The Place of the Law in the Salvation of Sinners
“For I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came sin revived, and I died.” — Rom. vii. 9,
A FEEE salvation has been provided: the world’s chief need now is a sense of sin. It is not food that is awanting, but hunger. There is healing balm at hand; but where are the broken hearts? The work of Christ is complete; we need to-day the Spirit’s ministry. If we were brought down, the end were already sure, for God is pledged to exalt the lowly. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom.”
Christ is preached in our land, in our day. Pardon through his blood is published free to all. His name has become a common sound on earth, even as it is in heaven. But privilege neglected does not save. It is mercy accepted that lifts a sinner up to heaven; mercy oiTered becomes a makeweight in the doom of the lost. It is not Christ in the Bible, Christ in the creed, Christ in the sermon; but “Christ in you the hope of glory,” It is not. Blessed are they who have bread, like manna from heaven, lying round their dwellings or trampled under their feet; but. Blessed are they that hunger. The rich provision of the covenant is set forth in vain to guests who are already satiated with a different and more congenial aliment.
The text does not directly publish the fulness of a Saviour; but it lays open the emptiness of a sinner. It is not the first and great commandment of the gospel, Look up unto Jesus; but it is the second which is like unto it, Look down into yourself These two exercises go together, and constitute the two sides of the spiritual life. The one we ought to do; but the other we ought not to leave undone.
In this chapter we have a brief, but exquisitely graphic specimen of autobiography. It is the history of a holy war, in which the writer was at once the battle-field and the combatant. It is a chart drawn by inspiration, of the pilgrims’ route from the City of Destruction to the gate of the New Jerusalem. Here the man himself, guided by the Spirit, tells the story of his course — his starting point under the wrath of God due to sin, his hard warfare by the way, and his glorious victory at last. In one short verse you have a bird’s eye view of the whole campaign. In these few lines you may trace a sinner’s footsteps on the passage over from death unto life.
The text contains explicitly or implicitly these three things: —
1. A life which a man has in himself, and of himself.
2. The passage out of that life by a dying.
3. The new life into which that dying brings him.
1. The life which Paul at first possessed of his own: “I was alive without the law once,” m THE SALVATION OF SINNERS. 7l
2. The process of ejectment from that life:” The commandment came, sin revived, and I died.’’
3. Another life which he then attained; for he does not say, I am dead; but, I died. The death is a thing past, and he utters this testimony from the land of the living.
In the books of Moses you may find in very large letters the same three things which this short text contains. The things that happened to the Hebrews happened to them for ensamples. God in providence arranged occurring events then in such a manner as to constitute types, whereby we in this latter day might print our own spii’itual history.
1. In Egypt Israel were slaves, and yet they were satisfied with the carnal comforts that were agoing there, and listless about the liberty to which their great leader beckoned them: this is like Paul’s first life, with which he was quite satisfied, “I was alive,” &c,
2. The exodus, comprehending the Red Sea at its commencement, the perils of the wilderness during its course, and the passage of Jordan at its close, correspond to Paul’s escape, “The commandment came,” &c.
3. The promised land, with its plenty, and liberty, and worship, into which Israel entered at a bound as they emerged from Jordan, corresponds to Paul’s new life in the kingdom of God.
I. A life which a man enjoys in and of himself before he knows God: “I was alive without the law once.”
This is the natural state of the fallen. It is here called life, and elsewhere it is called death. The wide diversity of the names employed to designate the same thing need not cause surprise. The one term expresses the true state of the man, and the other term expresses the man’s own view of his state. Iq God’s sight it is death: in his own imagination it is life. Paul is here giving the view which he took of his unconverted state, when he was in it. I was alive, I lived once. Ask the converted Paul what he now thinks of his former condition; he will answer, I was dead in trespasses and sins. Here he is describing his own former estimate of his own former state. He thought his life was good, and counted therefore on God’s approval.
