by Joseph Parker (1867)

“This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America. Within the U.S., you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.” 

— books.google.com
___

Ch. XVII: The Relation of the Cross to the Law

The Cross, which we have just been studying, must have produced many deep moral effects. It is proposed now to look at its relation to the principal educational agent which had been operating in society until the time of its appearance. That educational agent was Law, a term which has been used in so many senses that it may be necessary first of all to fix the meaning which we attach to it in this chapter with some approach to precision. Even in the sacred writings the term “law” is employed in various senses: for example, it sometimes comprehends the whole doctrine of revelation, thus—the “delight” of the “blessed man” is in “the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night.” Sometimes it is limited to the Ten Commandments, thus—“I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.” Sometimes it describes the principle or tendency within men which is known as “the law of their being;” thus—“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.” Occasionally it is used to signify the sense of right and wrong which is in every man, apart altogether from written statute and formal sanctions; thus—“When the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or excusing one another.” This is the innate law to which every other law, either of God or man, must make its appeal—a law without which even the commandment of God would be a dead letter; it is as the eye of the soul, apart from which all light would be shed upon the moral nature in vain. Then there is what has been termed as the law of love, that sublime concentration and urgency of the soul in all loving homage and service which cannot be regulated by written orders or formal stipulations, but is a delight, a holy rapture, a hallowed, self-forgetful, all-surrendering passion. This is the law of unfilled angels and justified spirits. They serve with an ardor which can never be enkindled by any statutes which could be written with ink, or engraved on stones. There are several other, perhaps minor, senses in which the term “law” is employed, but the main use is that which Paul makes of it when he includes under it all the outward system of commands, prohibitions, checks, rewards, and penalties which was divinely established to meet the apostasy of the race. Now, in relation to this system of imperative edicts, the author of “Ecce Homo” well says that the work of Jesus Christ operates in a manner at once of ratification and abolition. Paul says we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held, that we should serve in newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. Paul is most precise and clear upon this point; he never hesitates about it; anticipating anything like objection to the width of liberty which he claimed when he said, “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” He stood in a new relation towards God and man; he was no longer pressed and checked, like an undisciplined child, but had entered into what in one of his exultant moods he called the glorious liberty of the children of God. How has he attained this freedom? What is the signature, and what the date of his charter? In prosecuting the inquiry, we hope to come upon the meaning of the words, “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth by Jesus Christ.”

Man must stand in one of two relations to the law; either to law as an outward declaration of divine authority in a rebellious sphere, or to law as an inward principle of love, trust and self-surrender to the Divine Father. Take the principle into the family for practical elucidation. Law as an outward authority is established in the family, to meet ignorance on the one hand, or disorder on the other. So long as the household has worked harmoniously, the head of the house does not feel called upon to write commandments and publish edicts; he truly says, “It is better to have spontaneous expressions of interest and love, than forced submission.” But when family order has been set aside, he feels that where love has been defective, law must be made stringent; as the moral impulse is weak, the outward prohibition must be emphatic. Legal restriction is in proportion to moral feebleness. The stronger the written law, the weaker the unwritten dictate of love. The ignorant or self-opinionated man, especially the guilty man, must have the law thrust upon his notice, thundered into his ear, sometimes, indeed, scourged into his flesh. By an inverse process we may read a nation’s (or a man’s) moral history by studying its penal code. The legislators and magistrates are constantly, though it may be unconsciously, writing the spiritual history of the country. Many criminal laws simply mean much crime. So with the family: where there are many commandments, there is moral incapacity or moral turpitude on the part of household, or a miserable littleness and a pitiful conceit of authority on the part of the domestic legislator.

Outward law is necessarily consequent upon tainted or defective loyalty. God owed it to his own perfections, at least to publish what was due from the creature to the Creator. Silence on his part would be tantamount almost to connivance, and would certainly have degraded the dignity and authority of right. He can, up to a given point, only meet defection on the part of moral agents by an instant, emphatic and universal proclamation of what is due to himself. It is the same in the family; in the case of domestic insubordination, either the rebellion must be ignored, or a stern commandment, adequate to the occasion, must be proclaimed, but God cannot, by his very nature, connive at rebellion: he must therefore declare and establish a law. A cultivated man knows what it is to be driven to tell certain insensate (unfeeling) people what is due to himself or to his position; actually, to put it into plain words: the coarse-grained cannot see it unless a law of common courtesy be laid before them in letters of the most demonstrative magnitude, and the refined man is pained at being driven to do what natural sensitiveness ought not to have required. All outward law, then, except such as shall be presently explained, is a reflection upon man’s inconsistency of homage and love. Thus the Decalogue itself is a history of man’s deep shame. Every one of the commandments is really an indictment against the human family. To think that such things are named in the Decalogue should have been forced into human speech! Such things as idolatry, unnaturalness, adultery, theft, covetousness! Such words could only have been extorted from the lips of the Holy God under a tremendous pressure. That ever he should have been driven to say to the very being whom he fashioned in his own likeness, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” or to say to a being that was once lustrous with his own purity, “Thou shalt not commit adultery!” How it must have tortured him—how necessary that at the time of saying it he should be encircled with flames of fire! He was not so encircled in Eden; there he smiled, but on Sinai he blushed.

