Delight in the Law of God

“I delight in the law of God.” — ROMANS vii. 23.

IF we know what a man delights in, we know what sort of a man he is. “Where do you find your greatest pleasure?” is certainly one of the most searching test-questions by which men may try their own or their friends’ lives. Our circumstances tie us down to the things we have to do; but when our circumstances let us up and we are free, what do we fly to with delight? One to the pleasures of the senses, — the appetites and the lusts; another to the social joys; another to the charm of books; another to the glory of nature; another into the struggle for influence and fame. How they scatter as soon as they are free! It is as if you opened the doors of a great menagerie, and all the beasts that had lived monotonously there together felt their primal instincts once more, and the lion sprang with a glad roar toward the forest, and the eagle swept upward toward the sun, and the snake shot out of sight into the grass of the thicket. In all the confusion that pervades this world and perplexes us about the characters of the men that we know the best, would there not be a clearing-off of every doubt and mystery if every man for one appointed hour should do the thing in which he most delighted? It would be an hour of strange revelations, but when it was over it would be like the morning after the Judgment Day. We should know ourselves and one another.

St. Paul gives us his statement here. He tells us what he delights in, and it is so remarkable, it is so different from what delights most men, that we may well give it our study. It is the story of the new life which he was always talking of, the beginning of which was his most precious memory, and to grow in which was his supreme desire.

“I delight in the Law of God,” he said. What is the Law of God? As we live in the world we look around us and see a multitude of operations going on. How manifold they are! How confused and intricate they seem to us at first! The stars, the plants, the waves, the men, the nations — all moving back and forth on one another; everything restless, nothing still. Now, to a low order of intelligence there is sufficient pleasure in the mere confused movement of this mass of life. A low, dull-minded man is satisfied with the mere variety and vitality of the moving universe, as a child will look out of a window for hours and be amused enough with the change and liveliness of the scene before him, and never ask whither the procession that he sees is moving. But as a man improves, this mere unreasoning sight is not enough. He must look deeper. The confused variety, the ever-shuffling movement, cease to give him pleasure, and only tantalize and provoke him unless his eye can fasten on some law or principle which, if it does not tell him by what force, at least can tell him by what method, the perpetual movement is maintained. He must find a uniformity in the circling of the stars and the growing of the plants, and the coming and going of the tides; and when he has found it, when, through the clash and murmur of mere noise, beats out at last, first indistinctly and then clearer and more clear, the rhythm of harmonious order, — then he has come to a new kind of pleasure: he delights in a law.

Much harder in some respects, and yet much easier in others, is the effort to which the man is driven to discover a law in human action. The simplest instincts suggest it, and yet the most acute analysis cannot wholly trace it. But in human action man can least rest without a law. His own heart will not let him believe that, however it may be with the trees and stars, the actions of mankind are things of chance, capable of being submitted to and governed by no principle; and so he does discover various laws under which men act, and at last down deep under them all he discovers the fundamental law of conscience, the law of right and wrong, and sees that, however other influences have come and gone, have crossed it and recrossed it and mixed themselves up with it, still, always recognizable, there has always been, underneath everything, the principle of righteousness — something which proclaimed that certain deeds were right and must be done, and that certain other deeds were wrong and men must not do them.

Now, when a man discovers this, and begins to test the world by it, he has entered into a new capacity for pleasure. Deeds which before gave him delight only because they stirred his blood and touched his taste, now fall with quiet and profound satisfaction upon his sense of righteousness. “It is right” he says of some event of which the world is talking; and above any half-sensuous joy that comes from its picturesqueness or its bravery, that righteousness of it, that harmony with the sense of rightness that is lying in his soul, gives him a profound and peaceful satisfaction. He delights in the law of righteousness.