But how could he so far deceive himself? Sins of thought, word, and deed, enough to condemn him, he might have seen daily in his own life. How could he be so blind as to count himself just with God, while he was running counter to the law with all his might? The explanation is given here. He was alive “without the law.” He could not have lived with it. He maintained a good opinion of himself, by keeping God’s law away from his conscience. The craft by which a hypocrite lives is to keep the law in its spirit from reaching his heart. If the light of God’s countenance should at any time find an entrance into his soul, it would be a spark on the train of his confidence.
Why have we so much peace on earth where there is so much unpardoned sin — so many unrenewed hearts? How can men move about happy and mirthful with the wrath of God treasured over them? How can immortal creatures dance and laugh on the brink of perdition? They live as Saul of Tarsus lived, without God’s law. They either keep it altogether at a distance, or admit it adulterated and disguised. We hear of daring speculators cooking the accounts of mercantile companies, in order to stave off the evil day. Bolder cheats modify the law of God, ere they admit it into their consciences, that its incoming may not disturb their repose. Instead of going to God’s word for the law, they go first into their own hearts and take the measure of their own tastes; on that mould they frame a law, and call it God’s. If there is a malformation in some member of your body, and an order is given for an instrument or type to reduce its irregularities, and bring it back to a normal condition, you dread the pain of the anticipated operation. Dreading the pain, you secretly take a cast of your own crooked limb, and thereon mould the instrument. When the instrument so prepared is with due formality afterwards laid upon the limb, although the mould is made of iron and pressed fully home, it will not hurt the patient. His limb will feel easy, but it will not be made straight. Thus men go to their own hearts, and cast thereon their conception of the divine law, and, for form’s sake, ostentatiously apply the thing that is labelled God’s word to their own hearts again, but the application never makes them cry. The flesh is not crucified. The high things of an evil heart are not brought low; its crooked parts are not made straight. The process is pleasant, and it serves the deceiver for a religion. It is a prophet according to
Ahab’s own heart; it never prophesies evil concerning him, but only good. The old man is not killed by the law of God as it comes from heaven, but soothed by a forged instrument which falsely bears its name.
Thus, when we frame a rule on the model of our own attainments, and then by sleight of hand pass it off as the law of God, its application cuts off no right arm, and plucks out no right eye, — crucifies no lust, and disappoints no carnal expectation. After the visit of such a law the Pharisee is left standing still on his feet, lifting up his eye unabashed to heaven, and impudently magnifying his own righteousness.
The system on which the legalist proceeds is to expect that the Judge will overlook failings, and take the good will for the deed. When you stand on this principle, no conceivable amount of shortcoming will damp your hope. The more indulgence you need, the more you demand. As you advance with your encroachments, this shadow whom you call God’s law retires and gives you room. The law which would be your death is kept out of the way, and therefore you contrive to live.
II. The exodus from that Egypt; the escape from that false life by a dying:” The commandment came, sin revived, and I died.’’
1. “The commandment came.” It is no longer an imitation law, modelled on the measure of his own attainments, which might be pressed upon his conscience, and yet not extinguish his self-righteous life. It is now The Commandment. It is the unchanging will of the unchanging God — the word which liveth and abideth for ever. It is a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces. This law comes, not taking the shape which a man’s guilty heart desires to give it, but keeping faithfully every line of righteousness that it got at first from God. When the law comes to the man, its Author comes with it, and the culprit dare not put forth his hand to blunt its awful edge. It comes unbidden, and no tears can make it turn away. Convincing light goes before it, and vengeance follows at its back. It comes proclaiming its uniform demand: “Be ye holy, for I m holy;’’ uttering its irrevocable sentence: “The soul that sinneth it shall die.”
This new-comer is felt an intruder within the conscience, and an authority over it. Hitherto the man, in all his active and well-favoured religiousness, had merely played at law and gospel, justice and mercy. He taught a shadowy image, called law, to go through certain solemn evolutions in his presence; but it came and went at his nod, and although it stalked about with much pomp and circumstance, he feared not the phantom which himself had conjured up. He had procured a painted fire, which maintained the appearance of heat, and yet did not burn him when he laid it in his bosom. But now the image had started into life in his hands; the picture had, by the breath of the Spirit, been kindled into a real flame. The law became within him, like the face of God, a consuming fire. It came, working its way into all the interstices of his heart and his history; it came, elastic and pliant like the air of heaven, pouring itself into every crevice, and folding his whole soul in one dread embrace. This commandment came into the man, and found him “enmity against God,”
2. “Sin revived” at the entrance of this visitant. He speaks still of his state as it appeared to his own consciousness during the process, not as it truly was in the sight of God. It was not by the coming of the commandment that sin was brought to life within him. Before that time sin lived, sin reigned, in his members; but then and thereby he first felt sin, like a serpent creeping about his heart, and loath.ed its presence.
