I will now take notice of the Judge's remarks. In the first place, Mr. Marshall's statements make quite plain that, if we are under the law at all, we are under it not merely as a rule of life, but as a question of righteousness or condemnation. He says expressly of a believer, if he act contrary to the law (page 10), he would then have come under its condemning power; so on the same page, if a believer “acts contrary to the law, what then? Will not the law take hold of him, and condemn him?” Thus all pretension that it is a rule of life, but not the way of righteousness, failure under it bringing a curse, is wholly set aside. If I am told there is a remedy in looking to Christ, so there was in the prescriptions of the law. We have not advanced a tittle. Only remember, reader, that it is for this cause the apostle says, as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse. If you are on this ground, you are at this moment, according to your theory, under the curse. And this is all true if we are under the law at all. People talk of not taking it for this, but taking it for that. Who are you, to deal with the law and testimony of God thus? It takes you, as God has declared it should, if you are under it, and curses you. The curse comes with it, and sin revives when it comes. Mr. Marshall is right: it lays hold of a man, and condemns him. And, if “as many as are of its works,” they are all cursed. And Christ does not step in to weaken its authority. He bore its curse, and delivered us from the law, but He cannot be made a curse for us now; and, if it comes on us, there is no way of getting it off us left. If it be a rule of life, then righteousness comes by it, and Christ is dead in vain.
But let us see what Mr. Marshall has to say of it even as a rule of life. If it be God's rule of life, it must be a perfect one. Indeed a rule that is not a perfect one is pure mischief and deception. But what is Mr. M.'s account? “Christ enlarges it,” that is, it is not perfect, but has to be enlarged. Suppose I have to enlarge a measure to be honest in what I give; is my first measure right? Thus I must have the law enlarged to go right—a strange rule. But, further: “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat, all, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do.” Here, then, we have a clear, positive, and definite rule. All, and whatsoever they bid you, is to be done. “Of course,” continues Mr. Marshall (page 9), “he only meant such parts of the moral law as were in accordance with his new dispensation; and nearly all parts of it are in such accordance.” Here is a strange rule for me. Nearly all of it is right—God's rule, mind—and I am to judge by my estimate of the new dispensation what is not. I am not to find it enlarged, but to pare it off as I see it is consistent with my position. But how can this be called a role? Now these remarks prove to me that Mr. Marshall is an honest man. He sees that you cannot reconcile Christianity and the rule Christians are, on this system, to live by; and he honestly says so. But then all becomes nearly all, and whatsoever is cast overboard; and the rule is no rule at all, enlarged in one place, and pared down in another, by some other which is not given to us at all. Surely this is not establishing law.
The text universally alleged to put us under the law is, “I am not come to destroy the law and the prophets, I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” Now what Christ's fulfilling the law has to do with putting me under it I never could understand. I should have thought that it would rather have boon the contrary, and if fulfilled, there was an end of the matter. Thus he fulfilled the sacrifices, and the rather as He speaks of the prophets, which gives to the word fulfill, used as it is as to both, a force quite different from that sought to be made of it.
It is a mere fancy, let me add here, that a Christian cannot use every word of scripture for profit, law and all, without that putting him under law. All that happened to Israel is written for our instruction, on whom the ends of the world are come, but that does not put us in the place they were in. All that reveals God to me, His mind, His will, His ways, is profitable to me, is light, without putting me in the place of those of whom I read.
But there is another consideration to be referred to here—the sermon on the mount. This, blessed as is the instruction contained in it, was before the cross, which judicially closed the relationship of the Jews with God, breaking down the middle wall of partition. We have no hint of redemption in it from beginning to end, nor of the relationship in which men should stand to God by it. It gives, and gives most blessedly, the characters which were fitted to enter into the kingdom of heaven just going to be set up. Now that kingdom was not yet set up, but announced as immediately to be so. Nor do I for a moment imply that they were to give up the character necessary in order to enter as soon as they had got into it. It would be absurd: But what it does is to give the characters suited to the kingdom, not to show the effect of its being set up by the rejection and cross of Jesus. It is not the law, nor is it the gospel. Christ could not preach His death and resurrection as an accomplished ground of salvation. It is to disciples, though in the audience of all, that no man might mistake the true character of the kingdom, nor of those who were to get into it. That and the revelation of the Father's name are the subjects of the discourse. The law and the prophets were until Joint, since that the kingdom of heaven was preached, and every man pressed into it. The gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ could not be preached, though long before and now prophesied of. The preaching was that they might receive Him, not crucify Him.
