The Law of Moses

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THE
LAW OF MOSES

AS A RULE OF NATIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL LIFE
and

THE ENIGMATICAL ENUNCIATION OF
DIVINE PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSES

By Robert Roberts

Author's Preface

It would  not be possible, in the present temper of the public mind, to offer a more uninteresting book than a treatise on the Law of Moses. The feeling of the general reader is, that the subject belongs not only to the ancient, but the antiquated; not only to the old, but the obsolete; not only to the lifeless, but the discredited and the untrue. But experience shows that there is no reliable guidance in the feeling of the general reader, or the temper of the public mind. Nothing is more changeable, nothing less founded on true reason. The general sentiment that regards the Law of Moses with aversion, professes to regard Christ as the supreme expositor of divine truth, without apparently being aware, or at all events without giving due weight to the fact, that Christ was a zealous upholder of the Law of Moses, and avowed it to be his mission to fulfil that law—declaring with emphasis that "not one jot or one tittle would pass from the Law till all was fulfilled". An enlightened mind has to make a choice between Christ and general sentiment.  Considering how purely human and uninformed the public mind is on such matters, there can be no hesitation in choosing Christ, though such choice necessarily places a man in an insignificant minority with much present disadvantage. Public sentiment will change and pass away. Jesus says, "My word shall not pass away". By this word, the Law of Moses is upheld as the Law of God. As such, it is entitled to all the attention and admiration to which the reader is invited in the following pages. (The Author, September 20th 1898).

Preface to subsequent editions

CONTENTS & ANALYSIS OF CHAPTERS

I.—LAW: ITS NEED AND BEAUTY
Man’s need of law—Man innately lawless—False philosophy—But law must be suitable—Systems of law—The Mosaic only divine—Christ’s endorsement thereof —Importance of study because divine—Its admirable character—Its public rehearsal in main features after Israel’s entrance into the land—Its commendation by Moses before his death—Aim of the law as a mouth-shutter—Also its enigmatical shadowings of present rupture and future reconciliation—Its mission in clearing the way for the grace of God by bringing man under condemnation.

II.—BEFORE THE LAW OF MOSES
The world not without divine law before Moses—The times of Abraham. Noah, Adam—The flood—The tower of Babel—Melchizedek, the centre of divine law among descendants of Noah—A new start in Abraham through faith—Not a new principle but the new form of an old principle—Adaptation to altering circumstances—Divine law and priesthood as old as Eden—Every obedient man his own priest from Abel to Abraham—The interval between the covenant with Abraham and the exodus of Israel from Egypt under Moses—Lingering traces of the knowledge of God—Balaam, the Egyptian priests—Perverted remnants of knowledge—Heathen idolatries and ritualisms corrupt vestiges of knowledge from Noah—From Abraham to Moses—Perfecting of individuals—The bulk of Israel little better than the Egyptians—Ezekiel’s testimony—Why add God redeem them ?—Their organization as a nation, a measure with divine aims irrespective of their character-Israel made willing by affliction in Egypt—The negotiations between Moses and Pharaoh—The departure on the night of the Passover—Through the Red Sea to the Wilderness—The call of Moses to Sinai—The covenant proposed to the people.

III.—AT SINAI
Meeting with God—A divine address to the whole nation from the summit of Sinai—Recital of the ten commandments in the hearing of the whole assembly, by “a great voice”—The tables of stone—Their description as “the moral law” objectionable—Morality not an element in the nature of things—Morality extraneous to man and dependent wholly on the law of God—Hence killing and not killing right by turns—“Moral difficulties of the Old Testament” imaginary —Due to wrong ideas of moral law—God’s own description of the ten command-ments-The covenant between Him and Israel—The rest of the law mere appurtenances and amplifications—Unsuitable and unjust to regard the ten commandments in any other light than that in which the Mosaic record exhibits them—A speech from God as the basis of a national covenant—Afterwards “done away”—In what sense done away—The new law in Christ revives their excellent rules of action—The law of Moses unable to confer life because of human weakness—But made operative through Christ, who was born under it and obedient in all things—Learned misconceptions of the subject through wrong views of human nature.

IV.—THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Analysis of the ten commandments—Their order—God, family, and other men—Their beauty compared with humanly evolved systems—Greek and Roman civilizations—Contemporary laws of Canaan, Assyria, and Egypt still worse—The uprise of the Mosaic law in their midst a miracle—The first commandment mits incorporation of Israel’s deliverance—The meaning of this—Appeal to what Israel knew, and a guarantee of the historical veracity of the exodus to all subsequent generations—The Decalogue and the exodus bound together—Philosophy of the exodus—That God might be known—Revelation a necessity —Knowledge of God rests on the evidence of the senses—The Mosaic achievements in Egypt—Our conceptions of all scientific phenomena must be subordinated to this—The logic of the first commandment irresistible—The second commandment—God’s jealousy of the honour that belongs to Himself alone—The age of idolatry, continued in the age of statues, busts and memorials. Likenesses of Greek and Roman celebrities, but none of God’s servants—Reflex effect of the commandment—Jealousy as affirmable of God—Its difference from the human sentiment—Its basis in wisdom and goodness—The third commandment—Reverence for the name of God—Taking the name of God in vain.

V.—THE SABBATH LAW
The fourth commandment—More artificial in a sense than the rest—The Sabbath law exclusively Israelitish—A beneficial institution—The British nation and the Sabbath—The meaning of the Sabbath and the spiritual objects of its institution—Its observance before the law—Its association with the six days’ creation work—Scientific objections—The earth more than six thousand years old—The Bible account of creation not inconsistent with this, but on the contrary involving it—The Pre-Adamite state of the earth—The creation era—The angelic agents employed—Hebrew elohim and Greek angeloi—Their resting and being refreshed—The creation work—“Let there be light”—Light before the sun was made (to appear)—The explanation—The making of a “firmament” resulting in cloud and water—The formation of the seas, and the vegetation on the upheaved land—Next the appearance of the sun, moon and stars—Dr. Thomas on the subject—The explanation apparently strained and unnatural, but not really so—The rule for settling the doubtful and the unknown—Christ’s endorsement of Genesis compelling unreserved acceptance—The possibility if this without collision of truth—The statement that the Deity “rested and was refreshed”—The Sabbath also a memorial of the Egyptian deliverance.

VI.—THE SABBATH IN GENTILE TIMES
The Sabbath among the Jews in modern times—The Sabbath in Gentile Europe—Its observance a result of the establishment of “Christianity” and a proof of Christ’s resurrection—Substitution of the first for the seventh day —How it came about —The modern contention for the observance of the seventh day—Its unfounded character—The contentious activity of the Judaizers in Paul’s day—Paul’s opposition to them—His prophecy of their triumph—The Constantine church not an apostolic community, yet an instrument of preliminary blessedness to the nations of Europe—The Mosaic Sabbath not for the friends of Christ—Christ in relation to the law—The end of it—The disannulling of it—The Sabbath law displayed—The Sabbath in the days of Christ—His attitude anti-Sabbatarian —even examples—The apostles and the Sabbath—Their opposition to all observance of days—“The Christian Sabbath” a mistaken phrase—The breaking of bread on the first day of the week a different thing—The Sabbath in the age to come—The Sabbath in Eden—No argument for times under Christ—The true Sabbath-keeping in him.

VII.—THE REST OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Negative commandments—Not to do—How much human well-being depends on this —Man’s power to injure—Regulated by law, but law binding by authority only, and authority arising from divinity—The necessity for clear views here—Danger of setting aside obedience as the rule of righteousness—Moral laxities due to wrong theories—Submission wrongly regarded as a symptom of intellectual weakness—The FIFTH COMMANDMENT—Making light of father and mother—Modern lack of reverence—The only cure—Wisdom of the commandment to honour father and mother—Good effects on the children—Its reasonableness in view of the part performed by parents—Respect for parents among the Jews—Preparation for the other commandments—The SIXTH COMMANDMENT—“Thou shalt not kill”—Divine law alone creates the moral aspect of murder—Indebtedness of modern civilization to the effect of this law in many generations —Power of law as a protection to life—A higher protection in love which came after law—Under Christ, anger a crime—Obligation to love, one of the obligations of the truth—Extending even to enemies—An apparent impossibility, but possible when Christ is loved—The secret of triumph-Coming harvest of love—The SEVENTH COMMANDMENT—The sexual affinity—Its power and its blessedness when regulated by law—Necessity for iron barriers—Sophistries born of lust-Ignorant rebellions of all kinds—The two principles which settle the whole question—Libertinism—A short and decisive answer to all demoralizing theories—The law of Christ a stage higher—Impure thoughts forbidden—Powerful self-circumcision—The EIGHT COMMANDMENT—Not a matter of course—Wrongful taking made such only by divine prohibition—Atheism undermining the foundations of property, leads to socialism and anarchy—The divine recognition of personal possession as the basis of human society—Its regulation only needed to make the earth an abode of joyful life—Individual possession in the perfect age—The NINTH COMMANDMENT—The beauty of truth—The fate of liars—The TENTH COMMANDMENT—The finishing excellence—An uncovetous eye—Superb character of the whole law.

VIII.—THE LAND
The law of Moses a civil polity—More adapted than modem systems to promote social well-being—The modem system a failure—Settlement of the people on the land—Hurtful monopoly prevented by the law of Moses—pro rata division among families on the basis of inalienable inheritance—A nation of “landed gentry”—Self-extinguishing mortgages—Permanent beggary impossible—Creation of large estates prevented—Preservation of the social equilibrium—The divine land-law full of blessedness; the human, full of woe—Possession of the land married to the worship of God the coming cure for the world’s evils—Not “nationalization” but familization the true system—Objection on the score of increasing population —Every seventh year a year of rest for the’ land—The spontaneous harvest of that year, the property of the poor—The miraculous double increase of the sixth year—Levites to have no inheritance, but only residence at city centres—A spiritualizing element in the population—Imitation in the parochial system of Christendom—The law a failure in Israel’s hands—Its resuscitation and success under Christ.