We pause here for a moment just to say how pitiable the man’s life has been who has never known what this satisfaction is. As indescribable as the color of a rose to a blind man or the sound of a trumpet to the deaf, is the joy of righteousness to a man with no moral sense. “The thing is right,” — to say that unqualifiedly of anything, to feel the deed you see fit itself into the conception of goodness that is in your soul, so that the two claim one another like the embrace of mother and daughter, like the mutual recognition of seed and ground, — that is a joy, pure, deep, and indescribable to any one who has not felt it. I hardly dare believe that there is any man who never felt it; but just as to some men the sight of the stars is a rare luxury while other men study them night after night, just as some of us go once in our life and look at the great pictures while other men almost live in their sacred presence, so this delight in the law of righteousness, which is a sensation once or twice in a lifetime to many, is a continual passion to some men. They could not live without it.

But how cold it is — how abstract — this simple adoration of a law! By-and-by the man’s soul must have something else! Who made this law? Whence comes this beautiful, imperious standard of righteousness? And then (we need not try now to tell how), by various revelations comes out into sight as the background and source of everything, the dear, vast personality of God. How solemn and sublime it is! “He ‘made us,” — man has never done more than floated on the surface of that thought. “He made us! And all that we are, all that is in us, came out from Him. And if there is a principle of righteousness in us that makes us test and judge things morally and say that they are right or wrong, He put it there. And if He put it there, it was Himself He put there. This law of right and wrong is but the projection of His nature, the inspiration of His being. When I say that a thing is right, I mean that it meets and finds and harmonizes with Him. I, the child, have this of my Father in me His standard and pattern of righteousness. And when my brother here by my side resists a temptation, when he flings back a bribe, when he drags a wrecked life to the shore and saves it, I know at once that between that deed and the purity and love of God there is a bright, true harmony; it is an act that God would smile on, — nay, it is an act that God might do.

And now, this God, who is He? My Maker! My Father! My everything! This beautiful world, He made it! This deliciousness of life, He gave it! I put out my hands and they come back to me loaded with His ever-falling mercies! I walk my daily path and my feet are set upon His thick-sown benefits. Ever since I was born He has been showing me how He loves me, and tempting back my love to Him. And now, if I find that this law of righteousness is His law; if, instead of tracing everywhere the beautiful persistency of an abstract principle, I see everywhere Him, my Friend and Father, working on men’s natures with an influence which I have felt impressing itself on me, what then? There is nothing cold or abstract any longer. Every triumph of righteousness is an assertion of my Father’s nature. Every sign of the law’s working is a signal of His presence. It is not “it” any longer. It is “He.” I delight not merely in the law of righteousness, but I delight in the Law of God.

I do not know whether there is anything here that seems to you strange or obscure. It has seemed strange to some men. But surely it is very simple. If I live in and love the Fatherhood of God, then every desire of mine that righteousness should be done is warmed and fired with all the intensity of my filial love to Him. It is just such a feeling as might be in the mind of a loving son of a great prince or governor. He would see the absolute righteousness of the commandments that his father gave, and for their own sakes he would desire that they should be obeyed. Having his father’s nature, he would see just as his father saw when he made the law — that it was good and just in itself; but this would not conflict with a profound enthusiasm for it because it was his father’s. All his filial love would fire his devotion to it. If he went out to fight in order to sustain it, there would be no separation of the motives that moved his arm as he struck one single blow for the abstract right and for his father’s honor. It is his perception of the law’s justice, made warm and tender with his love for his father, that fills his heart as he delights in his father’s law.

