The Law and Its Fulfiller

“And Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, 0 Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep and do them. The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeh. The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day. The Lord talked with you face to face in the mount, out of the midst of the fire, (I stood between the Lord and you at that time, to shew you the word of the Lord: for ye were afraid by reason of the tire, and went not up into the mount,) saying,” etc. — Deut. v. 1-21.

Such are the Ten Commandments. Such is that great code of religion and morals on which the legislation of Great Britain is founded, and which pervades the jurisprudence of Christendom. In many sanctuaries it is read over every week, and to each precept the worshipper responds with the prayer, “Lord, incline our hearts to keep this law;” and even where it is not written on the wall or recited from the altar, few are the memories to which it is not familiar. Indeed, so omnipresent is it now in the life, the ideas, and the language of our country, that the difficulty is great to throw ourselves away from it even in thought, so as to mark its features and admire its symmetry. We cannot imagine a world without it, and so we can hardly estimate the service which has been rendered by its promulgation, not that its details were new even at Mount Sinai, but that then and there the rules of eternal riGjhteousness, which had been lying about the world — tossed along from age to age, vague, amorphous, and unauthoritative — were handed forth from heaven anew, and, clear beyond cavil, sufficiently compact for the smallest memory, and comprehensible by the feeblest understanding, became to mankind a statute-book for ever — a statute-book direct from the presence of Infinite Majesty, and in the solemnities by which it was sanctioned, suggestive of that awful tribunal when it will reappear as the law by which the righteous Judge shall render to every man according to his deeds.

I. The Decalogue is the first statute-book which has abolished idolatry and polytheism. “No God but me,” says the first commandment; “No likeness or image,” says the second; and in thus learning the unity and spirituality of the Divine nature, Israel was at once put in advance of the rest of the world by at least fifteen hundred years. In the most important of all knowledge, the little Samuel who could repeat these two commands was wiser than Socrates or Cicero adoring a statue. He was wiser than Homer, or Hesiod with his lords many and gods many; lie was wiser than Confucius, or Lucretius without a god at all.

2. Another peculiarity of this statute-book is its consecration of one day in seven to the service of Jehovah. The temple was a sacred place, and in the middle ages it was usual to claim for churches the right of sanctuary, so that whosoever took refuge within the hallowed precincts was safe from the avenger. But it is not to a holy place but to a holy day that God has given this protecting privilege. Addressing a world to which He had said, “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread,” and addressing a community in which there was a great deal of forced labour, many bondmen and many bondmaids, the purport of it was — “Yes, labour. You require labour from your servants, and I require labour from you. Toil is the taskmaster, entitled to seize you and to take it out of you wherever he finds you; but there is a sanctuary. There is one asylum into which I invite you, and into which I forbid my taskmaster to follow you. Every seventh day shall be an absolute cesspttion. It is the Sabbath of the Lord your God, when you are to do no work yourself, nor are you to ask your man-servant or maid-servant to do any.” The blessing which this>- weekly respite brought to Israel was unspeakable, and of all the boons which from Palestine have overflowed the surrounding world, there is not one which has been more widely shared, or which ought to be more gratefully guarded; none which the sons of industry should so resolutely refuse to sell, or which they should so scorn to steal from one another. To quote the words of one whose testimony is not the less valuable that he despised all religions and hated Christianity. Says Humboldt, — ‘’The selection of the seventh day is certainly the wisest that could have been made. To some extent it may be optional to shorten or lengthen labour on other days, but in regard to men’s physical power and for perseverance in a monotonous emj)loyment, I am convinced that six days is just the true measure. There is likewise something humane in this, that the beasts which aid man in his labour share the rest. To lengthen the interval would be as inhuman as foolish. When, in the time of the Revolution, I spent several years in Paris, I saw this institution, despite its Divine origin, superseded by the dry and wooden decimal system. Only the tenth day was a day of rest, and all customary work was continued for nine long days. This being evidently too long, Sunday was kept by several as far as the police permitted, and the result was too much idleness.”