IX.—PRIVATE LIFE AND PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS
The land in the possession of the people, but something else needful to prevent stolid dulness—Laws for the interweaving of God with every occupation of life—The law as to things not to be eaten and things not to be touched—Rest every seventh day—The rite of circumcision—Birth of children—Presentation and redemption of the first born—Personal diseases—Defiling contacts—God continually before the consciences of faithful men—The uncleannesses of the law, ceremonial, not physical—Not the less powerful as a felt experience—The law of taboo—Creation of the idea of holiness—National institutions—The feasts—The passover—The feast of tabernacles—Extensive comings together for a good time—A contrast to Gentile holidays—Conviviality with a rational and spiritual aim—Celebration of the national deliverance—The calling of God to mind—A joyous, subdued, ennobled nation—Presentation of the firstfruits—Charms of the feast of tabernacles—Most beneficent of public institutions—Calculated to produce a happy people.

X.—DEALINGS OF MAN WITH MAN
Phylacteries—The place for God in human life—The law of Moses as a policy of civil life—Gentile imitations—Responsibility for effects of individual action on others—Accidental injuries—The unprotected roof—The goring ox—The unguarded pit—The straying beast—Losing borrowed articles—Another man’s wife—Theft—Restitution—Sale of the thief—Stoning him on refusal to work—Carlyle’s rapture—Anti-slavery sentiment—Immortal-soulism and modern objections to the law of Moses—Comparison with Egyptian and Assyrian practices—An enemy’s interests to be conserved—Just judgment in all things —Majorities not to rule in such matters—The condemnation of tale-bearing, revenge, and cruel sport—Inculcation of mercy to the blind, the deaf, the poor, the distressed—Lending to be ready and free of usury—Liberal-handedness in the harvest field—Honour to grey hairs—Protection of female chastity—Death to the adulterer—The law, holy, just, and good, but Israel disobedient— A time of reformation coming.

XI.—THE COVENANT AT SINAI AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE TABERNACLE
First visit of Moses to the summit of Mount Sinai—Readiness of the people to promise obedience when he came down—The writing and reading of the laws added to the ten commandments—Ceremony of ratification of the covenant to obey—Concealed meanings—Silence with regard to the objects of what was commanded to be done—“All things by the law purged with blood”—The connection of this fact with death as a thing due—But the blood-shedding, being that of animals, only typical—The antitype in Christ—His own subjection to the purifying process—Paul’s testimony and the common view—The lesson of sacrifice: not human punishment but divine vindication—The enforcement of the will of God as the law of human action—Heathen religions and substitutions—Moses and Aaron and seventy elders invited to see the glory of God on the mount after ratification of the covenant—The parallel in Christ’s ascension—The throne of Eternal Light—Immensities of universal space—Six days cloud and silence—Adumbration of divine chronology in the shadowed substance—The “devouring fire on the top of the mount”—A counterpart—Command to make the Tabernacle —Exhibition of the plan to the eyes of Moses—Specially qualified artisans for the work of construction—The practical significance of the divine care for accuracy in the matter—The people invited to provide the materials of manufacture—The significance—The raw material for the final divine encampment on earth furnished by the human race—The voluntary character of the supply—Free-will the basis of God’s work with man—The making of the tabernacle—Its details as “the form of knowledge and the truth”—Christendom astray in rejecting the divine pattern—Every son of God a miniature tabernacle.

XII.—ALLEGORICAL TRANSACTIONS AT SINAI
Specifications for the construction of the tabernacle—Twice set forth in a “thou-shalt make” and an “and-he-made” series—Meaning of this apparently needless duplication—“Establishment” by doubling—Also the two phases of divine procedure: first plan; then fulfilment; command, then obedience; prophecy then history—Mutiny of Israel during the absence of Moses in the mount—The anger of Moses on coming down and finding the people in the act of idolatry—His flinging the tables of the law out of his hand—Parallel in Christ—Also in the return of Moses to the top of the mount to intercede for Israel—The exhibition of the divine glory to Moses between the “thou-shalt-make” and the “and-he-made” phases of the work—The glory of his face when he came down—The need for a veil—The historical counterpart in the days of Christ, and in days to come—The breaking and replacing of the tables of the law—The discernible parallel in the course of events since and in the prophetic sequel—The strangeness of such occurrences being made typical of future events—In reality an added beauty of the work of God—The pattern and quantities of the tabernacle—A meeting place with God and not merely a portable convenience—The order of making, different from the order of specification—A probable reason—The ark and the tables of the law—The cherubic figures—The throne of God in Israel’s midst—The shadows involved in their construction—God in manifestation—To be known only by revelation—The position of the ark at the very centre of Israel’s encampment—To be approached only by sacrifice—One of the secrets of popular distaste.

XIII.—THE ARK AND ITS CONTENTS
The tabernacle as an intimation of incompleteness in the union between God and Israel—Also as a prophecy of the way in which true union would be effected—Substance and shadow—Christ the way in head and body—The ark as a container —Its contents—First, the tables of stone—Typical of the divine law in the heart—Glorious state when this is affirmable of all men—Second, Aaron’s budded rod—Its history—Typical of divine choice and appointment as the basis of acceptable service—Divine purpose at the root of human well-being—Its budding as a type of the resurrection—The golden pot of manna: eternal life through Christ—The material of the ark: wood covered with gold—A prophecy of tried faith and resurrection recompense.—The blood-sprinkled mercy seat and cherubim all of gold—The perfect mediator—The glory between the Cherubim, the participation of the Eternal Father, in salvation through Christ—God at every stage—The crown of the ark, intimation of royalty—The rings of, pilgrim mobility in this state—The poles of, qualified carriers—Staves always in their place, faithful men always at work—The golden censer—Nadab’s and Abihu’s disobedience and death—Incense typical of prayer—The sweetness of the incense and its smallness—The antitype in Christ—Prayer a pleasure to God—Prayer in the immortal state—Praise its chief element—The memory of the one great sacrifice in the age to come.

XIV.—OUTSIDE THE VEIL IN THE HOLY PLACE
The holy of helios a meeting place with God—A truth lost sight of by natural thinkers, that God cannot be discovered or communed with, apart from His own disclosures of Himself—“THERE will I meet thee”—A revelation and a prophecy—The day when the curse is removed and complete communion established—The present a time of divine silence though not of divine inaction—The veil concealing the ark—Why it was there—Its significance of flesh-nature in its Christ form—Rending of the veil as to death and resurrection—Composition of the veil—Different materials blended—The significance of this complexity—The fine-twined linen—Sinlessness—The divine sonship of Jesus—“Josephism”—The scarlet significant of sin—How this applied to Jesus, a sinless man—The babe of Bethelem—Adamic flesh and blood—A sinless man subject to the consequences of sin—The difficulties raised—Chiefly of Romish origin—The blue and the purple—Healing and royalty—All the foreshadowings realized in the righteous : son of David—The four pillars on which the veil was suspended—Do they denote the “four evangelists” ?—The gold hooks and silver sockets—Outside the veil in the holy place—No wisdom—No light except from the seven-branched candlestick—The significance in probation—The oil and the beauty of the oil—The trimming of the lamps morning and evening—The daily reading of the Scriptures—No “light of nature” adequate to the revelation of God—“Natural religion” a myth—Will worship—The incense altar in front of the veil—Altar of sacrifice outside—The incense altar inside, a speaking symbol of the essentiality of prayer to acceptable worship—No strange incense or strange fire—God’s own truth the basis of approach—The blood-sprinkling on the altar of incense once a year, an intimation that contact with the sacrifice of Christ is essential to acceptable prayer—No relation to the stranger in any way—The table of shewbread—Twelve cakes, twelve tribes—Israelitish character of the whole polity of true religion—Salvation pertaining to the Jews—Modern forgetfulness of this—The divine plan one from the beginning.

XV.—OUTSIDE THE TABERNACLE—AMONG ITS BOARDS AND COVERINGS
The incense on the shewbread—The eating of the bread by the priests—The gold-lined walls of the tabernacle a powerful condemnation of the modern attitude towards faith—The reasonable character of faith as an exacted condition of divine acceptability—The vision of the golden city—The curtains at the door of the tabernacle—The material of the curtains the same as that of the veil—The meaning of this—The same Christ in another relation—The five pillars, five men permanently distinguished in the work of preaching Jesus as the door—The sockets of brass—The boards composing the tabernacle—The mechanical compactness of the whole structure—A probable spiritual significance—The boards considered as types of individual men—The four corner pairs braced together—Prominent divine servants in couples at turning points in the nation’s history—A structural parable with doctrinal and prophetic significances—The coverings laid over the tabernacle—first, a composite gold-hooked fabric in ten parts, of similar material to the veil—second, a larger covering of goat material tacked together with brass hooks—third, a covering of red ram’s skins, and fourth, of badger or seal skin—The literal purpose of the coverings—The spiritual significance, both as to %he material and the method of make-up—first, the Christ body—second, ecclesiasticism—third, the civil power—fourth, nature.

XVI.—THE COURT OF THE TABERNACLE
Tabernacle fenced off by a curtain wall of linen hung on wood pillars in brass sockets—The material—Its significance in righteousness—The world outside the divine economy—“They that are in the flesh cannot please God”—Men must come inside the walls of righteousness—The four pillars of the gate, the gospel narrators—The 56 pillars of the court, notable servants of God—Significance of the brazen sockets, the setting in the earth, the shittim wood of the pillars and the silver mountings—The uncircumcised not eligible for entrance—Nature, object and appointment of circumcision—Obedience and not gratification the ground of acceptance—The common thought opposed to truth—Invented religions of no final value—Natural religion a myth—The lesson of the tabernacle —God’s appointment the basis of acceptable approach—Circumcision plus sacrifice in the worshippers—The brazen altar of burnt-offering inside the court—The necessity and meaning of sacrifice—First in type, then in Christ—Why animal sacrifice was inadequate—The truth proclaimed by all sacrifice, that man is separated from God and can only return in God’s way—The popular fallacy about being “good” as the way to be saved—The relative positions of God and man forgotten—The Gospel and the Mosaic institution at one in declaring man’s position to be hopeless apart from God’s own methods and appointments—The laver—After sacrifice, washing—Confutation of modern views—“The blood” only an ingredient in the process of salvation—Probation—After reconciliation, reformation—After death (and resurrection), the judgment—Correspondence of the Christ-doctrine and the Mosaic parable.