A distinction must be made between a regulation and a law, and between a consequence and a threat. Take the terms on which Adam began life—“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eat thereof thou shalt surely die.” This, we have said, is a regulation or stipulation, simply pointing out cause and effect, and is therefore a display of grace rather than a formal legal appointment. Everything was new; as a finite is necessarily limited, God graciously pointed out the limit. He did not make the limit in an arbitrary spirit, but pointed it out as the simple necessity of all created or conditioned life, and this he did in full recognition of Adam’s integrity.

Law, then, may be looked at in relation to the human constitution generally, and so far may be described as educational, regulative, and disciplinary; viewed historically, it may be regarded as moral protest, a declaration of affronted righteousness or a demand of dishonored justice, and so far it is penal, coercive and retributive. The law of Eden was informational and regulative; the law of Sinai was retrospective and penal. By considering the law given in Eden as purely regulative, we get a new and satisfactory view of the so-called probation of Adam. The terms of interdict were not threatening, but explanatory; they contained simply an announcement of consequences—“In the day thou eat thereof thou shalt surely die.” God did not threaten man with death as an arbitrary punishment; it was not a matter of graduated offense and penalty, otherwise death would have been en excessive punishment for a first offense—it was an inevitable consequence, spoken of and warned against, in no spirit of threatening, but with all the care and tenderness becoming the Divine Father. Why, Adam could not have understood threatening! Think of it! We know the meaning of angry tones and menacing gestures, but what could Adam know of them? Threatening in the very first conversation with God would have been the most self-evident anachronism! When a parent says to a child, “In the day that you take poison you shall surely die,” he does not mean that death is a punishment, but a consequence; hence his statement is not severe, but merciful—not a threat, but a revelation. Nor can the child complain of disproportion between the act and the effect as an arbitrary appointment: it is the outworking and inevitable result of a natural law. This gives what we conceive to be the right view of Adam’s probation. It is not uncommon to represent that probation as being arranged upon arbitrary conditions, as if God had set a snare for the being on whom he had left the mark of his own image; it is entirely forgotten in such a representation that there cannot be two infinities, that the finite must be limited at some point, and that trespass upon God’s province is necessarily followed by death. We restate this view because it is important in the present connection.

To show that something more than a system of mere restraints and penalties was necessary to meet the wants of fallen men, it is only requisite to look for a moment at the necessary limitation and weakness of all outward law, whether indeed it be educational or penal. The house-holder may compel every member of his family to be present at the hour of domestic worship, but he cannot compel one of them to pray. He may be so infatuated as to make a law that they shall pray, but they can in the very attitude of prayer mock the law and the lawgiver. The converse of this is also true: he may make a law that his children shall not pray, yet while his frown is darkening upon them, their souls may be holding fellowship with God. How inoperative, then, is formal law? Its words are high-swelling, but the heart is its own master; it may threaten much, but the soul shuts itself in from the storm. The Legislature may restrain men from stealing, but the Legislature cannot make men honest. Law may compel men to close places of business on Sunday, but law cannot compel men to keep holy the Sabbath day. Law may imprison rebels, but law cannot raise rebels into patriots. We thus get, again and again, a glimpse of what is meant by the expression “what the law could not do in that it was weak.” It has no mastery over the heart. It sets up prisons, penal settlements, instruments of vengeance and writes an elaborate code, but, after all its efforts to encompass a great result, it is confessedly “weak.” Law had long ages in which to show what it could do; under its stern and righteous rule the earth never became much brighter than a prison-house, and human life had a deep melancholy gloom of conscious servitude about it. Law stood at the outside. Its balance was faultless, its sword was strong and sharp; no felon could escape it, no casuist could outwit it, no hypocrite could cheat it with empty promises, and yet it was “weak”—there was always something beyond, which baffled, or mocked, or despised its propositions and its penalties.