Nor is the sermon on the mount, as is stated, in a large degree portions of the moral law. Two commandments are referred to, which are the two abiding characteristics of sin since before the flood, corruption and violence, lust and murder. No others are alluded to, sabbath or any other. And if it wore to prove the law a perfect rule, how could it be written to them of old time, so and so was said, referring to law, but I say unto you, and so teach them quite differently? The whole idea is a delusion. That those who then broke the least commandment, and taught men so, were not fit for the kingdom is clearly stated, but that is all, and nothing about the law subsisting after Christ's death. Unless it be in temporal things there is no grace, no blood-shedding to cleanse, no redemption to deliver. The kingdom being just at hand, the character suited to an entrance into it is given. Israel was on his way with the Lord to judgment, and if they did not come to an agreement they would be delivered up, and so they have been. It is not grace to sinners, but righteousness demanded, to be fit to enter in, that is, such a walk and spirit as is set forth in the sermon. Charging scribes and Pharisees who were under it with making void the law has nothing to do with putting Christians under it after Christ has died.
As to establishing the law as a system, Christ clearly did not. He taketh away the first that He may establish the second. He is the end of the law for righteousness. We establish law, for that is the real force of the word in the highest and only scriptural way. They that have sinned under it will be judged by it, unless indeed redeemed out of that state. Christ's bearing the curse of the law established its authority, as naught else could do, but did not leave the guilty under it. The mistake made is this. Many things contained in the law, all in the moral law as usually understood, say Christ's two great commandments, and the ten commandments (not now discussing the sabbath which belonged to the old creation, the Lord's day to the new), were obligations before the law, and are obligations under Christ.
But the law, that is, the enforcement of these obligations by the authority of God, binding them on man as his righteousness by a rule of life (and that only is law), or pronouncing a curse on them if they did not keep it, from that, that is from law, we are, wholly and in every shape and way delivered, dead to it. It is adultery (to use the image of Rom. 7) to have to say to it, to call ourselves Christians, if we are not absolutely from under its authority. I learn how God viewed evil and good from it, I can learn to support true ministers from what is said of oxen, but the law is not binding on me. I learn more of Christ's sacrifice in detail from Leviticus and other places than from the Gospels; yet I have nothing whatever to say to the law as to them, not being under it.
So of moral obligations. I learn in the law that God abhorred stealing, but it is not because under the law that I do not steal. All the word of God is mine, and written for my instruction; yet for all that I am not under law, but a Christian who has died with Christ on the cross, and am not in the flesh, to which law applied, I am dead to the law by the body of Christ. In vain it is alleged that this is only as a covenant of works. The law is nothing else but a covenant of works. Matthew Marshall has shown it in his remarks already commented on. Mr. Wesley, it seems, admits (page 12) that Christ is the end of the law in the true sense; then let us have done with it. He has adopted, he tells us, every point of it (nearly all Mr. M. says). What He has adopted, if it be so, let us learn from Him. “This is my beloved Son, hear him,” and Moses and Elias disappear. His teaching will suffice by itself in such things.
As Mr. M. is content with what he has found in brethren as to the Lord's day, I should have nothing to say on that head. I take it up here only in its connection with the law. With the insisting on the godly enjoyment and observance of the Lord's day, which he approvingly quotes, I entirely agree, but as the sabbath and change from the seventh to the first day of the week is closely connected with the question of law, I will treat this point also for a moment. A Christian recognizes the first day of the week, not the seventh. Why so? The law we hold absolutely gone as to the Christian, not by enfeebling its authority where it applies, for Christ bore its curse, and men who have sinned under it will be judged by it, but because we have died from under it. Now what was the sabbath? God's rest in the first creation. We do not belong to it—our bodies do, hence a day of rest is a blessing for man toiling through the fall. But that did not make it a matter of eternal obligation, but the Son of man Lord of it, an expression in itself quite inapplicable to a moral obligation. The sabbath was God's rest in the old creation. In that creation God cannot rest now. Hence the Lord beautifully and blessedly says, when maliciously charged with breaking it, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” They wrought in grace in a world of sin, but could not rest in it. Now the Lord took man up on the footing of the old creation, and as undetermined whether he could find God's rest on the ground of his own responsibility. Hence the day of rest belonging to that was given and imposed upon him, as all the rest, as a matter of law. Death and life were set before him. Now he is known to be dead in sins. Under that system man failed.