Hitherto sin had been wasting him, but he knew it not- The disease was undermining his life, without giving him pain. The evil spirit met no opposition, and therefore produced no disturbance. The commandment coming in did not cause, but only detected sin. “I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.” With great precision and transparency the apostle here defines his own meaning. In the general, he would not have known sin if the law had not revealed it; in particular, and as an example, he would not have known sinful desires if the tenth commandment had not forbidden them. He does not say, “I had not sinned but for the law.” He was sinning before the law in its power came in contact with his conscience; but he thought, meantime, that all his life was righteousness. It was by the light of the commandment, when it came, that he discovered the sin which had all along been living and reigning in his heart and life.
The course of his life was like a river flowing through a level plain, slowly but steadily, toward the sea. So smooth is its surface, that a traveller approaching could not tell in what direction it is flowing, or whether it is flowing at all. A rock at mid-channel, protruding above the surface, reveals the current by opposing it. An obstruction makes known both the direction and the velocity of the river’s flow. But the rock that detects the movement did not produce it. Such is the relation between sin in the soul and the law which reveals it. Life is rolling downward like a river, — one great volume of enmity against God. Because all is sin, the self-deceived man does not notice that there is any. When the law of God gets a footing within, a commotion round the point of contact suddenly makes it known that hitherto the whole life has been” without God in the world.’’
Further: as the rock in the river’s bed did not cause, neither is it able to reverse the current. It can only show that there is a stream, giving some indication of its direction and its speed. Although impeded and chafed into foam at the spot, the river rises to the difficulty, and rushes down more rapidly than before. It is thus with the commmandment when it opposes sin in a human heart. If it remain alone, although it has power to disturb, it has not power to renew. “The king’s heart is as a river of water,” and it cannot be turned to holiness by the law which proclaims its sin. What the law could not do, God did by another agent, on another plan.
The diflerence between a man who is “without the law,” and a man into whose conscience “the commandment has come,” is not that the one continues sinning and the other has ceased to sin. The distinction rather is, that the one tastes the pleasures of sin, such as they are, while the other writhes at its bitterness. In the one the stream of evil flows smoothly; in the other it is disturbed by alarming convictions. In both the fountain remains the same, only evil, and that continually. The law, where it comes in power, may mar the smoothness of the river’s flow; but can neither change its course nor seal its spring.
Observe here, in passing, that the coming of the commandment for the conviction of sin is not necessarily the work of a day or an hour. In Paul’s case, indeed, the process was very short. During that journey to Damascus, it seems to have begun and ended. But in most cases, especially where the bulk of the people have been accustomed from infancy to the reading of the Bible and the preaching of Christ, the law enters the conscience, as a besieging army wins a fortress, by slow and gradual approaches. Sometimes the will, strong in its innate and habitual ungodliness, drives back the law; at other times the law, imder cover, perhaps, of some providential chastening, renews the assault, and gains a firmer footing further in. The conflict and the conquest may be the work of years — the work of a life-time; but whether by many successive stages, or by one overwhelming onset, the issue, if the work of grace go on, is, as it is recorded here, “Sin revived, and” —
3. “I died.” The life in which he had hitherto trusted was extinguished then. Convictions rose and closed round like the waves of a flowing tide, until they covered and quenched his vain hope. Bit by bit his standing-room of self-righteousness was taken away. Departments of his heart and his history, which till now he had thought good against the final judgment, were successively flooded by the advancing, avenging law. This good intention and that charitable deed — a righteous transaction there, and an exercise of repentance here — prayers, penances, and a long catalogue of miscellaneous virtues, floating down the stream of daily life, had coalesced and consolidated, as wood, hay, stubble, stones, mud, carried down by a river sometimes aggregate into an island in the estuary. The heap seemed to afford a firm footing for the fugitive in any emergence.
