The opening chapters set out moral wisdom in the fear of Jehovah as the true and sure preservative in a world of self will and its evils of violence and corruption. Redemption is not introduced any more than a new nature, but the duty primarily for the Israelite of subjection to divine instruction, with the consequent establishment in the land when the wicked perish out of it.
Here follows still more ample exhortation as well as admonition, that the discipline might issue in the happiest and most fruitful results.
“My son, forget not my teaching, but let thy heart keep my commandments: for length of days and years of life and peace shall they add to thee. Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the tablet of thy heart; and thou shalt find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man” (vers. 1-4).
We thus learn how far the O. T. was from casting the people of God on the sentiments, emotions, or reasonings of their own hearts. It was but an imperfect or at least partial revelation. “For the law made nothing perfect.” The first man was under process of trial; the Second had not yet appeared. There were dealings of God and testings of man; revelations from God, but not yet God revealed. For the Son of God had not come nor given us an understanding that we might know Him that is True.
Yet even in the days when faith waited for its Object and His work, and the best blessing then lay in promise, the heart was formed by the positive teaching afforded, and trained in the observance of commandments which came from God. They might come through a parent; and such no doubt was the due order in Israel, as it had been marked from their father Abraham, as Jehovah deigned to express His pleasure in his commanding his children and his household, that they might keep the way of Jehovah, to do justice and judgment. But what gave divine value was that it was His teaching, and that the commandments enjoined were His. This alone sanctifies-obeying God, obeying His word, the effect and proof of love, when any are in relationship with God. Nor do we forget but remember what we love and value.
So the Lord puts it in His matchless way to the disciples. “He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me; and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself unto him” (John 14:21). What a contrast with dark superstition, forbidden to have His commandments through fear of making an ill use of them, and shut up to a sinful director, and to its tradition nobody knows whence, both human and precarious at best! What a contrast with the yet darker sin, which denies the authority of God to every scripture, and thereby would deprive His words of spirit and life! Even a Jew was not so bereft of blessing. He was called not to forget what he had been taught, and his heart to observe commandments which were Jehovah's, only through Moses or any other that communicated them. What a blessed picture Luke 2 sets before us of the Lord, thus obedient in the days of His early sojourn, subject to Joseph and Mary in Nazareth, yet conscious of a higher relationship and so occupied with His Father's things! And blessed were the fruits. Even then truly, as He said afterward, He kept His Father's commandments and abode in His love. So here it is written for the obedient Israelites, “length of days, and long life, and peace shall they add to thee.” But this is far from all. As we know that “grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,” the Israelite was exhorted to cherish confidence in mercy, or loving kindness, and truth. Let them “not forsake thee,” is the word. He was entitled to believe and count on them habitually and evermore. “Bind them about thy neck, write them upon the tablet of thy heart.” What ornament can compare with them? What inward lesson so cheering and invigorating! “And thou shalt find favor and good understanding [if this last be the shade of sense here meant] in the sight of God and man.” So we see in our perfect pattern. Our Lord assuredly found in His unequaled path of subjection “favor” with God and man, as we are told. Whether the word often rendered “good understanding” is not modified here as sometimes elsewhere may be questioned. But as it stands, it was a good and welcome stamp of divine approval through devotedness to God's will, without either self-seeking or men-pleasing. Happy, when as here, it comes as the answer without as well as on high, to grace and truth written on the heart! Now too one word, Christ, expresses all; and the Spirit of the living God is given to us who believe, that He may be written truly and deeply on those tablets of flesh, our hearts. How rich the grace wherein we stand! For we all, contemplating with unveiled face the glory of the Lord, are being changed into the same image from glory to glory as by the Lord the Spirit.