The powerlessness of penal law as a morally resurrectional and regenerative agent my be seen from a detail of personal experience given by the Apostle Paul, in the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans: “But sin taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence; for without the law sin was dead.” The man was living in a kind of moral chaos. But in proportion as law was set up in the chaotic state, he was not merely put on the defensive in an argument, but the worst passions of his nature took arms against the invader. The Milanese hermit is reported to have boasted that he had not traveled beyond the city walls for 60 years; but immediately that a royal order was given that he should not go beyond the boundary of the city, he was seized with an irreparable desire to extend his travels. The child is often most strongly tempted to open gates which have been specially interdicted. If nothing had been said about them, probably he would not have cared to open them. “Thou shalt not” often quickens what it was meant to allay or restrain; so that again and again we are thrown upon the expression—“What the law could not do in that it was weak.” Why then have we any law? Because without it chaos and death are inevitable. But with it, not withstanding the strife which it necessitates, there may come a moral quickening which may lead to the restoration of men. To save one man from death is a victory worth all the battles which God has fought. Any movement toward life is better than the miscalled peace of death. Miscalled, indeed; peace is a compound term, including intelligence, purity, order, moral satisfaction, not one of which is found in death.

All the weakness and failure of outward law goes to show that, if ever the world is to be lifted up, the elevation must be wrought by a higher force than written statutes. The law has been doing a kind of vexatious work; there has been a good deal of school-mastering about its tone and method; everywhere there has been pressure, or correction, or sharp humiliation; nothing genial, sympathetic or alluring has appeared in its whole course. What was to follow? Law had long carried its codes in one hand and its iron rod in the other; what should displace it? Paul answers, “What the law could not do in that it was weak, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law may be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.” Law was to give place to Life. “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” Law could not re-establish the filial relation between God and men; it could at best only put men in the position of scholars and servants. “For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh to God.” Sonship, then, was the divine idea in starting the corrective remedial measures which are classed under the remedial measures which we classed under the respective designations Law and Gospel: not mere servitude, not mere innocence, but a holy, hearty love of God as the father of mankind. If a man could have been made by law as undeviating in his course as the star in its orbit, such constancy would have been a failure, unless it it had been the result of an intelligent and enthusiastic love of God—such a love as law can never inspire—a love which could only be born of greater love.

This throws us back upon the weakness of law: God has had no trouble with the worlds, but his children have cursed him to his face! Was it not a great risk (we put the inquiry with trembling reverence) to create any existences that came so entirely within the conditions of God’s essential nature? In fashioning planets, in quickening vegetation, in creating brutes more or less bright in instinct, he was, so to speak, a long way from himself—far out of the awful circle which is specifically divine — but, when he set his hand to the fashioning of man, a creature that should be distinctively in his own image and likeness, he confined himself within the interior of that circle! Think of what he proposed in making man: the creature was to be made in his own image, inspired with his own breath, and admitted to his very presence for fellowship. Now came the awful problem, How much can man contain of God without seeking to contain more? The sun could not seek to extend his empire; the stars never mutinied against their King; in all the uproar of the seas there was no tone of discontent. But this creature, this God in miniature, will he ever plot against his Maker, will he make confusion amid the peaceful order of the universe? The higher the life, the higher the difficulty. Ascension means complication. Man has less difficulty with dead wood than with living wood; less difficulty with vegetable life than animal life; less difficulty with a beast of burden than with the child that reflects his own image. So with God. His difficulty, so to speak, was at the top, not at the bottom of creation. It was a child, not a beast, that broke the boundary. What was to be done, then? In the first instance, prior to the trespass, while the glory of the Divine image lingered on the human countenance, there was a law regulative and educational—law that would have been a defense of liberty, and would have promoted a continual and blessed growth in divine strength, favor and honor—law that would have restrained only as a father’s loving grasp would restrain from the edge of the chasm or the nest of the serpent. After this came law judicial and penal. God said in deeds what he said in the first commandment from Sinai. He showed that there could be but one God, and taught the ambitious rival that the power which created him could limit his functions, and burn him in unquenchable fire. It must have been hard for God to say this to his human child; the words affect us as we see them on the page—what must their utterance have cost the heart of God? It was necessary to say them. God could not vacate the throne and leave the universe to be overrun by the anarchic spirit. A protest must be forthcoming. Hence came all that elaborate, stern, magisterial law, back of which lies the never-dying worm.