XVII.—THE PRIESTS AND THEIR ATTIRE
The setting-up of the tabernacle necessitated intermediaries—Israel’s uncleanness —Mercy to be shown but not at the sacrifice of holiness—God would be approached only through a man of His own choice, assisted by men of His own appointment-Aaron and his sons-Qualifications-The antitype in Christ—Christ as both sacrifice and priest—The brethren or Christ and the sons of Aaron—The priests to be dressed in a particular way, “for glory and for beauty” —The beautiful meanings condensed into this expression—The ways of man naturally base and hideous—The works of the flesh and the works of the Spirit—The great contrast between the natural and the spiritual—The true meaning of the word “spiritual”—The antitypical glory and beauty of the Aaronic garments —The materials—God in every aspect of them—Man acceptable only when clothed in vestments of divine origin and significance—The condemnation of all human invention in religion—The ephod—The order of investiture—The coat—The girdle of the coat—The robe with bells and pomegranates, the bottom fringe—The ephod and its attachments—(shoulder buckles and breastplate)—the most complicated, beautiful, and significant of all the priestly garments—The Urim and the Thummim—The mitre—The plate of pure gold on the forehead, inscribed “Holiness to the Lord”—The clothed high priests “bearing the iniquity of the holy things”, a strange expression become intelligible—The antitype in Christ.

XVIII.—THE CONSECRATION OF AARON AND HIS SONS
The tabernacle made in twelve months after the exodus—Setting it up—Investiture of Aaron—Washing with water—The antitype in Christ—A difficulty dissipated —Different sorts of the same nature—Jesus’ human nature mentally washed by the Spirit—Putting on the coat—The antitype—The ephod with its adjuncts of glory and beauty—The anointing with the holy oil—Typical of the anointing with the Spirit—The sprinkling of the oil and sacrificial blood upon every article in the tabernacle—The antitypical application—An objection as to the uncleanness of the children of Israel—The difficulty experienced by various thinkers as to Christ—His sacrifice “for himself” first—The statement that it was so and the “necessity” that it should be so—The blending and poising of apparently opposing principles—The end of all difficulty in the reception of the testified facts—For himself that it might be for us—The contrast between Christ as he now is and as he was—A “body prepared” for the abolition of death—A reverence for Christ “not according to knowledge”—The condemnation of sin in the flesh—An inspired expression defining a truth not in collision with any other—God’s objects in the case the key—The relations of the Creator and the created—Forgiveness after the amende honorable—The significance of bloodshedding—The declaration of the righteousness of God—Inspired definition of the object of the death of Christ—Jesus not to be regarded as an individual merely, but as the representative of his people—“Crucified with Christ”—Forgiveness through the forbearance of God—The curse of the law brought on Christ by the mode of his death—The whole principle—Redemption achieved in Christ for us to have on conditions—Destruction of the typical analogies of the Law of Moses by the erroneous views of the death of Christ.

XIX.—THE FINAL DEDICATION
Inauguration of the daily service of the tabernacle—The offering of the ram of burnt offering and the ram of consecration—A counterpart in Christ concealed by some views—Roman Catholic and Protestant views—Other views—Christ cannot be kept out of his own sacrifice—The bullock carried out of the camp and the ram not so carried out—Right ear, right hand, right foot touched with the blood of consecration—Waving of the parts in the hands of Aaron—The accompaniments of unleavened bread, oiled cake, and wafer—The significance—Active, joyful, holy life—Realized in Christ’s present state—The deeper meaning of the consecration services—“So hath the Lord commanded” but with fore-shadowings afterwards intimated—Purposed metamorphosis of the race by voluntary sacrifice—Only a partial experience now—The future—Activity—“Doing his pleasure” a cheering prospect—Eating of part of the ram—Seven days in succession—The surplus destroyed—“Too late”—The eighth day of the service typical of post-millennial experience—Israel on their faces before the manifested glory of the Lord—The sacrificial foundation of eternal glory always in remembrance.

XX.—THE ROUTINE SERVICE OF THE TABERNACLE
The tabernacle ready—Its services meaningless mummery to the naturalist—its real character as means of creating the conception of holiness—its immediate object and its secondary significance—Misapplications in the ecclesiasticisms of the age—Church consecrations—Ritualisms— Semi-Mosaic religionism not without its use—Routine services of the tabernacle daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly—The daily incense, lamp-trimming and lamb-sacrifice (morning and evening)—The counterpart in daily life—The light, Bible reading—The incense, daily prayer—The daily sacrifice, Christ in the head, heart and hand of true worshippers—The daily meat and wine offering—Strength and gladness in the service of God—Mosaic condemnation of Laodiceanism and the loose thoughts of moralists—The Sabbath day in the tabernacle—Double services: why?—The new moon celebrations—Benefits conferred by the moon—Appreciation of the works of God—The motions of nature in their relations to the contriving energy of God —God’s delight in the recognition of His wisdom—The new moon in the age to come—A succession of joyful activities in the new heavens and new earth.

XXI.—THE ANNUAL SERVICES
Several annual services in the tabernacle—The year in the life of man—The Passover —Not only Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, but the highest spiritual attainments typified—A significant association—Moses and Christ the two poles of God’s great work—The world’s scepticism as to Moses an insult to Christ who endorsed him, and to God who appointed the passover—The recognition of the exodus required at our hands—Our generation condemned, and its clerical leaders in unbelief—The feasts of the firstfruits, founded on an institute of nature—God’s beneficence in the harvest, yet the Egyptian deliverance to be interwoven in its thanksgiving services—The special services in the tabernacle—The wave-sheaf followed by the offering of a lamb—In seven weeks, on the completion of the harvest, two loaves of the new flour, accompanied by the sacrifice of seven lambs—The significances—Gratitude for the God-given bread of the field to be mixed with the acknowledgment of sinnership in blood-shedding—A prophecy of the sinless man through whom alone God will be approached in worship—Sinners not acceptable without the name of Christ on them—Human resentment of this appointment—The firstfruits in the antitype of Christ and his people—The two phases: the single sheaf and the two loaves seven weeks after—Ascension and Pentecost—A chronological inexactness with probable design—The feast of ingathering—The most elaborate of the tabernacle services —The seventh month—first day, a holy convocation: tenth day, day of atonement: in five days after, the construction and occupation of arboreal booths —The natural charms of such a feast—The numerous but gradually-diminishing sacrifices in the tabernacle—The Kingdom typified—The grand assembly on the eighth day, the close of the Kingdom.

XXII.—VOLUNTARY SERVICES
Various occasions of voluntary service—The altar of earth—Or stone undressed—The correspondence in Christ—Josephite fathership excluded—Divine origin of Jesus—“Voluntary will” as an element in the sacrifices—A far-reaching principle, at the root of the problem of evil—The attitude of the atheist and the meta-physician-Facts and philosophic triflers—Human power of choice—God’s aims in creation—His pleasure in man, but in what relation ?—Obedience free and uncompelled—The door opened for evil in the conditions of the highest good—Evil came in through this door—Man guesses: the Bible reveals—The final triumph—The process slow because the result stupendous—Means and ends—Man allowed to fall, that he may in the end know God in His true supremacy and kindness—The myriads who perish—No difficulty in view of man’s mortality —The bright morning of God’s perfected work—Responsiblity and judgment as arising out of free will—The relation of light—The fatalism of the Turk—The gloom of the Calvinist—Hurtful reactions in modern libertinism.

XXIII.—THE MALE ELEMENT IN SACRIFICE
Form of approach to God prescribed—Not anything acceptable—Cain and Abel—The killing of a living creature—The pouring out of its blood—The divine explanation —A “male without blemish”—The sex feature prominent—The female subordinate—Why ?—Historical facts and natural adaptations—“The new woman” fighting against nature—Man having the first place in redemption—Salvation by a man, not by a woman—The woman subordinately instrumental—Relative .positions of man and woman—Beautiful when determined by law—Naturalism contrary to nature—Human folly on the subject—The so-called “divine feminine” in the Godhead—All creation one stuff in different forms—The lessons of a zoological collection—Its application to the difference between man and woman—The same stuff differently organized—The organic power rooted in divine will—God manifestly in the mysteries of nature, but not to be found till He brought Himself near in revelation—God one and as lovely as we could wish Him to be—A great King not a Queen, but with more than a queen’s loveliness—The eternal masculine—The burnt sacrifice, a male figure of Christ—The anti-typical offerers—“Faith in his blood”—Rest—The sacrificial sheep or goat—Preparation of the Lamb of God—Difficulty to human understanding because men try to square it with human thoughts—Doves and pigeons in sacrifice—The same lessons as applied to Christ—“Crop and feathers” cast aside—Body cloven, but not parted—Spiritual analogies.