Upon this heap “the commandment came.’’ It came from God. It came with divine authority. It came with resistless power. It entered into his heart, and flowed over his whole life-course. It rose like the tide over the pieces of merit on which the man had taken his stand, and blotted them out. One by one they disappeared. He saw with dismay the whole region of honesty, and diligence, and almsgiving, and devotion, marked as sin, and given over to wrath. The law has come and covered them. Where they lay nothing now remains but a fearful looking for of judgment.
But still the commandment comes. The convict, trembling now for his life, abandons all that seems doubtful, and hastily gathering some of the very best and surest parts of his righteousness, piles them beneath his feet. He will no longer give himself out as a saint; he even owns that he is a sinner. He claims only to have sinned less than some whom he knows, and to have done some good things which might at least palliate the evil. The law pays no respect to this refuge of lies, and shows no pity to the fugitive. Still it comes. One great wave — “thou shalt love the Lord thy God” — dashes on, and washes down at a stroke the whole pile on which the hope of the hypocrite was built. Not a fragment of its foundation can now be seen, and the avenging law tumultuates triumphant over the place where once it stood. “With all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind;” thus wave follows wave, until the law of God has covered all the righteousness of men, and left it lying deep in everlasting contempt.
This death of false hope is, as its name indicates, like the departure of the spirit from its house of clay. Disease having gained a footing in the frame, makes its approaches, more slowly or more rapidly, and closes upon the man. Within a narrower and narrower circuit the encroaching enemy confines the life. Member after member is overtaken and paralyzed. The soul, pressed by a greater power, abandons one by one the less defensible extremities, and seeks refuge in its own interior fastnesses. Still the adversary, holding every point that he has gained, presses on for more. To one remaining foothold the distressed occupant clings a while; but that refuge, too, the inexorable besieger takes at last. Chased by the strange usurper from every part of its long — cherished home, the life flickers over it a moment, like the flame of an expiring lamp, and then darts away into the unseen.
So perished the hope of the self-righteous man. He died. What, then? Then-Ill. He lives in another life. No interval of time separated the two. The death that led from one life was the birth into another.
We do not read “I am dead,” as the testimony of this man, at the turning-point of his spiritual history. “I died.’’ Listen; it is the voice, not of the dead, but of the living. No articulate sound issues from a grave. The dead never tell us how they died. Here the possessor of the new life informs us how he was driven from the old. Israel, God’s dear child, settled now in the promised land, weaves the events of his strange history into a song of praise. The exodus from Egypt, and the passage of the Jordan, with all that filled the interval, seem but one step now, and that the step of the ransomed heir from the house of bondage into his eternal home. On this side, too, the death through which Paul passed at conversion, is like that death which lays a Christian’s weary body in the grave to rest, and admits his spirit into the presence of the Lord. “He that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” When the body’s strength is waning, and the emaciated members can no longer obey the will; when the breath is panting quickly, and the blood is flowing feebly, and the soul is hovering on the outmost verge of life, — another life, conterminous with this one along all its border, is ready to receive the exile. Eternity marches everywhere with time, as the sea marches with the land. There is no intervening space. The step that takes you out of one takes you into the other. As we, on this side, wait to receive the infant at its birth, and shout for joy when a man child is born into our world, — sons of God, on the other side, near us, though unseen, will learn to observe that shaking of the dividing veil which is caused by the dying struggle of a saint, counting and calling it the symptom of a birth, and welcoming the newborn into their brighter world. While we are weeping over the dead, they, not a step distant, are rejoicing over the living. The exodus is a death or a birth, according to the side from which it is seen.
Such, also, is the death through which Paul passed at the stage of his spiritual experience which is described in the text. The fact, like the person, has two sides. If you stand on this side and look, he dies; if you stand on that side and look, he is born. It is one act. The dying is the living. The exodus from this life is the entrance into that. He does not remain one moment dead. The instant after his death, you hear him exclaiming, “I died.” His own voice declaring how and when he died, is the surest evidence that he lives.
