IN taking up the lessons of the dispensation of law, we must carefully distinguish two different and, in many respects, contrasted elements. As a trial of man, which, in the highest degree, it was, we have already seen it to be the working out (in a divine way, and therefore to a true result) of an experiment which was man's thought, not God's. God could not need to make an experiment. Man needed it, because he would not accept God's judgment, already pronounced before (as a fallen being) he had been tried at all, in the proper sense of trial; " every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil, and that continually." God's way of acceptance for him had been, therefore, from the beginning by sacrifice, in which the death of a substitute covered the sinner before Him, closing his whole responsibility naturally in the place in which he stood as a creature.
The " way of Cain" was man's resistance to the verdict, upon himself, and so to the way of grace proclaimed.
God then undertook to prove him, taking him on his own ground, and bidding him justify his own thoughts of himself by actual experiment.
But this is only the law on one side of it. It was what made it law, and gave its character to the whole dispensation. Yet underneath, and in spite of all this, God necessarily kept to, and maintained, His own way, and to the ear of faith told out, more and more, that way of His, although in " dark sayings," from which only Christianity has really lifted off the veil. Thus, and thus alone, a sacrificial worship was incorporated with the law, and circumcision, " a seal of the righteousness of faith," remained as the entrance into the new economy.
First, then, let us look at the law as law, and afterward as a typical system.
As law, or the trial of man, we find him put into the most favorable circumstances possible for its reception. The ten commandments appeal, at the very outset, to the fact of the people having been brought out of the land of Egypt; it was He who had brought them out who bade them "have no other gods" before Him. He had made Himself known in such a way as to manifest Himself God over all gods, His power being put forth in their behalf, so as to bind them by the tie of gratitude to Himself. How could they dispute His authority, or doubt His love? His holiness, too, was declared in a variety of precepts, which, if burdensome as ceremonial, appealed even the more powerfully on that account to the very sense of the most careless-hearted. There were severest penalties for disobedience, but also rewards for obedience, of all that man's heart sinlessly could enjoy. The Providence of God was made apparent in continual miracles, by which their need in the wilderness was daily met. Who could doubt, and who refuse, the blessing of obedience to a law so given, and so sanctioned?
A wall of separation was built up between them and the nations round; and inside this enclosure the divinely-guarded people were to walk together, all evil and rebellion excluded, the course of the world here set right, all ties of relationship combining their influence for good; duty not costing aught, but finding on every side its sweet, abundant recompense. Who (one would think) could stumble, and who could stray?
Surely the circumstances here were as favorable as possible to man's self-justification under this trial, if justify himself he could. If he failed now, how could he hope ever to succeed?
That he did fail, we all know-openly and utterly he failed, not merely by unbidden lusts, which his will refused and denied, but in conscious, deliberate disobedience, equal to his father, Adam's, and that before the tables of the law had come down to him out of the mount, into which Moses had gone up to receive them.
The first trial of law was over. Judgment took its course, although mercy, sovereign in its exercise, interposed to limit it. Again God took the people up, upon the intercession of Moses-type of a greater and an effectual Mediator. Man was ungodly, but was hope irrecoverably gone? Could not mercy avail for man in a mingled system from which man's works should at least not wholly be excluded?
Now this, in fact, is the great question- under law rigidly enforced; it is easily allowed that man must fail, and be condemned. He does not love his neighbor as himself, still less love God with all his soul and strength. Is there nothing short of this that God can admit then? He can show mercy; can He not abate something of this rigor, and give man opportunity to repent, and recover himself?
And this is the thought that underlies much that is mistaken for the gospel now. A new baptism may give it a christian name, and yet leave it unregenerate legalism after all. For this-only correcting some mistakes-is what the second giving of the law takes up. It is an old experiment, long since worked out, an anachronism in christian times. " The law is not of faith;" these are two opposite principles, which do not modify, but destroy, one another.
A second time the tables of the law are given to Israel; and now, along with this, God speaks of and declares the mercy which He surely has: " The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty." It is the conjunction of these two things that creates the difficulty. We recognize the truth of both; but how shall they unite in the blessing of man? This doubt perplexes fatally all legal systems. How far will mercy extend, and where will righteousness draw the line beyond which it cannot pass? How shall we reconcile the day of grace and the day of judgment? The true answer is, that under law no reconciliation is at all possible. The experiment has been made, and the result proclaimed. It is of the law thus given the second time, and not the first, that the apostle asserts that it is the " ministration,of death" and " of condemnation."