The history of ages is at hand, so that no difficulty need be felt in estimating the effect of this law upon the moral growth of man. To do this, in outline, will help to illustrate the value of the cross, and to dispel illusions respecting a merely legal service. The question resolves itself into one of evidence. How does the testimony of the acutest students of human nature tend? A citation or two from the Christian writings will answer the inquiry: “By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight”; “The law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never, with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually, make the comers thereunto perfect; “If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.” What is this but a repetition of the expression, “what the law could not do in that it was weak”? Is any man at liberty to treat the verdicts of history with contempt, and to try to live by the law as if its weakness had never been proved?

Now arises the important question hinted in the title of this chapter—What Is the Relation of Christ’s Cross to the Law? Have those who have put their faith in Christ no more to do with law of any kind? Is the Christian life anarchic? This class of inquiry seems to have occupied the attention of Paul a good deal, and while discussing the subject he makes copious citations from his experience: thus he tells the Romans—“The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” There are two laws here spoken of—the one is said to make free from the other—the law of life liberates from the law of death. The same writer speaks of two services, respectively termed “the oldness of the letter” and “the newness of the spirit,” and rejoices that he is an able minister of the New Testament, “not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter kills, but the spirit giveth life.” This shows somewhat of the new relation in which Christ’s cross has set Christians towards law. They no longer work from the outward commandment, but from the inward impulse; the shalt of law gives way to the must of love—a mightier tyranny, mightier because making no pretensions to might. The difference between the letter and the spirit as regulating service is seen in common life; the hireling says, “It is my duty,” the child says, “It is my delight,” the hireling asks, “Is it so nominated in the bond?” the child says, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Duty weighs and measures all its services; love can never do enough—it knows nothing of quantity; it proceeds upon the principle that nothing has been given where aught has been withheld.

What, then, is meant by being delivered from the law? Take one of the commandments, say—“Thou shalt not steal”—is the Christian delivered from that—is it no longer binding upon him? Certainly, he is delivered from it in the sense of not keeping it “in the oldness of the letter,” but he can never cease to keep it “in the newness of the spirit.” Obviously, this command, in its literal expression, could apply only to such as are in the very lowest moral condition; it goes as low down in the moral scale as possible—down to the elemental line. So with all the other commandments. “These laws (against robbery and murder) to be sure were not obsolete, but the better class of men had been raised to an elevation of goodness at which they were absolutely unassailable by temptations to commit them.” Christ’s cross delivers Christians from what may be termed moral drudgery; they are not oppressed and pined serfs, but freemen and fellow-hires serving their Lord Christ with all gladness of heart. Let a Christian be told as he is proceeding with the business of the day that he must not steal, and at once he will regard the remark as an affront or a pleasantry. His soul is honest; not honest merely in the rough sense of not picking pockets, but in all the finest shades of honesty which will not withhold a good opinion where it is due, which will not strain a word to the injury of any human creature, which will not steal any man’s reputation or plunder any man of his righteous claims to consideration and honor. The man who is truly possessor of “the spirit of life in Christ” cannot have any other gods but his Father in heaven, cannot commit adultery, cannot bear false witness, cannot kill, cannot steal. Such a man comes down upon all the exercises and avocations of life form a high altitude of wise and loving homage to the Son of God, and expounds practically the saying of an apostle—“Whosoever is born of God sins not, but he that is begotten of God keeps himself, and the wicked one touches him not.” If it be urged that many professing Christians do break the Commandments, notwithstanding high public pretensions, the apostle just quoted gives the only true answer—“If a man say, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar”—and there is an end of that hypocrisy. Paul, too, designates such professors “enemies of the cross of Christ,” and “weeps” as he writes of them in his letter to the Philippians.

The meaning of Christian freedom from “the law of sin and death” can be approached only when the heart is in the highest ecstasy of love, when the soul rises into the unclouded light of full communion with God, and forgets all boasting in glorifying in the cross. Such experiences are rare, by reason of the weakness of the flesh; the body could not long endure such a strain as the highest joy puts upon it. Yet, in the moment of passionate love, when the soul is at its fullest stretch of rapture, we feel how chilling and inadequate is the service required by written statues: the heart spurns the niggardly dole and cries, with no poetic license, but with literal simplicity of meaning, “I count all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.” It does not require to be taken to the “mount that might be touched” that it may learn its duty towards God; it has condensed the Ten Commandments into one word, and that word itself by a syllable, “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” This love, which subdues and tones the whole life, never could have been inspired by law. Legal enactments leave no scope for the play of the affections; they show the particulars and the aggregate, and demand payment to the uttermost farthing. Love comes from personal contact with the all-loving Christ, who gave himself a sacrifice unto God for man’s sake. Love can be learned only at the Cross. Strange as it may appear, the loving apostle has marked this love as a corollary. He says, “We love him because He first loved us”: how delicate is that logical form! Does this love, then, exempt us from keeping commandments? By no means. But now we come upon the commandments in another spirit and from another point. “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not grievous”; they demand no servile obedience, they are done by the heart, and not merely by the hand. “If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” Amid such love how can it be otherwise than that the yoke should be easy and the burden light? Under the inspiration of such love, instead of avoiding commandments we inquire diligently for them; constantly the heart is asking, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” “And whosoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things which are pleasing in his sight.”