Now, with all our unfilialness, let us lift up our hearts and imagine ourselves for a moment the perfectly filial children of our Heavenly Father. Let us forget the sins of yesterday, the ingratitudes and forgetfulnesses which to-day have stained our love. Let us imagine ourselves all that God’s children might be, and then let there come to us, as we stand with quick, attentive ears, the story of how all over the world there is a Law of God at work. It rustles right by my feet at first. Some child I know is tempted to steal or cheat, and does not do it because God has forbidden it. Some man, burning with lust, is held back from his sin because he knows that it is wrong. And then more faintly I hear the same tidings come from a great distance. Some hero in China has laid his life down in self-sacrifice. Some good deed in the Sandwich Islands bears witness that there are souls there struggling for the right. And then sounds come out of the past. Some martyr in the sixteenth century went to the stake rather than deny his Lord. Some old-time Greek would not betray his friend, and so he gladly died. What is the sum of all these tales of goodness, these testimonies of righteousness from all the ages and from all the world? Children of God, what do they bring to us? At once a joy in righteousness and a joy in our Father. A delight in the Law of God. There is no conflict, no jealousy. God is the Law, the Law is God. And added to the deep, pure sense of satisfaction that I spoke of, that rises cool and sweet from the perfect fitting of the action to our sense of right, all mingled with it and setting it into a glow, there is a happiness in the new exhibition and the extended sway of Him whose glory and power are our light and life — our Father, God. In its broadest way this is, I think, the soul’s delighting in the Law of God. It is a noble life. This, I think, is what Paul meant. But now we must turn for a moment and remember that, while Paul meant this, he meant this in a more special form than that in which I have stated it. Paul taught a theology; we must not forget that. We dishonor and misunderstand him if we make his theology, as it has been so often made, so special and narrow that it does not coincide with and explain the problems and questions of ordinary, universal life. But while we must always shrink from turning him into a mere local Jewish teacher, we must get at his full meaning always by putting ourselves as far as possible into his place and time and way of thinking. Now, when Paul speaks of the Law of God, he is thinking especially of the Law of the Old Testament, by which his people had been trained for the coming of

Christ. He is thinking of the Bible history of the moral experiment of humanity. He is thinking of the Bible as the Book of this universal law of which we have been speaking. That is the Law of God which he delights in. And so we may apply what we have been saying not merely to the universal law of God which is written everywhere and made known to us in many ways, but to that special revelation of the Divine Will which is given to us in the Bible. Surely, if there is in us such a soul as longs every where to discover the intentions and purposes of God in this perplexed world where we live, the very idea of a written Law of God — a Book which shall so utter Him that any man studying it shall know what. He desires, and find His commandments written plain and clear — must be the most welcome blessing that it can dream of. And that is just what the Bible is — a Law of God, an utterance of a regulative word. That is the side on which it approaches us. That is the claim with which it comes to us. It is not a mere satisfactory account of the universe, appealing to our intelligence; it is not a poem of beautiful life, appealing to our imagination; but it is a law appealing to our conscience, and just in proportion as men read the Bible with their consciences does it satisfy them and send them away saying, “I delight in the Law of God.”

I am glad to say this because it seems to me that very often nowadays men and women (we here, perhaps) are not getting the comfort and pleasure which we ought to out of our Bibles, because we do not go to them with the right idea. We miss, it may be, in ourselves that eagerness and joy with which we know that other Christians have turned to the Bible constantly and lingered over its pages. We read it, and it interests us; but it may well be that there are some of the young people whom I speak to, who have often reproached themselves that they could not feel that intimate and dear affection for the Bible, as the friend of their souls, the treasure of their lives, which they have heard older people tell about. It is not good that it should be so. It is a sad loss to the life not to love the Bible. Of course there may be other reasons, but may not one reason be that, in the midst of all the discussions and discoveries about the Bible in our time, the primary purpose of the Bible has been too much dimmed, too often lost? The histories of the Bible have been analyzed. Its poetry has been magnified. It has come to be treated in many circles as a literary work, and so we do not easily regard it as our fathers did, as a Book purely for regulation. It has been so much a Book for criticism that we do not easily make it the Book of Life. What many of us want, I am sure, is to get back to the very simplest thought of the Bible. It has all one plain, direct intent. There is nothing told us in it to satisfy our curiosity or to gratify our taste; nothing that has not the one great purpose — to regulate our lives. God is shown to us in it, not in His absoluteness as the Lord of Heaven, but in His relations to us, as our Maker, Master, Father. It is a Law of God, and will open its heart and beauty only to those who come to it as a law, with hearts asking for commandment and promising obedience. Certainly if we could go to our Bible thus, if to-night when we open its pages it could be with hearts feeling their failures in governing themselves and longing to have God govern them, anxiously asking Him, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” the Bible would speak to us as it does not speak now; and, entering into its new mastery, finding it really the lord and ruler of our life, we should learn to love it as we learned to depend upon it, and it would no longer seem strange or extravagant for us to say: “I love my Bible “; “I delight in the Law of God.”