XXIV.—MEAT OFFERINGS AND PEACE OFFERINGS
Love-offerings—Gifts to God—Highest pleasure to God and man—Meat offerings acceptable through the priest and on the altar only—Easy to understand when divine teaching allowed to prevail—Christ the way—Meat offerings to be drowned in oil—The place of joy in the service of God—For sinners to mourn, for the righteous to rejoice—No place for the gloomy religion of the cloister and the cell—Meat offerings to be garnished with frankincense—The place of praise—Man likes it but God claims it and permits it to man only when he has had his superlative portion—All meat offerings to be seasoned with salt—The antitype—Sound, wholesome savory principle—Hearty loving intelligence essential to acceptability—No leaven—A serf-propagating thing tending to deterioration—Analogy to the operations of “malice and wickedness”—No liberality to God acceptable if offered with a wicked mind—Such an act possible—Honey also forbidden—The sweetness of self-gratification—Enjoyments permitted and enjoyments forbidden—Self-glory the anti-typical honey—The use made of the meat offering—Part burnt and part eaten—The significance—God and man conjoined in the object of gift—Oblation of the first cut corn, waved, not burnt—The probable meaning—A meat offering from the first cut corn might be burnt—The reason—The meat offering as the expression of friendship—The peace offering, pointing to reconciliation—Must be a living creature for sacrifice —Might be a female—The reason—Mother of the Saviour—Woman saved by the “child-hearing”—Offerings to be brought by the offerer, and not by deputy—The fat as well as the blood—Why—The priests to have the chief part—Mis-application by the clergy—The antitypical house of Aaron.

XXV.—BURNT OFFERINGS, SIN OFFERINGS, AND TRESPASS OFFERINGS
Compulsory and voluntary offerings—An adaptation to spiritual need—The diversity of offerings a perplexity at first—The difference between the different classes of offering—Gradations of atonement—Different degrees of sin—Presumptuous sin unatonable—The burnt offering—Why so-called—The type involved consumption of sin nature—The crucifixion—Flesh and blood to cease from the earth—Those who deny Christ’s inclusion in his own sacrifice—The removal of the ashes in the morning—The change of the mortal in the day of Christ—The sin offering—Sins of ignorance—Why should they require atonement—An escape from a false position—The ignorant sin recognizable when it “comes to knowledge”—An offering required, forgiveness offered—The reasonableness of the whole procedure—No accountability where there is no knowledge, but sin, sin, all the same—The offering for sins of ignorance—Wherein they differed from other offerings—An intenser repudiation of sins of ignorance—Why ?-Unconscious sin more hateful than known and acknowledged sin—How often may we grieve Him in our ignorance when self-pleased—The Laodiceans—Necessity for judging ourselves by the word—Cause of fear, ground of comfort —“The spirit itself helpeth our infirmities”—The antitypical eating of the sacrifices—The danger of false theories of the sacrifice of Christ—Why the flesh of the sin offering “most holy”—The antitype in Christ—The trespass offering—the distinction from the sin offering—All trespass is sin, but all sin not trespass —“All manner of sin forgiven unto men, except blaspheming of the Holy Spirit” —The combined effect of all the sacrifices.

XXVI.—MOTHERHOOD
Special impurities and special purifications—Childbirth—A period of seclusion for the mother—Then sacrifice—Spiritual intimations—Propagation a provisional thing Marriage absent from the perfect state—Males to be circumcised the eighth day—The mother remaining 33 days unclean—Probable antitype—Uncleanness for a female just double the number of days—Good remarks by brother Harvey, of London, on the difference between the man-child and the woman-child of this ordinance—The male-child type of Christ with his 33 years of natural life; the woman-child of his bride, who had personal sins to be atoned for—The number of days, 66, with an added six to represent the false or pretended Papal Bride—The moral and prophetic teaching of the type.

XXVII.—DISEASE
Disease and its treatment, evidently with a typical significance—Diseases of dis-organization—Leprosy and issue—Healthy mortals and unhealthy mortals—Human frailty and human wickedness—Curable and incurable leprosy—The spiritual meaning—Forgiveness of sin but only when not persisted in —The ceremony of the reception of the cured leper—The sacrificial lamb and the two birds—The allegory of the two birds, one killed and the other liberated—Orthodox misinterpretation inseparable from a false view of human nature —The key to this parable in the apostolic doctrine of the death of Christ— Christ the two clean birds in death and resurrection—The cedar wood, hyssop, and other adjuncts—The work of Christ through the apostles—The law as to issue—Its recognition as defiling—The spiritual import—The periodical infirmity of woman as the subject of sacrificial purification—The typical intimations —an ordinance that does for woman what circumcision does for man—Both the helpless subjects of vanity, with hope.

XXVIII.—DEATH
Special reprobation of death as a cause of defilement by contact—The cleansing—The water of separation—The ashes of a slain heifer—Why such stringent measures ? —A deep subject—The origin of death in relation to man—Death in the animal world—Attested revelation—Adjustment of revealed truth to natural fact—Human mortality the result of sin—The awful thing meant by sin—Life: what is it ?—An insoluble problem—Revelation—God the fountain of life—Death the negation of His own work and the penalty of treason—Death destroyed by death in Christ—Some admirers of Christ horror-struck without a reason—The Papal view and its mischievous results—A wrong idea of God’s objects—Subject difficult but beautiful and essential—John’s emphasis on the subject of Christ having come in the flesh—An immaculate Christ as unfit for the object of sacrifice as a seeming Christ—Approach unacceptable without a true discernment of the principles on which God is willing to receive erring man to friendship—The red heifer—the colour—the condition—the killing—the priestly presentation—the sprinkling of the blood seven times—the burning—the left ashes—the cleanness of the man gathering them—All types realized in the work of Christ—Christ’s forbidding Mary to touch him after his resurrection—Object of the various sacrificial ordinances—A solemn and imperative lesson—The holiness of God—An unbelieving and disobedient world.

XXIX.—MEATS
Beasts dying of themselves unfit for food—The reason not hygienic but spiritual —The flesh of particular creatures unclean—The principle of refusal—List of unfit animals—The classification based on spiritual significance—The principle allegorically involved—Peter and the vision of the knit sheet—The distinction of the meats done away—Still natural distinctions remain—Things good, things evil—Licence and fastidiousness alike to be avoided—The cud-chewing and hoof-parting animals—The sort of men that answer to the type—Spiritual food and spiritual life—Ruminating animals—The truth a thing for constant use—The typical eating of clean animals only—The avoidance of ungodly men—Dividing the hoof—surefootedness—Some all theory, and no action—The pig among the Jews—Pork and anti-pork controversy among the Gentiles—Singular state of things in view of the sow being a creature that symbolizes executive efficiency but indifference to the will of God—The moral combination most odious to God—The hygienic aspect of the question the least important—The law against unclean animals done away, but the thing signified remaining for ever—The classification of fowls and fishes on a different principle but meaning the same.

XXX.—NAZARITESHIP
A man at liberty to dedicate himself to God—The Nazarite not to drink wine—The reason—Interference with the natural equilibrium of the mind—The typical significance—Spiritual inabriation—Acceptable Nazariteship founded on cairn reason leading to strong love—The true Nazarites not shouting or theatrical religionists—Forbidden to cut the hair -The meaning—To come at no dead body—Domestic inconveniences—Jesus, the great Nazarite, made light of natural ties—The relationships of those who are sanctified by the truth—The Nazarite defiled by the sudden death of another near by—Important things suggested—The remedy for lost days—Confession, forgiveness, and reformation—The Nazarite’s separation a parable of probation—The prominence of favour in the process of salvation—The saints saved as forgiven men—The typical counterpart of the sacrifices to be offered by the Nazarite at the end of the days of separation.

XXXI.—GIFTS TO GOD
Gratitude yearning for utterance—Suitable provision in the law—Dedicating property to God—Redemptions on payment of money on a scale of values—Personal consecrations—Devoted things unredeemable—Samuel—Jephthah’s daughter—The typical distinction between sanctification and devotedness—This mortal and the immortal beyond—God only fitly served in the latter—The apparent inference from special consecrations that Israel were at liberty to live secular lives—A mistake—Only special holiness in the midst of a holy people—A type of what is coming—Provision for sanitation—Far better than modern sewage schemes—A clean, holy, happy earth coming—The antitype—The incorruptible camp of the saints—A perfect nature—perfect digestion—No residue—A pleasing prospect—Food not necessary to life in the future state, but assimilable to the spirit substance of the new body and a source of pleasure and refreshment —Wizards—The reason of their not being tolerated—Necromancers, witches, diviners, familiar spirits and all pretenders, and robbers of the glory of God.

XXXII.—MINOR THINGS
The non-muzzling of oxen in treading out the corn—A typical significance encouraging to workers—Unequal yoking of ox and ass—A lesson on the limits of practical co-operation—Neck not to be put in the same yoke with the unbelieving—The first numbering of Israel in the wilderness—Names of the enumeraters—Their meanings—A concealed prophecy in a dry list—The numbering a preparation for inheritance—A pattern as to days to come—The life of the redeemed not a social chaos—Exact in number and definite in station—The second numbering—The number about the same after forty years—Its probable significance in the second and .final adjustment of human affairs at the close of the thousand years—Exclusion of the tribe of Levi from the census—Given to God—Counterpart in the saints given to Christ—The Bride in the endless age—Captains, guides, and officers for ever—The immortal population in the perfect age an organized and well-ordered society—The honour of being called to the millennial kingdom greater than the millennial invitation to life eternal—The saved state a state of endlessly-varied and joyful activity.

XXXIII.—FINISHINGS
Extraneous but related matters—The present of wagons and oxen by the twelve princes—The divine acceptance of the present—The lesson of the incident—Unprescribed co-operation acceptable if in harmony with the principles of divine work—Another instance in Jethro’s recommendation of helpers to Moses—Modern applications—Shadowing of the work of Christ in the age to come—The twelve apostles on twelve thrones—Reigning and co-operating—Yet individuality of thought and volition—The offering of the princes besides the present of the wagons and the oxen—Twelve similar offerings on twelve successive days—Why ?—A probable explanation—The nature of the offering and its typical significances, pointing forward to the perfect service of God—Orders to march—Order of procession—beautiful order—No hitch—A foreshadowing of the perfect order that will prevail in the age of glory—The end of these commentaries —The law, though ended in Christ, to be brought into force again in Israel’s midst at their restoration—The testimony that it will be so—General prophetic allusions to the same effect—In the day of Christ, the Law of Hoses the understood typical memorial of the work accomplished in him—The last injunction of the Old Testament, to remember the Law of Moses—The hostile attitude of the nineteenth century—In the twentieth century, the law enthroned in Zion.