3. A third peculiarity of this legislation is that it extends to the thoughts and intents of the heart. “Thou shalt not covet.” Thou shalt not cherish wrong desires. Thou shalt not only forbear from

254 THE LAW AND ITS FULFILLEll.

doing the sinful deed, but shalt forbear from thinking it. In all human legislation there is no such requirement. If there were, who could enforce it? If the tongue is silent, if the face is blank, if the hands are motionless, who can read his neighbour’s heart? who can go and testify against him, “I saw him imagining the king’s death. I saw a great greedy thought of his devouring a widow’s house, traced the chimneys going down as you trace the horns of a kid down the throat of a constrictor. I saw him in a fearful fit of inward passion, shaking his spirit’s fist, foaming mth revenge and rancour, and pouring forth unuttered imprecations?” Man looketh on the outward appearance, and as long as our neighbour’s outward conduct is correct we accept him as a good citizen. But the Lord looketh on the heart. God is a Spirit, and our truest self is a spirit also; and unless that hidden man of the heart be right, all outside accuracy profiteth nothing. And so in this its solemn and heart- searching close, as well as in its august commencement, the Decalogue reminds us of Him with whom we have to do. And although a commandment which to many occasions small concern, there is no one more fitted to arouse and quicken conscience. The Pharisee who has fancied that he was advancing straight up to heaven’s gate, along the avenue of ample and well-observed commands, has come to a standstill on reaching this one. High arching above, with room on either side, a gateway for a camel, rises the first command, and, with head erect and broad phylactery, he marches on, full sail, “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men, — no idolater, no blasphemer, no murderer, no extortioner,” — when suddenly he strikes his head a hard blow on the lintel, for the vista ends in “Thou shalt not covet;” and although he stoops and tries to wriggle through, the effort is in vain. It is the needle’s eye, too strait for anything which does not yield the point, and cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

4. A fourth peculiarity is the place here given to parental authority, and consequently to filial piety. It has been much debated whether the fifth commandment closes the first table or commences the second; and we deem it more interesting that such a controversy should exist, than important to have it decided. It shows how well the precept would suit for either purpose, — to shut up our duties to our Father in heaven, or to preface our duties to one another. Like that remarkable architecture still found in the land of Bashan, where a door will be hewn out of the solid rock, and door, rock, and hinge are all a single stone, the two tables make but one law, and the fifth commandment is the axis or hinge on which they open and close — the connecting point where you pass from the one to the other. “Eevere thy God,” says the first table, and “Honour thy father and mother,” says this first commandment with promise: “Be a virtuous citizen,” says the said table, but in order to this be first an obedient child.” “God teaches us reverence for Himself through the blessed name of ‘Father,’ and inspires love for what is holy by the boundless heart of ’ mother.’ He spreads His smile over the face of duty by the socialities of home, and gives us foretastes of heaven in the domesticities of the Church on earth: so that if parental love be trifled with, and those domestic influences in which is so much of God’s own Spirit set at nought, the hold of man upon God is all but snapped.”-^ So, children, obey your parents in the Lord, for it is right, and it is requisite to your highest welfare. God will not accept you as His dear and duteous child unless you be affectionate and deferential to those parents whom in life’s first outset He has made so much His own vicegerents, and whose names you uttered, and with whose faces you grew familiar before you learned His own. And likewise, ye fathers, provoke them not by anger and caprice. Be so affectionate that they needs must love you, but withal so firm, so fair, so consistent that they still must “honour” you. As far as possible let your rule be a copy from God’s own government, — kind without blind-

1 Yes or No, 1. 105, slightly altered.

ness; merciful and gracious, forgiving transgression yet not clearing the guilty; not spoiling by soft indulgence, and yet withholding no good thing when there is no good reason; insisting on obedience, yet always open to that cry of the repentant prodigal, “Father, I have sinned against thee.” Where there go hand in hand a mother’s love, tender, self-denying, inextinguishable, and a father’s, wise, firm, and far-seeing, the best natural foundation is laid for piety; and he who has learned to honour such a father and mother has many helps and advantages for loving, trusting, and revering the God whom he has not seen.