One serious mistake that has to be rectified here, is, that the law can be tolerant to a certain (undefined) measure of transgression. It is not so. It is not on legal ground that God " forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin." The law says, " Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things written in the book of the law to do them." If on other ground-in this case, as ever, that of sacrifice-mercy can be extended, and even forgiveness, if man be permitted to cancel the old leaf, and turn over a new; yet the new must be kept unblotted, as the old was not. " When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness," he must do "that which is lawful and right," to " save his soul alive." And thus the commandments, written the second time upon the tables of stone, though now by the mediator's hand, were identical with the first. Here the law cannot give way by a jot or a tittle, and therefore man's case is hopeless. The law is the ministration of condemnation only.
That was the foreseen issue, and the divine purpose in it, and God, to make that issue plain-that man might not, unless he would, be a moment deceived as to it lets Moses know, as the people's representative, that His face cannot be seen. He does indeed see the glory after it has passed-His back parts, not His face. God is unknown; there is no way to clear the guilty, and therefore none by which man may stand before Him.
Thus the law, in any form of it, is the "ministration of condemnation" only. That it was the " ministration of death" also, implies its power, not to produce holiness, but, as the apostle calls it, " the strength of sin." His experience of it: " I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died." Forbidding lust, it aroused and manifested it. " Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of lust"-thus " deceived me, and by it slew me."
Of this state of hopeless condemnation and evil, that physical death which God had annexed to disobedience at the first, was the outward expression and seal. In it man, made like the beasts that perish, passed out of the sphere of his natural responsibility and the scene for which he had been created, and passed out by the judgment of God, which cast, therefore, its awful shadow over all beyond death. The token of God's rejection of man as fallen is passed upon all men everywhere, with but one exception in the ages before Moses. Enoch had walked with God, and was not, for God took him. That made it only the plainer, if possible, what was its significance. It was actual sentence upon man for sin, and all men were under it as sentenced, not under probation.
If God, therefore, took up man to put him under probation, as in the law He manifestly did, He must needs conditionally remove the sentence under which he lay. "The man who doeth these things, shall live in them," meant, not that he should die, and go to heaven, as people almost universally interpret it, but the contrary; that he should recover the place from which Adam had fallen, and stay on earth. Faith in Abraham, indeed, looked forward to a better country, that is, an heavenly. But the law is not of faith, nor was Abraham under it. Faith, owning man's hopelessness of ruin, was given in measure to prove the mystery of what, to all else, were God's dark sayings. To man, as man, resisting God's sentence upon himself, the law spoke, not of death, and a world beyond, which he might, as he listed, people with his own imaginings, but of the lifting off of the sentence under which he lay-of the way by which he could plead his title to exemption from it.
Thus the issue of the trial could not be in the least doubtful. Every gray hair convicted him as under law, ruined and hopeless. Every furrow on his brow was the confirmation of the old Adamic sentence upon himself personally; and the law, in this sense also, was the ministration of death, God using it to give distinct expression to what the fact itself should have graven upon men's consciences. It is this-so misunderstood as it is now-that gives the key to those expressions in the Psalms, and elsewhere, which materialism would pervert to its own purposes: " For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in hades"-it is not " the grave"-" who shall give thee thanks?"
God would have it so plain, that he might run that readeth it, that upon the ground of law, spite of God's mercy (which He surely has), man's case is hopeless. " By deeds of law shall no flesh be justified in his sight; for by the law is the knowledge of sin."
Yet, God having declared His forgiveness of iniquity, transgression, and sin, the second trial by law could go on, as it did go on, for some eight hundred years, till the Babylonish captivity. Then the legal covenant really ended. The people were Lo Ammi, a sentence never yet recalled. F. W. G.
(To be continued, the Lord willing.)
THE difference between learning sin in God's presence, and by falling into it is very great. One may feel sin very deeply, because one has committed it, but this never gives one God's sense of what sin is. The cross of Christ is the measure of sin in the sight of God. J. B. S.