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Category: The Law of Moses

CHAPTER I

LAW: ITS NEED AND BEAUTY

How much the excellence of human life depends upon law we do not at first realize how much! We grow up under the feeling that the best thing for us is to be just let alone to follow the bent of our own sweet will. We learn at last that this is just the worst for any man or nation. Experience confounds false philosophy. Men are not as cabbage roses that will automatically unfold their blushing beauty, and exhale their fragrant odour if left alone; they are rather as the apple trees that will grow crabs unless grafted with good slips. The dictum of Christ and Paul is found correct: “In the flesh dwelleth no good thing” (John 6:63; Rom. 7:18).

The fact is nationally illustrated in barbarous races, and, individually, in the uneducated members of civilized communities. The extremest demonstration is seen when a child happens to be kidnapped and brought up in the woods away from human culture, of which there have been instances.

Modern literature is impregnated with false notions on this subject. These false notions are generated by a false method of study. Man is looked at as he develops under the surroundings of an established civilization, and because he is interesting when enlightened and subject to law, he is supposed to be innately good and rational, requiring only a proper self-evolution. Disastrous results come from this theory when it is acted on in either public or family life. A lawless community, or stubborn and rebellious children bring misery when the hand of repressive discipline and kindly culture is absent. Human nature in itself is only a bundle of potentialities, which cannot be developed except by firm discipline under the wise administration of good laws. The best men of the best nations are those that have seen the most trouble, along with the possession of knowledge.

But what is law? In the abstract, it is a rule of action made obligatory; but its value must depend not only upon its obligatoriness, but upon its nature. Unless a law is calculated to evoke results of well-being, its obligatoriness will be a calamity. Its enforcement will oppress—and destroy instead of blessing. Hence the importance of devising laws and rules that will work out for good. But who is able to do this? It evidently requires a very far-sighted acquaintance with human nature and its needs to be qualified to prescribe a law which in all points will work out individual and social well-being. The world knows much of law of one kind or another. That it has not attained to the law that it needs, is manifest from its evil state, and the ceaseless law-tinkering and agitation for law-tinkering going on in every country.

Among all the systems of law that have appeared among men, there is only one that makes any admissible claim to be Divine; and that is the system known as the Law of Moses. Of this we have the most ample information in the Bible, apart from which we could have no reliable knowledge of it, for Jewish tradition and Rabbinical gloss tend rather to obscure than to reveal its features. We could wish for nothing fuller or more satisfactory on the subject than we get in the Bible; and we must assume on the present occasion that the Bible is good authority in spite of all the hostile endeavours of German, French, and British criticism. That body of criticism seems a weighty affair to people who make no endeavour to master the subject for themselves. In the abstract it is a mighty mass, but reduced to its elements, it only amounts to the opinions of men groping in obscurities, who hazard suggestions in a learned style, and catch up and send round each other’s suggestions with the effect of holding each other up in their uncertainties. A single authoritative declaration of the resurrected Christ is as destructive to the whole mass as a spark of fire would be to a mountain of gunpowder.

We have more than a single word. Christ says that God spoke to Moses (Mark 12:26), and that Moses gave the law (John 7:19), and that the books containing it are his writings (John 5:46–47); and that it is easier for heaven and earth to pass than one tittle of the law to fail (Luke 16:17). This is decisive against a whole world of speculation or doubt. We may trust absolutely, on Christ’s authority, to the unmixed divinity of the law given by the instrumentality of Moses. We are certain not to be deceived or disappointed in Christ’s view of the case: who can say as much for the merely speculative critics of these late days?

If the law of Moses were not divine, there could be no object in considering it. A merely human conception of what was suitable for an age long gone by would be of no practical interest to men of our age, and of no value for guidance in a state of things so radically different. If it could be shown there were good things in it, they could only appear good on a principle that would leave us at liberty to discard or modify them according to our particular bias. Moses, in that case, would be down on our own level; and we probably should not feel disposed to submit our judgment to his on the mere score of antiquity, but probably the reverse, as we should naturally hold a later and longer experience to be a better guide than the experience of Moses at so early a time.

It is as a divine system that its study becomes so important. There is something in a work of God for us profitably to exercise our faculties on. A divinely prescribed rule of human action must be wise; and a ritual system that is divinely declared to be an allegory of the principles and the purposes before the divine mind in His dealings with the human race, cannot but be interesting and profitable when worked out by the clues divinely supplied (as they are in the later writings of inspiration, by the apostles).

The study of the law of Moses on this basis will lead us to share the intense admiration of it expressed in various parts of the Bible—panegyrics that otherwise appear as the mere extravagances of sentimentalism. Such for example as the language of the Psalmist: “O, how love I thy law; it is my meditation all the day” And again, “The law of thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver”; and again, “I hate vain thoughts; but thy law do I love”; and again, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb; Moreover by them thy servant is warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward” (Psa. 119:97, 72, 113; 19:9–11).

Moses himself speaks thus on the subject: “Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me … Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day?” (Deut. 4:5–8). Paul in another way utters the same praise: “The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good… The law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin” (Rom. 7:12, 14).

That the law should be strenuously enjoined on Israel is natural in view of its divine character. One of the most interesting of all the interesting incidents connected with Israel’s settlement in the Land of Promise, when they came out of Egypt, was the public endorsement of its leading features by the assembled tribes in the valley formed by the two hills of Ebal and Gerizim—as commanded, and the imprecation of a curse on those who should fail to keep it. The particulars will be found in Deut. 27:2–26; Joshua 8:33–35. In the presence of the massed multitudes, the Levites, stationed in the hollow, and within hearing of all (as travellers have found who have experimented), briefly recited the principal commandments of the law in rotation, and the whole multitude, at the end of each sentence, ejaculated an endorsing “Amen!” which must have sounded like a wave breaking on the shore. It was also a commandment (Deut. 31:11–13) that, always when Israel should gather at the feasts (which was three times in a year—Deut. 16:16), the law should be read in their hearing.

Before leaving them, Moses was very earnest in his entreaties that they should be obedient. He impressed upon them that their well-being depended upon it: “If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law … . See “, said he,”I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; in that I command thee this day to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply… I call heaven and earth to record this day against you that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live” (Deut. 30:10, 15, 19). There is no more interesting chapter in the whole Bible than the long chapter in which he describes the blessings and the curses that were associated with the keeping or the breaking of the law in Deut. 28, or the similar recital in Lev. 26. Joshua, before his death, spoke to them in a similar vein: “Take diligent heed to do the commandment and the law, which Moses the servant of the Lord charged you, to love the Lord your God, and to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, and to cleave unto him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul” (Joshua 22:5).

Such later sayings as the following are the natural corollaries of the subject :—“Whoso keepeth the law is a wise son: but… he that turneth away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer shall be abomination” (Prov. 28:7, 9); “He that keepeth the law, happy is he” (29:18); “As the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel” (Isa. 5:24). “The earth is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant” (24:5).

AIMS AND SHADOWS

These things concern the law as a rule of action during the present mortal life. But we learn from apostolic teaching that there was (1) a deeper meaning, and (2) a more far-reaching aim. The deeper meaning is briefly expressed in the statement of Paul, that “the law was a shadow of good things to come”. The more far-reaching aim is revealed in the declaration that “the law entered that the offence might abound”, and “that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world become guilty before God” (Rom. 5:20; 3:19)—statements that are unintelligible until we discover that the object was to make man feel his native powerlessness, and that he might be placed in a position in which salvation should be a gift by favour of God on the condition of faith leading to obedience.

We look at these two points a little more closely before passing on to the study of the law in its details. Their separation will simplify and help the study. We find that the “shadow” feature of the law had two aspects: first, the figurative exemplification of the actual situation of things between God and man—as when Paul alleges that the tabernacle was “a figure for the time then present”, and explains the solitary entrance of the high priest once a year into the holiest of all with the blood of animals to be a signification by the Holy Spirit “that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest while as the first tabernacle was yet standing” (Heb. 9:9, 8). And second, the foreshadowing, or showing beforehand in an enigmatical manner, the purpose of God as to the method by which He would open the way for free communion with Himself on the part of sinful man. This second aspect of the matter is plainly affirmed in the statement that “the law was a shadow of good things to come”: that the law was“the form of knowledge and of the truth” (Rom. 2:20), and that the body (or substance) of the law-shadows “is of Christ” (Col. 2:17); further, that the promulgated righteousness of God by faith in Christ without the law was “witnessed by the law” (Rom. 3:21). This view of the matter enables us to understand how Christ could say that he had come to fulfil “the law and the prophets”, and that “till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matt. 5:17, 18).

Keeping carefully distinct these two elements of the typical law—which might be described as the present and the future significance of the general shadows—we shall be the better able to see what the law was designed to teach without falling into the mistake sometimes made of attributing to the law a power which it did not and never was intended to possess. We shall find it was a shadow both of the ruptured relations of God and man and of the means by which He should restore those ruptured relations in His own time; but not having in itself the justifying efficacy that some in Paul’s day imagined (Acts 15:5, 24; Gal. 5:4; 4:21–31); but, on the contrary, was a purely temporary institution destined to pass away when its mission should be accomplished in silencing man and developing God’s righteousness in Christ (Gal. 3:19–21; 4:3–5; Rom. 3:19–20; Heb. 7:18–19; 8:7–13; 10:3–4).

Our enquiry, when we come to this part of the subject (which will not be at the first), will be: which of these typical features of the law enlighten us concerning the actual position of man in his state of separation from God? and which of them tell us of Christ as the great purposed healer of the woe?