I think, then, that, both with reference to the universal law of righteousness and also with reference to the special revelation of the Bible, we have seen that a delight in the Law of God means simply this — a love for God and a profound and peaceful satisfaction that One whom we love and trust entirely is ruling us and everything about us. It is as simple as that. Look at the life of Jesus — was there ever a Being who so delighted in the Law of God as He did? It was His meat and drink to do His Father’s Will; and that calm face, unmoved among the tumult and the roar, kept its perfect calmness because in, under, through it all, He knew that God was fulfilling His purposes, manifesting Himself. That satisfied Him entirely. “Ye could do nothing against me unless it were given you from above,” He said to His persecutors, and so He let His persecutors do their worst. “Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight” — that was the end of everything for Him. He knew what God’s Law was. A portion of the Deity Himself, He had felt it control the throbbing pulses of the universe, and had seen the bright, endless ranks of Cherubim and Seraphim bow before it, and uncounted hosts of angels fly to do its bidding. And now, a man, weary and dusty and bewildered, it seemed glorious and sweet that His life as He toiled back and forth between Jerusalem and Galilee, up the steep hill at Nazareth, and at last out of the gate to Calvary, was all held and sustained and regulated by that eternal, supreme Law. It rested Him and strengthened Him. He delighted in the Law of God.

Sometimes it seems to me as if we, with our imperfect obedience to and realization of God, getting so little of what He wants to give us every day, wrenching ourselves by our wilfulness out of His care, — as if we, living thus and looking from our disordered lives at the calm, obedient life of Jesus, were like a wrecked and broken ship lying dismasted on the ocean, feeling the winds that it could not obey, tossed by the waves on which it could not steer, — as if that ship should see bearing down upon it a ship like itself, only perfect, — every sail set, every breeze caught, ruling the waves that carried it, borne on in all its stateliness by the very ocean that seemed ready to open its black mouth and swallow the poor, helpless wreck that floated like a foreign and unwelcome thing upon its bosom. So Jesus, perfectly obedient to His Father, delights in the same Law of which we are so apt to be afraid. We love to look at His life. And most of all the stately ship is beautiful to us if she bears down to us that she may help us. The perfect obedience of Jesus, beautiful in itself, is a thousand fold more beautiful if it gives itself to the rescue of us from our disobedience.

If we understand, then, what it is to delight in the Law of God, I think we can see easily enough what must be the blessed consequences of such a noble condition in the life of the happy man who has attained it. It will sweep out of his life the two great hindrances that most impede and vex the life of every man — selfishness and restlessness. O my dear people, look into your lives and tell me, what is it that keeps you unhappy and ineffective? Is it not these — these which came in across the pure happiness of Eden and ever since have held men in their power. I open the old palace of the Caesars and I open the squalid hut of some Fiji barbarian, and in both there is just what makes miserable your house and heart, the old, undying tempters and tormentors of the human soul — selfishness and restlessness. What is there that can cast them out and bring in their bright opposites, devotion and peace? What but just this, a delight in the Law of God; such a new state of being that the soul shall be happy in knowing that God reigns, and in obediently helping His government to its complete results. Is there any selfishness left there? What room is there for it when the one wish is that God’s Will may be done? Is there any restlessness left there? Where can there be any flaw for it in the entire peace of a soul trusted away from itself into the hands of a

Lord of perfect wisdom and entire love? O my dear people, all the while that you are selfish and restless there is a region of unselfishness and peace right by your side in which you might be walking. If you would only make one effort, leap one fence, you would be in it, and your life would be changed. That leap is taken, that change comes, when you begin to delight in the Law of God.

