? — he who offendeth in one point is guilty of all. I admit that there are unconverted people “lovely in their lives,” in temper amiable, very likeable, kind-hearted, generous, just in their dealings, honest to a farthing, and in their friendships true as steel; such that, were Christ to walk this world now as He did eighteen hundred years ago, He would love them as He loved the young ruler who came, and, falling at His feet, cried, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? Suppose you were such, — and that is not supposing little, — what of that? What man or woman can hold up their hands to say, These hands are clean; uncover their bosom, lay bare the secrets of their hearts, to say, My heart is pure — then, alas! he that offendeth in one point is guilty of all — One, but one sin! Ah! that is the dead fly in the apothecary’s ointment; there stands the spot of leprosy on beauty’s brow. There are none, not the loveliest of human characters, but have sinned; and he who offendeth in one point is guilty of all. This bolts the door of heaven against all self-righteous hopes. Looking down on others, shrinking from the society of the openly licentious, the ungodly or profane, and saying, as we push our way on, to this and that one, Stand aside, I am holier than thou, we may march bravely up to the gate. But to our plea, I have not been a great sinner, or I have not sinned like others, or I have been honest, and sober, and virtuous, correct in my deportment, and constant in my attendance on religious ordinances, there follows no drawing of bar and bolt — but only through the unopened door this stern reply, these words of doom, He that offendeth in one point is guilty of all.
Terrible, yet blessed words! Like the muttering of distant thunder, they warn us to haste to the refuge opened in the gospel. Like a friendly notice, they warn us in letters which he who runneth may read, No road to heaven this way. They shut us up to Christ. No misfortune that! In Him we have all fulness of mercy to pardon, and grace to help; and as men who, when they have done their utmost to stop the leak, and keep the ship afloat, find her settling down in the deep, in that terrible hour, with death staring them in the face, thank God for the life-boat that, pulled by strong hands, bears down on the sinking wreck, so we thank God for Christ; we hail the Saviour of the lost. He has hastened to our relief — He is at our side — He invites us to His arms — for in Him, though the law condemns, “mercy rejoiceth against judgment.”
The gospel brings salvation to the law-breaker.
Mercy does not rejoice against the justice of God. The claims of Justice were not ignored or repudiated; but satisfied. Jesus bore our punishment, dying, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God; — and the gospel that saves does not present the sword of Justice broken, but, though red with blood, wreathed with roses. Nor does Mercy rejoice against the law of Godr — Christ tells us that He came not to destroy the law and prophets, but to fulfil them; — and when the Son of God, leaving His Father’s bosom, became a man to obey the precepts of the law, and pay the penalty due by us for breaking them, He crowned the law with higher honours than it had worn though Adam had never fallen, and Eden had ne’er been lost. It was great honour done to the law when God wrote it with His own finger on tables of stone; but it receives a higher honour when, dipping His finger in the blood of Christ, He writes it on the fleshly tablets of a living, loving heart. There have been great sermons preached and printed on the ten commandments, but the Cross is the greatest sermon that was ever preached on the law; — and as we have seen a lofty mountain best, not from the plain, but from the top of another, it is on the summit of Calvary that you command the grandest views of Sinai.
It is against not God’s law or justice, but the devil and death, the grave and hell, that Mercy rejoiceth. Rejoiceth! grand, wonderful word, it lays open the very heart of God. Father of the prodigal, kind, loving, joyful man, running to meet thy trembling son, folding the poor wretch in thy fond embraces, lavishing tears and kisses on his haggard cheek, bestowing forgiveness before confession, and with answers anticipating prayer, thou wert but a dim, imperfect image of our Father which is in heaven. It is not only that God “has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” What father has? The more wicked the son, the calamity is the greater; the deeper goes the knife into a bleeding heart, as that greatest, blackest grief gushes forth in a cry like this, O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom; would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! Nor is it only that God is “not willing that any should perish.” He is God and not man; and even we are not. I have seen the life-buoy spun out to a drowning man, and, amid the crowd on the pier that gazed in horror, there was none, as they watched its course over the roaring waves, but wished in his heart that it might reach its mark. Nor is it only that God is “willing that all should come to Him, and live.” What mother but would open her door who heard the knocking, and recognised the well-known voice of some poor, fallen child, that had sunk down there amid the winter drift, and cried, with failing breath, O mother, mother dear, open and let me in. And who thinks so ill of God as to believe that when He hears such a cry at the door of mercy, He will not rise to let us and to welcome us in! More than all that, God rejoiceth to save, and receive back to His bosom the worst and unworthiest of His erring children — of those who, like lost sheep, have gone astray. Mercy rejoiceth against judgment. It is a blessed thing to fill a mother’s heart with joy, and pour a tide of gladness into the bosom on which we hung — so deeply loved and tenderly cared for in helpless infancy. And be he poor or rich, prince or peasant, I honour the man who would do, dare, suffer anything to gild the evening of a father’s life, and smooth the thorns of his dying pillow. It is a grand thing to make glad a parent’s heart. But here we may do a thing grander still. Turn to the call of mercy, and you fill the great heart of God with joy, and angels’ harps with praise. It may be that you do not love Jesus. Well, Jesus loves you; and pities you. You spit on Him, despise His love, repel His approaches? Well, His blessed hand arrests the gleaming axe, as He turns to His Father to say, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do!”
Thus mercy rejoiceth against judgment. And let none stand back as if their sins were too great to be forgiven, or their case too bad to be cured. Jesus is an Advocate who never lost a cause — a Physician who never lost a patient — His blood cleanseth from all sin, and through Him the door of heaven stands open to publicans, harlots, the chief of sinners. Let all come! See there Mercy, sweet Mercy, wearing a form of celestial beauty, with a blood-bought pardon in this hand, and a sparkling crown in that, stands aloft on the summit of the Cross, ringing forth this old cry, “Sing, O daughter of Zion; be glad and rejoice, O daughter of Jerusalem. — The Lord hath taken away thy judgment; he hath cast out thine enemy. — Fear not, and let not thine hands be slack. The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save.” — Save? save is almost a cold and feeble word. More, much more than save; “as a bridegroom rejoiceth over his bride, so will thy God rejoice over thee.”1