S. WHEREFORE THEN THE LAW?

WHEREFORE THEN THE LAW?

TEXT: Wherefore then the law? - Galatians 3:19. The "wherefore" is based upon the preceding statement that the covenant of grace antedated the law by 430 years; and another statement that no man can be justified by the law; and another statement that ye are not under the law but under grace; and yet another statement that you received the Spirit through faith and not the words of the law. Hence the pertinence of the question, "Wherefore then the law?" What purpose did the law serve?

Try to get, first of all, a scene before your minds. The Arabian Peninsula has about 22,500 square miles. It is a triangle. The Southern part of the triangle is a high table. land, 4,000 feet above the sea, and the mountains tower 2,500 feet still higher. Now, in that triangle of the Arabian Peninsula, there is a place perfectly level, two miles long and half a mile wide. On three sides of it this level place is enclosed by a mountain, rising somewhat abruptly, and at the far end of it, a solitary, tremendous peak uplifts itself 6,500 feet above the sea. That was the scene of the giving of the law. On that level place, two miles long and half a mile wide, the millions of Israel were gathered. On that mountain peak at the end of this plain, the cloud and pillar of fire settled to indicate God’s presence there. God on the mountain, Israel on the plain ¾ and that mountain has always been an historic one. There Moses was prepared for the ministry of the leadership of Israel for forty years and in its neighborhood the next forty years of his life were spent. There Elijah came after he was driven away by the threats of Jezebel, and, like Moses, fasted forty days and nights. And there, I believe, our Savior fasted forty days and nights in His preparation for His work. And certainly there the Apostle Paul spent three years of his life in preparation for his work. The Crusader and the Saracen fought around the foot of the mountain. Mistaken piety erected convents on that mountain, and there, not a great while ago, was discovered an ancient manuscript of the Bible, in that old convent on the mountain. Such the scene and such the history of the mountain. The time when that law was announced I can give you a date that you will have no trouble recalling 1491 years before Christ, God gave that law on Mount Sinai; 1491 years after Christ, Columbus discovered America. Thirty-four centuries ago, what we call the law was given-the law concerning which the question is asked, "Wherefore then the law?" Why was it given? The people of Israel had been wandering from the time of the faith of Abraham unto the time of this giving of the law, 430 years, and now being delivered from Egyptian bondage, and having been trained in hunger and thirst, and sickness and war, and being made to feel that in any of these trials God was sufficient, He now, while great clouds gather over the top of this mountain, mighty thunderings are heard, and the blackness is gored by the vivid flashes of lightning, in a voice that every man could hear distinctly, the most penetrating voice that ever fell upon human ear, made an overture to the people, and that overture was this: "Will you enter into a covenant of life with God? God will announce, so that you can hear every word He says, just what you will do on your part to carry out this covenant, and He will announce on His part what He will do to carry out this covenant. Now, will you do it?" And the people said that they would. The overture was accepted.

Then He said, "Take three days to prepare. Let every one wash his body and wash his clothes, and come clean before God; and do not come until you hear the sound of the trumpet. No earthly lips will blow it, but the sound can not be mistaken. It will be the sound of a trumpet, and when you hear that trumpet, come up and stand before that mountain, and God will come down on the mountain; but don’t touch it, and don’t let a beast touch it. You won’t see any similitude of God. You will see evidences that He is there, and every one of you will hear what He says." And so on the third day the people came, as prescribed, and when the mountain began to stagger like a drunken man, when it began to shake and tremble, when the blackest clouds covered it from summit to base, when the thunder reverberated through all that peninsula, suddenly, clearer than the thunder, rang out on the air the unearthly sound of a trumpet, and the record says it waxed louder and louder. There will be no other trumpetsound like that until the archangel blows the trumpet and wakes the dead. And from out that cloud came a voice, and that voice pronounced ten words-the Ten Commandments, we call them. He announced, one after another, the ten words of the law, and the people became more terrified at the voice than at the trumpet, and Moses himself said, "I do exceedingly quake and tremble." And the people said, "Don’t let us hear that voice any more. You go and commune with God and hear what He says, and you come and tell us." And so Moses sent the people back and he went up and communed with God. God told him the ten words and then God took two pieces of granite, about 27 inches long by 18 inches wide, perfectly smooth, and on them, with His own finger, He wrote in the Hebrew language the ten words. But in the meantime Moses had written them. It was Moses’ copy that the people had. God’s copy was for an entirely different purpose.