So there it stood, this law so holy, just, and good, so brief, so plain, so self-commending in its requirements, so majestic in its origin, — there it remained by Jehovah’s finger written on the tablets of stone; by Moses transcribed in the Book of the Covenant; engraven on the minds of the people by the solemnities of so august a promulgation. There that law remained, a revelation of its Author’s holiness, a preacher of righteousness, a protest against the sins of men, and furnishing a text of tremendous import to every Elijah or Malachi or John the Baptist who came enforcing the claims of God, and appealing to the conscience of his countrymen. There it stood, a challenge to the world, — a moral dynamometer asking which of the sons of Adam could -raise it to the tenth or topmost mark, and thus earn eternal life — a brazen gate, with a new Eclen on the other side, but closed with a ward-lock of ten letters, which could not be wrenched open, and of which no man possessed the password.

There it stood for fifteen centuries, when at last Christ came. Entering on His mission, one of the first things He did was to resuscitate this law and expound it all anew. The grand old pillar had disappeared. A jungle of weeds and worthless creepers had sprung up around it; and instead of insisting on the pure heart and the holy life, the schooldivines of Palestine, the ritualists and word- splitters and tradition-mongers, laid down rules about the shape of scarves and the breadth of hems, and preached about the washing of pots and tables and the paying tithe of mint and cumin. With the sharp sword of indignant rebuke the Lord Jesus cleared away this noisome tangle, and whilst the newts and blind worms wriggled off from the unwelcome light, the Foundation of God, that memorial column inscribed with man’s duty and his Maker’s will, stood forth to view, and beholders were astonished at its majesty. The Sermon on the Mount was (so to speak) a sequel and a supplement to Sinai; but, as befitted the dawn of a more spiritual era, there was no cloud nor voice of trumpet to stun the soul and overwhelm the sense; but it was the simple force of truth, the tremendous power of heart- searching words, — words penetrating as Omniscience, and weighty as unchanging righteousness. Then, as in many others of His sermons, the Lord Jesus expounded the Decalogue. From its negative He printed off the positive, and showed how beautiful is the resultant holiness, how blessed is the soul thus brought to harmony with God; and by something more divine than any rhetoric, by the authority with which He spake, and by His own sublime separateness from sin. He awakened in His hearers at once a wonder and a wistfulness: “N’ever man spake as this man. Oh that I were like Him!”

More especially did the Lord Jesus fill out the law, and bring its sayings into relief, by laying stress on its pervading principle. Of that law the epitome and essence is, “Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy soul, and thy neighbour as thyself” As we saw a little while ago, in thus grasping the springs of action, in claiming dominion over the thoughts and intents of the heart, this code differs from all human legislations, and, we may add, from all human religions; but it differs still more gloriously in the same direction in this master-principle, in thus dictating holy love as the mainspring of all goodness, the one sufficient but essential motive of all duty to God and those around. This epitome was not unknown to Israel. It occurs repeatedly in the Pentateuch, and it was recited by the young ruler in his interview with Christ. But the Lord Jesus continually returned to it. It was the motive with Himself, and He delighted to dwell on it. In morals and religion love is the supreme philosophy. “If men loved God supremely, there would be no idolatry upon earth, nor any of its attendant abominations; no profaning of the name of God, nor making a gain of godliness; no perjuries nor hypocrisies, no pride nor self-complacency under the smiles of Providence; no murmuring, sullenness, nor suicide under its frowns. Love would render it men’s meat and drink to obey God, and it would take everything well at His hands. And if they loved their fellow-creatures as themselves, there would be no wars between nations; no strifes between neighbours; no intolerance nor persecuting bitterness in religion; no deceit nor overreaching in trade: there would be no murders, thefts, nor robberies; no cruelty in parents or masters; no ingratitude nor disobedience in children or servants; no unkindness nor treachery between friends; no jealousies nor bitter contentions in families; in short, none of those streams of death, one or more of which flow through every vein of society, and poison its enjoyments.”’^

But the Lord Jesus was not content with ex-

1 See Andrew Fuller’s Gosjoel its own Witness, ch. iii.

pounding the law of God: He exemplified His own exposition. All that the law required He did; all that enters into our idea of perfect goodness He was. If love be the fulfilling of the laAV, love was but another name for Jesus Christ. And so, confronting the precept in all its breadth, fathoming it in all its depth, He met it with a corresponding compliance — an obedience in which nothing was exaggerated, nothing was omitted. Going up to the adamantine gate with its lock of the tenfold ward, it opened to the word “Fulfilment,” and entering in, the Fulfiller of all Eichteousness walked with God — in that presence where there is fulness of joy, and in the enjoyment of that ineffable complacency wherewith the Father regarded that well-beloved Son who always did the things that pleased Him.