I believe that the millennium will be, in a certain sense, the accomplishment of that day, but on that I do not enter here. But Christ's cross closed for the spiritual mind the old creation and the old covenant. He gave Himself for our sins to redeem us from this present evil world. His resurrection began redeemed man's history on a new footing, on which innocent Adam never was, any more than sinful man; a state based, not on responsibility, in which there might be failure, but on a work whose value could never change; a state which was a proof of accomplished redemption by an accepted work. Thus the first day of the week, that is, of Christ's resurrection, became the sign and witness of rest for us. We begin work with it, that is, with redemption in Christ, not end with it, though in fact we shall not fully rest till we are risen. Still, through Christ's resurrection we have rest for our souls, and it is a pledge of the full rest of God into which a promise is left of entering. This entering into the rest of God is the compendium of the fullest blessing of His people; for He rests in holiness and perfected glory and love, and will rest in it, when He has His people there and all answers to His own nature, and His love is satisfied. But this for us is in resurrection, and through the resurrection of Christ; and as the seventh day was the symbolical rest under the law, because God had rested from the works of the first creation, and was made additionally obligatory under the law in connection with redemption out of Egypt, and strictly enforced under pain of death; so for us the first day of the week is the witness of a better redemption and a better rest.
The Lord met the disciples the first day of the week, and again the following. The first day of the week the disciples came together to break bread; the first day they were to lay by for the poor as God had prospered them; and in Revelation John was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, when it had already definitely acquired its name. It is not a seventh day, as if we worked when God rested, and rested when God worked. It is not the fourth commandment, for we are in no way under the law, but the blessed liberty of rest to serve God by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Besides being a boon in itself to toiling man, Jehovah gave His sabbath to Israel as a sign between Him and them, a mark of God's people. (Ezek. 20:12, 2012Moreover also I gave them my sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them. (Ezekiel 20:12)
20And hallow my sabbaths; and they shall be a sign between me and you, that ye may know that I am the Lord your God. (Ezekiel 20:20)) Nor is any new institution established in the law, as the setting up of the tabernacle, the manna, or other special things, without the sabbath being specially enforced. It was a sign of their being God's people, though in fact they never really, any more than Adam, entered into God's rest (Heb. 4); there remains a rest. But this has ceased; they are no longer God's people, unless in promise for the future, when they will have their rest by grace.
Hence the Lord never has to say to the sabbath in the Gospels but as slighting it. It is a singular fact, that, as in the law it is repeatedly and rigorously enforced, in the Gospels it is studiously made light of. The Son of man was Lord of it. He recognizes it as existing under the law, but makes use of and acts on it, as above it, making the man carry his bed on it, and the like. The old covenant was passing away; and we, having died with Christ, are not to be judged in respect of sabbaths. Yet, for the same reason, I hold the Lord's day as a blessed privilege conferred, and to be observed for the Lord's service as “the Lord's day,” and I do not doubt we may, in our little measure, be in the Spirit on the Lord's day, however that may be our privilege at all times. And let the reader remark that there are many things binding, not as law, but as the divine good pleasure. I do not pray by law, nor read the word by law, nor praise God by law. Yet I should be unhappy and be guilty if I did not. A father's will is a law to a loving child, if he has not given a formal order.
But I may add here, I am not afraid of the word “commandment.” It is a wholesome word, because it involves obedience. Christ could say, As my Father has given me commandment so I do, and that as regards His work on the cross, His highest act of love. Did I do everything in itself right, nothing would be yet right, if obedience to God were wanting in it. So “I come to do thy will,” and we are sanctified to the obedience of Christ. It is as to this the word “commandment” has its wholesome place. But we cannot be under law without being under a covenant of works, and that Mr. Marshall's pamphlet shows, as we have seen.
I come now to the question of righteousness, which connects itself pretty closely with that of law. Mr. Marshall has not quite understood “Brethren's” views on this. I know not whether I shall succeed in making them clear. Scripture never speaks of the righteousness of Christ (though, of coarse, He was in every sense perpetually righteous) but of man's, or legal righteousness, man being what he ought to be towards God and his neighbor, of which the law was the measure, or of God's righteousness, what He is in Himself manifested in the display of His own consistency with Himself, and that judicially in respect of Christ, and through Him of us. Righteousness is practically recognizing the claim of another—claim in the sense of what is due to him; with God it is as the source and measure of all claim, what is due to Himself. This may be, as to the creature, what is due to God, according to the place He has put the creature in, the creature's duty; and of this law was the perfect expression enforced by the authority of God, and sanctioned by the penalty of a curse. In this consistency with God's will man wholly failed; not only that God came in Christ, reconciling the world, not imputing their failures, and man rejected Him.