Over-arching the whole as a rainbow, is that larger mission of the law, which men are so liable to omit or fail to appreciate, viz., a clearing of the way for the manifestation of the kindness of God.

This is the last lesson we learn: the beauty we last perceive. Naturally so; it belongs to God’s point of view; and our own point of view is our first, and for a long time, our only point of view. God’s kindness is full and bountiful and unconstrained, but in the matter of admitting created beings to a participation in His open friendship and divine nature, it has its limitations and conditions of so strict a character that one act of insubordination on the part of Adam sufficed to put an end to it. The work of restoration is being carried out on the basis of this principle being vindicated. There must be no boasting, says Paul. Most reasonable. Boasting is barbarism, even between man and man who are equal. What is it towards God, who is the fountain of all being? God will be head. He is so, and it is only reasonable that the fact should be recognized. Where is there any monarch or human official of any kind who would consent to work where his authority was challenged or dignity affronted? If this is a tolerable principle of action amongst fellow-mortals, is it not absolutely indispensable with God, who is the author of our life and the strength and support and wisdom of all creation? Yet it is a principle that man ignores in his pride. It is a principle that God asserts by bringing all men under condemnation first of all. He has done this by the law of Moses. Unless there is forgiveness, there can be no salvation. Forgiveness is favour (grace), and God requires the honour of “faith” towards Himself as a condition of the favour. “Where is boasting then ?” enquires Paul. “It is excluded. By what law? of works ? Nay, but by the law of faith.” “It is of faith that it might be by grace”—“that God in all things may be glorified”: “that no flesh should glory in his presence … that according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (Rom. 3:27; 4:16; Pet. 4:11; 1 Cor. 1:29, 31).

The principle is perfect in its reasonableness and ravishing in its beauty: for it secures the highest happiness of which man is capable (either in his corruptible or his incorruptible state), when he bows before God in grateful and reverential submission, and at the same time it admits of the great Increate finding pleasure in man. There is, therefore, a depth of true philosophy unsuspected in the words of Paul’ “The law entered that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound’ that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 5:20, 21), In a new and brilliant light appears that other Scripture : “God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his consellor ? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed to him again ? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things to whom be glory for ever. Amen” (Rom. 11:32–36).

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Category: The Law of Moses

CHAPTER II

BEFORE THE LAW OF MOSES

To see the law in its right place, we must look at the circumstances going before. We must not imagine that the world was without law from God in the times before the law of Moses. There is the clearest evidence that law, commandment and statute were in force, and that men were righteous or wicked according to their attitude towards these during that time. Thus of Abraham God said to Isaac, he “kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes and my laws” (Gen. 26:5), which was centuries before the giving of the law. So, of Abraham’s contemporaries, it is testified, in the case of the subjects of Abimelech, king of Gerar, that they were “a righteous nation“, and the king a man of integrity (Gen. 20:4, 6); and, in the case of the Sodomites, that “they were sinners before the Lord exceedingly” (Gen. 13:13). The abstract possibility of finding righteous men in Sodom was admitted in the Lord’s response to Abraham’s question: “If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes” (18:26); and the existence of godlessness as the prevalent quality of man at that time is recognized in the remark of Abraham to Abimelech, “Surely the fear of God is not in this place” (20:11).

Indeed, the entire history of the world before that time, as given in the Bible, is a history of man’s relation to God. When Adam was driven out of Eden, his relation to God was not suspended, though changed by the sentence of death affecting all mankind. Man was under command to walk in the way of God, but, at the end of over 1,600 years, “the wickedness of man was great in the earth”: “all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth”: and God said, “I will destroy man whom I have created” (6:5, 12, 7). There were exceptions to this state of things besides Noah in his day. Not only Abel, in the day when the human race was limited to Adam’s family circle, but afterwards, in the days of Seth, we read that “men (in a communal capacity) began to call on the name of the Lord “(4:26). Enoch also was a prominent example, of whom we read that “he walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (5:24), on which Paul’s comment is: “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him; for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God” (Heb. 11:5).

In the days of Noah, things had attained a bad development. There was a complete abandonment of the restraints of divine law among the population, and God saw fit to remove them by a flood, saving “only Noah”. The flood was not an ending of the Lord’s law among men, but the assertion of submission to God as the divinely desired rule of life for all men. The reason of Noah’s exemption from the universal destruction was expressed thus: “Thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation” (Gen. 7:1). The continued life of himself and family was to be on the basis of submission to God: “Behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you … between me and all flesh that is upon the earth” (9:9, 17).

The divine claims upon human submission as the law of human life became more manifest as men again multiplied upon the earth. They proposed to make themselves a name by building a great tower as a rallying point which should prevent their weakening through dispersal. But they were not allowed to carry out their ideas. God interfered with their enterprise, confounded their speech, and “scattered them abroad upon the face of all the earth” After this scattering, the activity of divine law becomes luminously visible in the office of “Melchizedek, priest of the Most High God”, who blessed Abraham on his return from the rescue of Lot. We should not have known from the casual mention of him in Gen. 14:18–20 how great and real a man he was, if he had not been referred to in Psa. 110 as exemplifying the nature of Christ’s priesthood, and if he had not been the subject of extended comment by Paul in Heb. 7, where we are asked to “consider how great this man was unto whom even the patriarch Abraham gave the tenth of the spoils… first being by interpretation King of righteousness, and after that also King of Salem, which is, King of peace” (verses 4, 2). We know very little as to the details of his position, his origin or his work: but there he stands before us, in the centre of human life as it was in those days, representing the claims of divine law among the descendants of Noah, who though far declined from the standard of Noah’s righteousness, had yet 470 years to run before the cup of their iniquity (in the case of the Amorites) was considered “full” (Gen. 15:16).

When we come to the case of Abraham, we do not come to the introduction of a new principle, but to the beginning of a new form of the same principle. The call to separate himself from his ancestral kindred and to leave his native country and depart to another country that God would show him, and the promise that God would make of him a great nation and should ultimately bless the whole family of man in him, required a faith special to himself; but did not begin the operation of the law of faith. Paul traces this law right back to Eden, introducing Abel as its first exemplification (Heb. 11:4), Abraham standing only fourth on his list of illustrations. He was the root from which faith and obedience expanded into a national form, embodying the system of the law of Moses. But the law was operative towards the race generally before his time. The reason of a new start in him appears to have been that the procedure employed when mankind were few in number, and comparatively tractable, was no longer suitable when they were developing in extensive populations on all hands, and sinking slowly into a state like that which prevailed before the flood. The altering circumstances required the creation of a national kernel or basis of divine operations in order that God’s ultimate purpose to bring the human race into reconciliation with Himself might be accomplished. This gradual transition from a general to a national administration of divine law—this narrowing of already active divine operations with the descendants of Noah to relations with a particular family organized into a nation—enables us to understand the apparently anomalous circumstance that there were “commandments, and statutes, and laws” before the laws of Moses (Gen. 26:5), and that there were “priests that came near to the Lord” before the consecration of Aaron or the separation of the tribe of Levi (Exod. 19:22). Divine law and priesthood were in fact as old as Eden. They came into operation immediately after Adam’s expulsion on account of disobedience; but in a form suited to the extremely limited circumstances of human life when Adam’s family circle for centuries formed the only population of the earth. A public and official priest was not required when every obedient man offered his own sacrifice. Every obedient man was his own priest, as appears in the case of Abel, Noah, Melchizedek, and Abraham. In the same way, Levi, the son of Jacob, before Jacob had become a nation, appears to have acted as priest, and to have received divine recognition in the matter, by reason of the special aptitudes referred to in Malachi 2:5–6. His sons would be likely to take after him in the matter, and appear to have acted for the other members of the family and afterwards for the tribes before the formal separation of the Levitical tribe in the wilderness.

These considerations throw light on the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and on the circumstances filling up the period between the confirmation of the covenant with Abraham and the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. They account for the appearance of Melchizedek as a priest during the life of Abraham. They account for Abraham building an altar and offering sacrifice when he came into the land of Canaan (Gen. 12:6–7), and for the recognition of God among those with whom Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob came in contact during their sojourn in the land, such as Abimelech, King of Gerar (Gen. 20:4), Eliezer of Damascus, Abraham’s eldest servant (24:35), Laban and Bethuel (24:50), Ahuzzah, one of Abimelech’s courtiers, and Phicol, captain of his army (26:28)’ also for such lingering traces of the knowledge of God (though mixed with superstition) as exemplified in the case of Balaam, and even the Egyptian priests (Num. 22:8; Exod. 8:19). There were everywhere the perverted remnants and dying memories of the law of God which had come through Noah from previous times. The very idolatries and ritualisms and sacrifices of the Egyptians, Hittites, and other nations were vestiges of the divine “way” which had again become corrupted in all the earth religion had degenerated from a thing of enlightenment and obedience to a system of tradition and slavish compliance.
The first promulgated revelation had spent its force, so far as man was concerned, and if the race was not again to be a failure (fit only to be swept away by a second flood), the divine work had to be placed on the basis of a national organism which would generate a sufficiently constraining influence to develop suitable individual units, though it might not thoroughly affect the mass. Nothing was to be done with the national organizations extant. A new start had to be made’ new ground cleared’ a new nation made. This was done in the call of Abraham and his posterity. There was a necessary preliminary of 430 years, which gave scope not only for the multiplication of Abraham’s descendants, but for the perfecting of prominent individuals among them for a part in the final and permanent upshot of the work (in the immortal age beyond)—Luke 13:28. Among those are Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Levi, and Moses, of whom we are expressly informed, and probably many others whose cases are not recorded. By faith were all these exercised and developed, but not to the exclusion of obedience, which has always been the corollary and test of acceptable faith. Of Abraham, the most distinguished of them all, James exclaims, “Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect ?” (Jas. 2:22). They were all of them obedient to the (unrepealed) “statutes and commandments and laws” which Abraham kept to God’s well pleasing (Gen. 26:4–5). “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.”