Viewed as a covenant — as the condition of life everlasting — the Lord Jesus has fulfilled the law. To all its requirements, on behalf of His people He has presented an obedience spotless as His own perfection and as magnifying to that law as may be imagined from His own intrinsic glory. “Your work He hath done, your debt He hath paid,” and in quitting the scene of His sojourn He hath left an open door through which the weakest and least worthy may enter in, and through the merits of the great Forerunner find acceptance and the smile of God.

Christ has done more. To Israel rescued from Egypt the Decalogue was not merely a code of laws or rule of conduct, but it formed the basis or condition of a national covenant. On the side of Israel that covenant was perpetually broken and its conditions never were fulfilled; but looking forward to a happier time, by the mouth of Jeremiah Jehovah promised, “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; (which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord;) but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.”^

These days have come. The first of them was Pentecost. Ten days after Christ’s return to heaven — remarkably enough, it was the anniversary of Sinai, the day when the law was given, the fiftieth day after the Feast of Passover: but instead of thunder and the voice of a trumpet there was a noise as of a rushing mighty wind, and instead

1 Jer. xxxi. 31-33.

of forked lightnings on the distant mountain-top, on the heads of every one of them were flaming mitres, — tongues of bright but unconsuming fire. It was no second giving of the law; it was the inauguration of the gospel. There were no stone tables in their hands, but heaven was in their hearts, for the Holy Spirit was there. Effectually set free from the old legal spirit, they were full of the mind that was in Christ, and so full of might and power on behalf of Jesus; and they not only spake with tongues as the Holy Spirit gave them utterance, but began to lead such lives and entered on such a career as the world could little have expected from the men of Galilee.

And, brethren, this is our dispensation. The Holy Spirit has been given. ISTot as in the manifestations which made Pentecost so marvellous, but in mild, assuring, strengthening power, God’s Spirit will be with you if you ask His aid. He will awaken in you a hunger after righteousness, — a hunger which in the Father’s house shall be abundantly filled. He will teach you to know the Lord, so that you shall not need to ask your neighbour. He will show you God’s covenant — that new and better one of which the terms have been fulfilled by the Divine Surety, so that you have only to take the benefit. And freeing you from the law’s condemning, threatening power, He will write it in your heart, endearing it as the rule of your own conduct and the revelation of God’s righteousness.

Nor will you like this law the less because its opening sentence is the gospel: “I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have no other gods before me.” ‘Thou shalt have no god but me.’ Addressing every sinful child of Adam, the Possessor of heaven and earth says, ‘For thy own God take me.’ Now that in the person of Jesus his Son, now that in the person of Him who says, “I am Jesus your Brother,” God has drawn near to our guilty family; His overture to each is, “I am the Lord thy God,” and the right reciprocation is, “My Lord and my God.” “0 my soul, thou hast said unto Jehovah, Thou art my Lord.” Is it not wonderful? Is not this to “bow the heavens and come down”? Is not this a condescension truly divine, that addressing dust and ashes the Eternal should say — that addressing a weak empty worm the All-sufficient should say — that addressing sin and impurity Infinite Holiness should say, “I am thy God “? But He says it. To put an end to all cavil He puts the gospel into the form of a precept, and from the top of Sinai and in the forefront of the Decalogue He preaches that gospel, and to every hearer says — what is the end and essence of the gospel, — “For thy own God take me.” Some think it presumption to appropriate a gift unspeakable or to accept too kind an invitation; but surely it is no presumption to obey a precept — it is great presumption to refuse compliance with God’s command. And God commands you to be happy. He commands you to be saved. He commands you, as your very first act of obedience, to become His subject and His son. Will you not reply, “0 Lord, thoLi art my God. Other gods have had dominion over me; but now their bands are loosed, and I am thy servant. Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee, My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.”