Man's moral history was over. Not only God had turned him out of paradise because of sin, but, as far as man was concerned, he had turned God out of the world when He had come into it in mercy. The second Man comes on the scene. Now our probation was in the first man, God's purposes were in the Second. And both these come out into light through the work of Christ, perfect when fully proved. He meets our failure as the sin-bearer for us, and lays the foundation of God's accomplishment of His purposes of glory in the same work. That is our portion. Had man even kept the law, this did not give him a title to be in the glory of the Son of God; but we are predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He may be the first-born among many brethren. We have borne the image of the earthly, and we shall bear the image of the heavenly. We rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Now Christ in His death glorified God as to all that He is, and that, where God had been dishonored, in the very place of sin. Man's enmity, Satan's power, death, the curse or wrath of God, all met there; and He in love and obedience was made sin. There it was obedience was perfected, God's righteous judgment against sin fully displayed, and endured in the forsaking of God, yet God's perfect love to sinners displayed in the same act. God's majesty maintained in the sufferings of Christ, His truth, and all that was needed that His purpose of bringing sons into glory might be accomplished.
God was glorified in the Son of man, and man was set at the right hand of God. All that God's glory could claim as against sin, and for the accomplishment of His purposes, according to that glory, all that could make it good, and that as only could be done where sin was All that could glorify God, and, blessed be His name, to the glory of God by us, was accomplished; and righteousness, God's righteousness, what was due to His consistency with Himself, set Christ at His right hand as man; for Christ suffering as man had realized that glory, making it good at all cost to Himself. (See John 13:31, 32; 17:4, 5; 16:1031Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 32If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in himself, and shall straightway glorify him. (John 13:31‑32)
4I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. 5And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. (John 17:4‑5)
10Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; (John 16:10)) God, having all in this work that was due to the claims of His own glory, acted righteously, did what was the necessary consequence according to that glory, and glorified Christ with Himself. “I have glorified thee on the earth” (there where it was needed, and nothing but Christ made sin in the perfection of obedience and love to His Father could do it), “and now glorify thou me with thine own self,” and man entered into the glory of God righteously—this, besides Christ's bearing our sine in His own body on the tree. He was Jehovah's lot and the people's lot. Much blessed instruction is connected with this, but I confine myself to righteousness.
The testimony to the world is that there is none righteous, no not one; but there is righteousness in this, that Christ has gone to the Father, and the world will not see Him any more (that is, as then come in grace) until He comes in judgment. Through this work the believer is justified from all his sins, for Christ has borne them and suffered the penalty. God is just (righteous), and as such the justifier of him that believes in Jesus, justifies the ungodly, and whom He justifies them He also glorifies. Grace reigns through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord. He is made unto us righteousness, and we the righteousness of God in Him. He is before God the ground and measure of our place before God, and His righteousness displayed in putting us there, while all is grace towards us. He is gone to our Father and His Father, our God and His God, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
And now a word as to “imputed righteousness.” No such term is in scripture, but imputing righteousness, of which the sense is wholly different in English, and a different word employed in Greek. Imputing righteousness is simply counting or reckoning us righteous. Imputed righteousness is a certain valuable sum put over to our account. Thus in Philemon, “If he owe thee anything, put that to my account.” And so “sin is not imputed where there is no law.” You cannot put that specific act as a transgression to the man's account, because when there is no law it has not been forbidden, as it could be under the law in Israel; though the reign of death proved they were sinners, and lost. Now this and the passage in Philemon are the only places where this word is used. But imputing righteousness, used some eleven times, is, as the Thirty-nine Articles justly state, simply accounting the man righteous.
But whatever the blessed fruits of divine life or of the Spirit, which there surely will be where that life and the Spirit are, and be the proof that it is really there, still, if God justifieth the ungodly, and if it is to him that worketh not but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly that faith is imputed for righteousness, it is evident that it is not because of what a man is himself, but of another, that he is accounted righteous. By the obedience of One shall many be made righteous. And mark the difference. We are not accounted righteous according to the poor measure of the fruits which we produce, with the defects which may accompany them, but according to the measure of Christ's work, in which He has borne our sins, on the one hand, and perfectly glorified God, when made sin, on the other; the former represented by the sin-offering in Leviticus, and the other by the burnt offering. Or, in another aspect, when both were parts of one sin-offering, by the blood on the mercy seat, and the sins of the people laid on the head of the scape-goat.