As regards the bulk of Abraham’s posterity, by the time they had become numerous enough to be a nation for rescue from the Egyptians who enslaved them, they were in little better condition than the Egyptians themselves. We learn this from God’s message to them by Ezekiel (chap. 20:8), from which it appears they were addicted to the worship of the idols of Egypt. God had said (verse 7), “Defile not yourselves with the idols of Egypt … But “, He says, “they rebelled against me, and would not hearken unto me: they did not every man cast away the abominations of their eyes, neither did they forsake the idols of Egypt”. It is a question insoluble, on all human principles of action, why God should have redeemed Israel from Egypt under these circumstances. Human thoughts can imagine a fitness in the rescue of a deserving nation; but why should God have interfered on behalf of a nation to whom Moses said: “Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess the land … for thou art a stiffnecked people” (Deut. 9:5); to whom David said: “Our fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt” (Psa. 106:7); and concerning whom Isaiah was commanded, “Write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever, that this is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear the law of the Lord” (Isa. 30:9).

There is an answer; but it is an answer whose force is not felt till the mind has learnt in the furnace of deep affliction that man is nothing but a transient appearance, and that God is the only intrinsic reality. God gives the answer through His prophet Ezekiel (20:9): “I wrought for my name’s sake, that it should not be polluted before the heathen, among whom they were, in whose sight I made myself known unto them, in bringing them forth out of the land of Egypt”. This answer is identical with what we read in the above-quoted psalm: “He saved them for his name’s sake that he might make his mighty power to be known” (Psa. 106:8).

It is a first principle of the subject, therefore, that Israel’s deliverance from Egypt and organization into a nation was irrespective of Israel’s state, and was wholly a measure with divine aims, with the promotion of which Israel as a nation in the first instance had very little sympathy. Yet it was needful that they should be brought into a state of willingness to co-operate, and finally into a state of fitness for use as an instrument in the work. These two objects were secured by the admirable methods adopted. As regards the first, Israel was brought into great affliction. Egypt’s jealousy was excited in reference to Israel’s increase and prosperity; and Pharaoh’s suggestion found a ready response among his people, that they should “deal wisely” with the alien race and set over them taskmasters to afflict them. “And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour, and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field.” Finally they ordered the destruction of all male Hebrew babies in the hope of stopping their increase. No wonder that” the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God”. The persecution continued at least 80 years, for we find Moses himself cast out as a babe under the edict for the drowning of the children, and we find the oppression in full rigour when he stands before Pharaoh at 80 years of age to demand their release.

Such a prolonged experience of extreme hardship was well calculated to humble and predispose the nation for what was to come with the arrival of Moses, and it was probably also a punishment for the state of practical apostasy into which Israel had sunk. However this may be, the moment Moses presented himself along with Aaron with the commission received at the burning bush and the signs attesting his authority, “the people believed: and when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel, and that he had looked upon their affliction, they bowed their heads and worshipped” (Exod. 4:31).

We have in another work (The Visible Hand of God) considered and traced the negotiations that passed between Moses and Pharaoh on the subject of Israel’s demanded release, and the stupendous displays of divine power that occurred in all the land of Egypt to compel Pharaoh to let Israel go. We need not repeat that line of contemplation here. We pass over the six months or so during which the resistance of Egypt was gradually broken in the ten successive plagues, and behold the children of Israel after the first Passover, and after the appalling visitation of death in every Egyptian house, leave the country in orderly array, and march from Rameses to Succoth, and thence in a series of marches to the shore of the Red Sea, where they are caught as in a trap, pursued by Pharaoh, and delivered by the miraculous opening of the sea, through which they marched to the opposite shore, while Pharaoh and his following host are drowned.

Safe on the eastern side of the sea, they unite in the magnificent song of deliverance set forth in Exodus 15. Afterwards they pursue their way to Horeb, which they reach in about two months. Here in the rock solitudes of the wilderness and under the shadow of the frowning heights of Sinai, they encamp at the end of what may be termed the first act in the national drama. Miraculously delivered at the end of about a century of oppression, they are in the best circumstances in which a multitude could be placed for receiving that communication and impress of divine law for which it was the object of all these experiences to prepare them.

Every measure was now adopted which was calculated to turn the situation to the best possible use for the object in view. First, Moses, the mediator or intermediary in the whole operation, is called to the top of the mount to receive a message for the mustered multitude. Nothing more appropriate could be conceived. God could have spoken to Moses in the presence of the whole congregation, or He could have spoken direct to the whole congregation, as He did presently for a particular purpose, but there were reasons against both of these modes at this moment. A message to Moses in their hearing would have been lacking in the dignity and impressiveness that always accompany well-timed reserve, and there could not indeed in that case have been any object in limiting the communication to Moses. A message direct to themselves was out of the question on many grounds. They were an assembly of unenlightened, faithless and rebellious men, though for the moment m the interested and grateful mood that is produced in the least intelligent of men by the conferring of a great benefit. They were not such as it was possible that God could have any direct dealings with. With Moses, it was different: he was “faithful in all his house”, as God Himself testified a short time afterwards, adding, “With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold” (Num. 12:7–8). It was therefore beautiful and appropriate that the first thing done on the completion of their journey from Egypt should be to call Moses to the solemn privacy of the top of Sinai.

“And Moses went up unto God.” The first communication he received was most natural to the situation. He was directed to fix Israel’s attention on the events of the last nine months, with a view to their divinely-intended purport: “Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel; Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine” (Exod. 19:3–5). What a suitable opening to the most wonderful negotiation that ever took place upon the earth! Moses went down to the people with the brief but pregnant message—inviting them, on the basis of what had happened in their sight and hearing during nine exacting months, to offer a voluntary subjection of their own wills to God, as the condition of their selection. What answer could the people make but the answer they gave: “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do”. Thus was the foundation of the first covenant laid, in knowledge and consent, to be presently ratified by sacrifice.

Moses took back the answer to the Lord. Next we have a step characterized by all the reasonableness and majesty that always appertain to divine procedure. God would manifest Himself in a sensible manner in the presence of the whole congregation that there might be no room for doubt hereafter as to the reality of His part in their transactions. They had seen the miracles performed in Egypt, but it had been as yet a matter of faith with them that they were the works of God. Moses had told them so, and in all the circumstances, their belief was reasonable; but God would now put the matter beyond all doubt by speaking to Moses in their hearing, so that faith in the work of Moses might not be a matter of reasonable tradition, but might be established for ever upon the actual evidence of their senses: “Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with thee, and believe thee for ever” (Exod. 19:9). Not only so, but what He should say should also be addressed to the congregation themselves, and should be a declaration of the first principles of the covenant He should make with them as a nation—a compendium of the whole law He should deliver to them—as we discover from the speech divinely delivered from the summit of Sinai in the hearing of” six hundred thousand men, besides women and children”

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Category: The Law of Moses

CHAPTER III

AT SINAI

It was fitting that there should be due preparation for the stupendous event of an audible address from the mouth of Almighty God (personated by an angel—Acts 7:53; Heb. 2:2) to a mustered nation at the foot of Mount Sinai. There had been a measure of preparation in all that filled up the interval since the selection of Abraham and the appointment of circumcision as the token of the covenant and the condition of their choice. Their deep affliction in Egypt, following the pure prosperity of Joseph’s time (like the seven years of famine after a similar period of great plenty), prepared them to give themselves up willingly into the hands of the deliverer when he appeared. And the observance of the Passover in anticipation of the last and most crushing plague on the eve of their departure from “the iron furnace, even Egypt” (Deut. 4:20), enabled them to feel they were under the protection of the God of their fathers. (Circumcision and the Passover, preceding the law, were afterwards incorporated in the law, and will most naturally engage our attention when we meet them there.) But now they were actually to “meet with God” (Exod. 19:17). So they were commanded to “be ready against the third day; for on the third day the Lord will (not only speak but) come down in the sight of all the people upon Mount Sinai”. They were to “wash their clothes “, and abstain from the common defilements of domestic life, and to keep at a respectful distance from the mount at whose base they were encamped. The terrible penalty of death was attached to non-compliance.

The people were entirely compliant; and on the morning of the third day, there were awful tokens of the promised interview between God and a nation. The top of the mountain was concealed in dense cloud, intermittently illuminated by the play of lightning. From the cloud ascended thick volumes of smoke as from a furnance. Roars of thunder pealed forth at intervals, the earth trembled under their feet. In the midst of all these terror-inspiring manifestations, the steady strident sound of a loud trumpet note was heard from the summit, “sounding long and waxing louder and louder”. On a sudden the tumult ceased, and in the silence, “the Lord spake unto all the assembly out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, WITH A GREAT VOICE” (Deut. 5:22). The whole assembly heard the pealing words which filled the air to the following effect:

“I am the Lord thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
“Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
“Thou shalt not kill.
“Thou shalt not commit adultery.
“Thou shalt not steal.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.”

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Moses, in rehearsing these impressive circumstances forty years afterwards, says the Lord spoke these words “with a great voice, and he added no more” (Deut. 5:22). This cannot mean that He added no commandments after the ten commandments, for he immediately proceeds to narrate that the ten commandments having been delivered, the Lord ordered Israel to their tents, and said to Moses, “But as for thee, stand thou here by me, and I will speak unto thee all the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which thou shalt teach them” (Deut. 5:30–31). It means, then, that the voice that proclaimed the ten commandments stopped abruptly at the prohibition of covetousness. Nothing was added to the oral delivery from the mount—no tapering off—no peroration—no gradual and ornamental finish, as there had been no exordium or oppropriate introduction—no rounded periods—none of the mere arts of rhetoric: nothing beyond solemn substance and meaning. There must have been something very impressive in this sudden cessation of “the great voice “, as there was in its sudden commencement in the pause after the terrific overture. The whole method of their communication seems to mark off the ten” words “or commandments with a special emphasis, as possessing a peculiar and leading importance: for not only were they rehearsed in the hearing of the whole assembly, but immediately afterwards, as Moses records, “the Lord wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto him” for special preservation.