Law regulative and educational, and law judicial and penal, is an expression of the Divine purpose accommodated to human limitation and human guilt. All incomplete life must be placed under tutors and governors, under formal statutes and decrees. Young life lives by the senses, and must, therefore, have corresponding arrangements made for its defense and edification; appeals must be made to the eye and the ear, and if need be, the flesh must feel the sharpness of the penal rod. All this comes of incompleteness. Life is not spheral; at first it is but an arc, and law assists in the extension of the periphery, and corrects, sometimes severely, every aberration of the unsteady or unwilling hand. This external adaption to human incompleteness is not required by those who are in Christ, for in him “dwells all of the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” and we “are complete in him,” complete in every sense; complete beyond the small entirety which the dreams of technical theology have comprehended. This is what Jesus Christ came to fulfill. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly: “might have it completely; might so have it as to be behind the reach of death; might so have it as to bring “the power of an endless life” to bear upon “the things which are seen and temporal.” This great bestowment of life—in other words, this vast increase of manhood—was rendered possible only by the cross of Christ, and the crucifixion which we endure upon it: “Our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.” Christ said that he would “draw all men to him,” “if he was lifted up from the earth;” draw all men to him to be crucified with him, for men cannot be men in the highest sense until they have undergone crucifixion. Paul said, “I am crucified with Christ.” No man can be morally crucified without Christ; he alone made crucifixion possible; and only by joint crucifixion with him are we made free from “the law of sin and death,” and from that “other law warring in our members,” for “they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh, with the afflictions and lusts” and can understand the apostle when he inquires, with somewhat of amazement if not anger in his tone, “If ye be dead with Christ in the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances?” He means that, if they had been “planted together in the likeness of his death,” they would have been planted “also in the likeness of his resurrection,” and so have had much life, which means much liberty. The whole is a question of life—the vitality of man had run down to a minimum and could be increased only by the infusion of Jesus Christ’s life; and as that began to operate each could say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” “I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.”

Here, then, we obtain an idea of the influence of Christ’s cross upon the law which God gave to the earlier generations. It magnifies that law and makes it honorable, yet delivers those who accept Jesus Christ as their Savior from the bondage of the letter. The law of Sinai, comprehending as it did worship, natural affection, self-discipline, and all social virtues, received a deeper and wider interpretation from the work of Christ. It ceased, in the case of the true Christian, to be a formal externalism, and became a living and gracious power in the heart. It so far, too, quickened and strengthened man’s power of understanding the nature of God, that man needed not to study the letter with painful desire to reduce its meaning to the utmost so as to accommodate his own weakness, but inspired him with a heroic and unconquerable determination to “know nothing among men but Jesus Christ and him crucified,” and to “spend and be spent” in the service of the Son of God. Instead of throwing the commandments into contempt, it gave them a higher moral status, and even Sinai itself was shorn of its greatest terrors when viewed from the elevation of the cross. Love was really the reason of the law, though the law looked like an expression of anger. We see this, now that we love more; love is the best interpreter of God, for “God is love.”

A practical point arises here: the cynic hears of an idea, and contemptuously contrasts it with the actual life of Christians. With the scorn which only cynical nature can feel or simulate, he points to the errors and weakness of men who profess to be in Christ, and asks if these are the fruits of the law of the Spirit of Christ Jesus. It is the inquiry of man who mistakes an atom for a globe. The experience of Paul is the best reply: “I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into the captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” A distinction must be made between the sins which have the full consent of the mind and those which arise from the weakness of the flesh; these will be conquered as the spirit becomes stronger. Paul anticipates the possible use which cynics and hypocrites may make of his reasoning, and inquiries, “Shall we sin because we are not under the law, but under grace? If any objector should imagine that Paul grants liberty to sin, let him ponder Paul’s words: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof, neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto God. Thus liberty is guarded; thus an unholy use of privilege is forbidden, and the libertine must go elsewhere than to Christ’s Gospel if he would bow down to the bad sovereignty of his own passions.