Now Mr. Marshall's system contradicts itself. “The brethren,” he says, “are quite in accordance with scripture in holding that a believer is justified solely on the ground of the Lord Jesus Christ's atonement and satisfaction for his sins; and that so believing his faith is imputed to him for righteousness, and that he is thus justified and accepted of God.” Now, that a true Christian is made partaker of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust, that he is to cleanse himself from all filthiness of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord, that he is not his own, but bought with a price, and to live wholly to Him who has died for Him, and risen again, as a thousand passages testify, cannot be too earnestly pressed on the Christian. It is of vital importance and daily need. That is not the question; at any rate it is no question with me. The question is this, our righteousness before God. But Mr. M. says (page 16), “If all a believer's righteousness, at present and in the future, are in Christ alone, why were all those cited exhortations and commands?” If a believer is justified, as Mr. M. says, solely on the ground of Christ's atonement and satisfaction, and that his faith is imputed for righteousness, they cannot be for righteousness to be accepted of God; for how then is it solely by Christ's work? But I answer, Not to make out righteousness but for consistency and growth in the place he is set in, to grow up to Him who is the head in all things, to glorify Christ as he ought to be able to enjoy God. We are accepted in the beloved. See how it is said in John 14: “In that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” By the Holy Ghost dwelling in me I know I am in Christ, consequently accepted perfectly of God. This is not my responsibility, but my place; but cannot be without Christ being in me; they go together; and there is my responsibility now, namely, to show forth the life of Christ, of Christ who is my life, in everything—that Christ should be all to me as He is in all that have received the Spirit, and that all I do I should do in His name. My objection is, not that men should press holiness, but that they should make righteousness out of it when Christ is made unto us righteousness.
As to the phrase, “we through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith,” it teaches the contrary of what Mr. M. supposes. It is not righteousness we are waiting for, but the hope of righteousness; we are made the righteousness of God in Him (Christ), and then wait for glory which belongs to that righteousness. Christ is made to us righteousness: by one man's obedience the many are made righteous; and the objection to that, that we may then continue in sin, is not met by putting us under law, or giving uncertainty as to righteousness, but by showing (Rom. 6.) that righteousness involves death to sin. I cannot have one without the other, and so live to God. It is a sad thing if a Christian never can know he is accepted; and if he was not righteous somehow, he assuredly could not. The scripture shows us it is in Christ we are justified, that is, accounted or held for righteousness, as Mr. M. admits, solely on the ground of Christ's atonement. Otherwise, if we cannot so stand before God, no peace, no joy, no bright hope of glory; for this belongs to the righteous. But He has made peace by the blood of the cross, and we are accepted in the Beloved. It is well that a simple principle should be realized by Christians, that duties flow from the place we are already in; and if I am in a place in which I always must be, as a child with its parents, it only makes the duty perpetual, and this is always the measure and principle of duty. Destroy the relation, and the duty ceases.
I have treated the main questions at issue, and which are of importance to every soul. I only add that in one aspect all Christians are sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints called and set apart to God by the power of the Holy Ghost; in another they follow after holiness, and, beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, are changed into the same image from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord. They know that, when He shall appear, they shall be like Him, for they shall see Him as He is, and, having this hope in Him, they purify themselves as He is pure.
As regards the church, or assembly, the question is not at all if Abraham was not justified by faith through Christ's work, nor whether he will be in glory, nor whether he was more or less faithful than any of us. There were those more or less faithful then. There are more and less faithful now. The question is what place God set the Old Testament saints in, and where He has set us. Now I believe God has set us in a better place, because, after speaking of the faith by which all those elders obtained a good report, it is declared God had reserved some better thing for us. (Heb. 11) It is a mistake to think that there may not be in God's sovereign wisdom a better place in which some are set. Among those that were born of women there has not arisen a greater than John the Baptist: who more faithful or separated to God than he, filled with the Holy Ghost from his mother's womb? Yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. What a privilege that of the disciples, to have the Lord with them, the long and earnest desire of prophets and righteous men! Yet for these very persons it was expedient that He should go, for then they would receive the Holy Ghost. Under the law the Holy Ghost signified that the way into the holiest was not made manifest; now we have boldness to enter into the holiest. The veil is rent.