Throughout the whole of his previous history, Paul had stood on the ground, and breathed the atmosphere of his own merits. Probably, like other people, he was obliged frequently to remove from place to place in that •egion. Now his hope depended more on one good deed, and now more on another. Sometimes his conscience grew uneasy, and compelled him to shift his ground; but as long as his first life lasted, every change was a change from one thing in himself to another thing in himself Even the law, when it began to track his path, and confine his range, could not, with all its terrors, drive him wholly forth of his own righteousness. It hunted him up and down, and made him miserable in that region; but still that region was all the world to him; he would not, could not leave it.
What the law could not do, God did by sending his Son. Christ came near the tempted, tormented man, — came near, as the Lord our righteousness. Christ brought his own righteousness, divine and infinite, into contact with Paul and Paul’s wretched righteousness. Christ came, and called, pleaded, wept, “Come unto me, and I will give you rest.” Now, the law chasing him once more, chased him over. Out of his own merits went the man that moment, and into Christ. Then he died; and from the moment of his death he lived. Henceforth you find him continually telling of his life, what it is, and where he found it, “Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me;” “Our life is hid with Christ in God.”
The man whose footsteps are marked here was one of the Good Shepherd’s flock. We must follow this track, if we would enter the fold. In the suddenness of the passage our experience may be different; but in the way by which he went, our experience must be the same.
This is the way, — the way of life: I am leaning on my own merits in prospect of the judgment. The law, revealing glimpses alternately of God’s justice and of my sin, drives me hither and thither within this region, seeking peace and finding none. When I am at the point of despair, beginning to perceive that my own righteousness, instead of saving, will justly condemn me, yet desperately clinging to it, because I know no other, then Christ comes near. There is no terror in his look. I see his compassion flowing. He bids me abandon my own righteousness, and put on his. Drawn on this side by Christ’s love, and driven on the other side by the law’s terror, I at last let all my fastenings go, and cast myself into the Saviour’s outstretched arms. I leap from my own righteousness into Christ’s. I pass from death unto life. “There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”
Let the line be distinctly marked between what the law can, and what it cannot do. It may turn your root into rottenness, but it cannot cause a living tree to spring from the dust of the dead one. It may shake, until it shake down all the foundations of a man’s first hope, but it cannot bear away the stricken victim from the ruins. It can make the unforgiven sinner more miserable, but it cannot make him more safe. It is only when Christ comes near with a better righteousness, that even the commandment, raging in the conscience, can drive you from your own. All Pharaoh’s armies closing round could not have driven the helpless Hebrews forth from the confines of Egypt, if the Red Sea had not opened and offered them a passage through. We owe much to a terrible law for not permitting us to rest under the wrath to come; but more to a winning Saviour for being our refuge and drawing us in. We owe much to thai flaming justice which made the old life die, but more to that love which received the dying as he fell into life eternal.
I desire to make it plain to your understanding, and leave it deeply imprinted on your hearts, that though the law, like flaming fire and stormy winds, becomes God’s messenger to run his errands of mercy, yet the saved owe their salvation all to Christ.
I awake from a swoon, alone. The fathomless sea is beneath me, the fathomless sky above me., and I am clinging convulsively to some broken bits of wood. The burning, sinking ship — the shrieking, drowning crowd, — I can scarcely be said to remember: a dim, faintly-outlined image of them hovers like mist about my troubled brain. The sky grows dark, the wind grows stormy, the waves leap higher, the little raft is rending; I am sink — sinking in the sea alone. Will these terrors drive me from my frail resting-place? In these extremities will I let my failing foothold go? Yes, if I see the life-b oat bearing down upon me, and feel a line thrown from her bows falling athwart my body, and hear a brother’s shout above the storm, “Hold fast by this and you are safe!” The storm above, the waves around, the rending beneafch me, will not drive me off* my bits of broken wood, unless the life-boat is by my side. Although I know my standing to be unsafe, although I feel it going asunder, I will cling to it and perish with it, if nothing better is within my reach.
If I am saved to-day, I owe much to the law which taught me that I was lost, but more to Christ who became my Saviour.