Am I painting what is only a mockery? Am I telling of something which is very bright and tempting, but which is utterly out of your power or mine to attain? God forbid! It is not an easy, matterof-course thing, I know. I have talked, perhaps, as if it were very easy for St. Paul. It is time for me to read you his other verse and show you how hard he found it, what a perpetual struggle it was to him. He says there were two men in him, one of which was capable of this supreme delight, while the other lived in lusts and low desires. “I delight in the Law of God after the inner man,” he says. “But I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members. Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death!” He saw the beauty and peace of living in the delight of the Law of God. Part of the time he lived up there in that high employment; but then his lower passions were always dragging him down. Just your life and mine exactly; and certainly it may help us when we see that the great Paul — that Saint of God — had not escaped from this harassing and fluctuating life in which we are living.

He has escaped it now. In God’s very presence, there in heaven where he stands through his Redeemer, he has left selfishness and restlessness behind forever and has entered into entire devotion and perfect peace. But when he wrote these words he was just where we are — trying to delight in God and yet dragged back always by pride and selfishness to his own restless self.

If Paul could speak to us to-day he would tell us how he finally escaped, by what divine and loving ways God led him out of the power of his lusts and into the glory of that pure delight in God in which he is now laboring. “Be patient,” he would say, — “be patient, my brethren, and never be discouraged. Your God is able to deliver you, and will deliver you at last.”

Shall we venture to put words into the mouth of the glorified Apostle and think what he would say to us if he should speak to his brethren who are wandering and struggling in the darkness which he must so well remember? We run no risk, for we know well enough what he would say to us.

First of all would he not say: “Never forget that you have the power, the capacity of delighting in the Law of God. Let no tendency to grovel and to love low things blot out of your soul the certainty that there is in you a capacity for a higher happiness. Do not think it impossible, even down where you are in the depths of degraded passion, do not think it impossible that you should sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus and delight in the Law of God. Cling to the possibility of the highest life, however low you sink.” Would he not urge us with some such words as these?

And then again he would say: “Obey the Law of God even if you have no love for it, and so you will learn to love it. Even if obedience be only a task, even if righteousness be a burden and a cross to you, even if you have to force yourself to your duty — still, do it. The Law of God is delightful; force yourself up to it and you shall know its delight. Do your duty, even if duty be wearisome and hard, for then you are in the place where it can be come joyous and easy to you.” That he would say with all the emphasis of his own brave duty-doing life.

But then (and we can almost hear his voice rise and see his face glow as he advances), then he would go on to what he would most love to say. “I escaped,” he would declare, “purely and solely by the help of Christ. He took me, and, drawing me into His love, made me delight in God’s Law by my delight in Him. He took me and showed me the Beauty of Holiness by offering me Himself as the Master to serve, the Law to obey. Look at Him! — He is the Law of God. To be conformed to Him is to obey God perfectly. Can you love Him? Can you not love Him? He lived for us, for me and you,” the old Apostle would say, putting himself right by our side. “He lived for us, He died for us, He lives for us forever, — can you not, must you not love Him? Must not your soul delight in Him?” And then, turning back to the life and work of heaven, we should hear him say as his voice ceased from our ears: “To delight in Him, that is to delight in the Law of God. Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness.”

We can at least do this which he tells us, — we can believe that there is in us the power of loving God’s Law. We can obey God’s Law even before we love it, doing our duty however hard it be. And we can pray to Him who came to show God to all men, that He will show God to us, and make us delight in His Law.

Oh, let us claim our souls for their highest joys, for it is sad and terrible that men and women who have the power of loving and obeying God should be loving and obeying the tyrants of this world — houses and fortunes and the poor standards of Society. May God set us free and lift us up to Himself!