It is customary to speak of these ten commandments as “the moral law”. This is an objectionable description on two grounds: it takes for granted a false theory of “morality “, and it ignores the divine estimate and description of the ten commandments. The false assumption of human philosophy is that” the moral law” is as natural and spontaneous a thing as the physical laws of the universe. It is assumed that the ten commandments are as natural as the law that you must have air to breathe and food to eat before you can live, and that their obligation arises from the constitution of things, and not from their having been enjoined by divine authority. The “moral law” is thus thought of as a part of nature, and not as the appointment of God. This view will upon study be found a fallacy, and like all fallacies, it works confusion in the applications of knowledge. If the so-called moral law were an element in the nature of things, it would be found asserting itself like the law of gravitation or the law of eating and drinking. Instead of that, man left to himself is an ignorant savage, who kills and steals with as little scruple as a lion or a tiger. He has no idea of wrong in these acts. He never exhibits the conception of moral restraint till the idea has been introduced to him by some process of instruction. Even Paul (in Rom. 2:12–15), where he is supposed to sanction the idea of an instinctive sense of right and wrong among “the Gentiles which have not the law”, recognizes that men are only “alaw unto themselves”, and “do by nature the things contained in the law”, when “the work of the law” has been “written in their hearts” (see verse 15). It is very few Gentiles who have been the subject of this operation. His testimony of the world in general harmonizes with experience to this day, that “the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God” (Rom. 8:7), and that the Gentiles unilluminated “walk in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened,” and are without God and have no hope (Eph. 4:18; 2:12). Those who had had “the work of the law written in their hearts” had had it so written by the pen ministration of the Spirit of God by the instrumentality of the apostles, as Paul says: “Written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Cor. 3:3). These were “the Gentiles” of whom Paul writes in Rom. 2. The rest he speaks of as “other Gentiles who walk in the vanity of their mind” (Eph. 4:17).

If the ten commandments were the moral law, and the moral law were “a law of nature”, killing could never be right, whereas the killing of the Canaanites became Israel’s duty (Deut. 20:15–17), and the killing of the Amalekites, Saul’s duty, for failure in which Saul was ejected from the kingship (1 Sam. 15:3, 23). It is the wrong view of the subject that creates what are called “the moral difficulties of the Old Testament”. People holding it read of the slaughter of the Canaanites and many other things with a shock for which there is no ground at all. Duty is obedience to the commandments of God, and not the following of a supposed natural bias. Natural bias may be whim and darkness. The keeping of the commandments of God is the following of the light, whatever the commandments are. He makes alive, and has a right to kill, and when he says “Kill”, it is wickedness to refrain. The slaughter of the wicked Canaanites was by the order of God, and became an act of righteousness. So with all the other so-called “difficulties” They are difficulties that vanish with a right understanding.

The ten commandments are only to be rightly estimated by God’s own description of them. He calls them (Exod. 19:5) “My covenant”. Moses says: “He wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments” (Exod. 34:28). Also in his rehearsal to Israel on the plains of Moab, at the end of the forty years, he said: “The Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire And he declared unto you his covenant… even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of stone”. The rest of the law is treated as an appendix to these: “And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it” (Deut. 4:12–14). The “sanctuary” and “ordinances of divine service”, prescribed in what is called the ritual and ceremonial law, in its detail, are scripturally treated as mere appurtenances and amplifications of “the first covenant” promulgated from Sinai in the ten commandments (Heb. 9:1). Of the allegorical significances contained in these, it will be our duty to enquire by and by.

The Mosaic view of the ten commandments as God’s covenant with Israel, agrees with the historical allusions they contain, and with the fact that they were addressed exclusively to Israel. A “moral law”, in the sense of modern parlance, would be as much the concern of the Chinese and the Babylonians as of the Jews: it would be of universal application—and it would not start off with a circumstance so local and historical as the Exodus, which is the substance of the first commandment and the basis of the other nine: “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt”. It is in fact, unsuitable and unjust to the subject to regard the ten commandments in any other light than that in which the Mosaic record exhibits them: namely, as a speech from God to Israel, defining the leading maxims on the basis of their consent to which He would choose them as His people: “Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”. “Now therefore if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth in mine” (Exod. 19:5–6).

This view is also in accord with the undoubted and otherwise extraordinary declaration of the New Testament that this covenant, “written and engraved on stones”, has been done away. Paul calls it “the ministration of death, written and engraven on stones”, because a curse was pronounced on everyone that should infringe any of its enactments (Deut. 27:26). James’s application of this curse is so stringent as to make a man who transgressed one of the commandments an offender against all. His argument is : “Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all: for he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law” (James 2:10). Because, therefore, the Mosaic law condemned to death those who should disobey any of the ten commandments, or their engrafted corollaries, and because no man was capable of a spotless obedience (save Christ), they were in their totality a “ministration of death, written and engraven in stones”; and had they continued in force against men, their condemnation would have been inevitable and their salvation impossible. Consequently, it was necessary that they should be “done away”, as Paul three times expresses it in 2 Cor. 3:7–14; or “taken out of the way”, as he has it in Col. 2:14—not taken out of the way, in the sense of being abandoned as a rule of acceptable behaviour before God, but taken out of the way in the sense of Christ discharging their whole claims in every sense and then dying under the curse of the law of which they formed the kernel or foundation—a law which in another clause enacted “Cursed is he that hangeth on a tree”, and therefore cursed Jesus who so hung as Paul declares, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree” (Gal. 3:13). When Christ rose after thus bearing the curse of the law, the law had expended its cursing power on him, and was therefore “taken out of the way” in him, so that all who put on his name and came under his authority in faith and baptism were “free from that law” This is Paul’s argument in Rom. 7:1–4, to which the reader is referred. The pith of it is in the assertion of verse 4,” Ye are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead”; and in the further statement in verse 6, “We are delivered from the law, that (law) being dead wherein we were held”. Therefore, as he says in Rom. 6:14, and substantially in Gal. 4 (the whole chapter), “Ye are not under the law, but under grace” (or favour), being recipients of the kindness of God in the forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake, and participating jointly with Christ in the heirship of the good things wrought out by the righteousness of Christ.

But though the covenant of Sinai is thus “done away in Christ”, it is not done away in the sense of abolishing the excellent rules of action which that covenant enjoined. The new law in Christ, which believers come under, revives those rules in a stronger and more efficient form. Paul is very clear on this point, in which he is supported by the highest demands of reason. He enquires, “Shall we sin (that is, shall we do the things that the law forbids), because we are not under the law, but under grace ?” (Rom. 6:15). He meets the suggestion with an emphatic “God forbid”. “Being made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness” (verse 18). The new form of God’s wisdom in Christ is that “the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit” (Rom. 8:4). The meaning of this is practical, and not mystical and ceremonial as some people make it. Paul interprets for us thus:”.. Love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this (the ten commandments), Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:8–10).

The position of the matter is therefore perfectly clear. The law, so excellent in itself, would have given life, if men had been able to keep it, as Christ and Paul unitedly declare (Luke 10:25–28; Rom. 7:10), but because they were unable to keep it in the absolute perfection required, it condemned them, and stopped every boasting mouth, and made all the world guilt3; before God (Rom. 3:19), establishing such a situation that if salvation was to come, it could only come by the kindness of God, in the particular form He might appoint, which indeed was the result aimed at, as Paul declares in Rom. 5:20–21. The law was unable to confer life because men were unable through weakness to keep it; it became instead a cause of death (Rom. 7:10; 8:3; Gal. 3:21). Salvation, therefore, could not come by the works of the law, but had to come in another way, namely, by forgiveness through grace (or favour); but not unconditional forgiveness. Through Christ forgiveness was preached and offered: that is, “By him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses” (Acts 13:39).

When we say “through Christ”, we bring into view the fact that the law has been made operative in him. He was “made under the law” (Gal. 4:4), to which he was obedient in all things; and for his obedience “even unto death” he became “the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (Rom. 10:4). Thus the law was made effectual through Christ. The law was not a failure; God’s word never “returns to him void”
It accomplished its mission in two directions. It condemned Israel, who were disobedient—every man of them, more or less—“stopping every mouth”, and it bestowed its blessing on Christ, who “magnified the law and made it honourable” (Isa. 42:21). The mode of his death brought him under its curse, but without the surrender of his righteousness, since his submission to that mode of death was in itself an act if obedience. It was necessary that he should bear its curse away “to redeem them that were under the law” It was therefore necessary it should come upon him, yet that it should come righteously, that all the ways of God might be consistent one with another.

The law was a rule of procedure towards mortal men. It ceased to be a rule of procedure towards Christ when he died and rose again. As a rule of procedure towards all others, it could only condemn them, because they are all transgressors. Therefore righteousness for transgressors in the sense of forgiveness unto life eternal cannot come by the law. This was Paul’s great contention against the Judaism of his day. His argument is drawn to a focus in the statement of Gal. 2:21, “If righteousness come by the law, then is Christ dead in vain”. But he has not died in vain. He died to declare the righteousness of God as the ground of invitation for sinners to receive forgiveness. He died to remove the old covenant as a rule of procedure towards men.

The “learned” of this world misconceive the subject altogether. While they truly recognize the limited or tribal character of the Sinaitic enunciation, they draw wrong conclusions from it through the effects of a wrong theory in another direction. They assume that all men are immortal, and on a footing of equal acceptability to God, and that therefore a system like the Mosaic system, which limited its proposals to a particular nation, and ignored the rest of mankind, must have had a human origin. The argument really turns the other way; that the Mosaic limitations being divine are a confutation of popular views as to the nature and position of the human race.
The ten commandments as the authentic formulation of divine will concerning the deportment of individual man are of unspeakable moment. They embody the fundamental principles that regulate human life.