Moses wrote the Ten Commandments and then wrote all of the elaborations of the Ten Commandments that God announced to him during forty days, the Ten Commandments being the constitution, the elaborations being the statutes evolved from the ten, harmonious with the ten, and all of the enactments in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (and there are hundreds of them) are but statutes derived from the constitutional law, the Ten Commandments.

Moses wrote the first constitution, the ten sections; then he wrote what he called the judgments-that is, the judgments derived from interpreting the Ten Commandments ¾ and on a day appointed, the people again came before God; and Moses read from his copy (not from God’s copy) both the constitution and the statutes, and an altar was erected, and sacrifices were slain, and the blood of the victims was sprinkled first upon the altar, and then upon the Book of the Covenant, and then upon the people; and by this solemn religious ceremony the covenant of life records upon the part of the people with God was ratified. This covenant they shall keep - every one of the ten words - and all of the subsidiary legislation growing out of the ten words. They agreed that if they violated any one precept, the covenant was broken. They admitted the solidarity of the law, that he that is guilty in one point is guilty in all. It was only necessary to put in the evidence that he had failed at one point, that just one link of the chain was broken, and he must die. The law is spiritual. The commandment is exceedingly broad. It relates not merely to the overt act. It takes cognizance of the heart, of its desires. Thou shalt not covet thou shalt not desire ¾ thy neighbor’s goods, anything that thy neighbor has. Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not hate with the malice to kill; whosoever hateth is a murderer. The law is spiritual. When that covenant was read and blood was sprinkled upon the Book and upon the people and upon the altar, all the parties to it were bound. God is bound by the blood on the altar. The people are bound by the blood sprinkled on themselves, and Moses tells them plainly, "They that do these things shall live by them. Whosoever faileth to do any one of them shall die. I call heaven and earth to witness that in this Book of the Covenant I have set before you life and death. To obey is life. To disobey is death." The capital thought, the governing thought in the whole matter, is that the Ten Commandments constituted a covenant, a covenant of mutual obligation, and that it was a covenant of life and death. It was solemn engagement, ratified by blood, and the people said, "We will do this and we invoke on our heads the penalty of not doing it, and we take the oath of the covenant, made sacred by the witnessing of blood, that we deserve, and upon us and our children may come, all the recompense of reward in the way of penalty, if we do not comply with every jot and tittle of this law."

Well, what then did God’s copy amount to? He wrote His, as I told you, on tables of stone. The people broke the covenant, and the covenant being broken, Moses broke the copy, which was a witness, and then Moses came and pleaded: "If thou wilt, forgive these people-if not, blot my name out of thy book." He meant everything that he said. He did not mean, "Kill my body." He did mean, "Exclude me from the land of Canaan." He meant all that is involved in the word death, and banishment from God. He was the type of the Redeemer, in that he offered to die for his people.

God forgave the people that breach of the covenant, and the covenant was renewed and God wrote another copy. Moses wrote a copy for use among the people, but God wrote a copy for A witness. The Ten Commandments that God wrote were deposited in the Ark of the Covenant. They were not read by the people. They were in God’s handwriting. They were the witnesses of the compact. And when the nation ultimately and permanently violated the covenant, then there went away God’s copy, and no man knows what became of it, and it is utterly immaterial. It would serve no purpose if we had it. We have Moses’ copy. God’s copy was a witness of the compact, and the compact being broken, broken is the tablet of the witness.

Now comes up this question of our text. Before this law was given was there not a way of life, through mercy, held out to the people? Yes, 430 years before. And was not that way of life to be through faith? Yes. Wherefore then the law? Why was that law enacted? Why were the people permitted to go into that covenant? God knew they would not keep it. God knew that on account of the weakness of the flesh they could not keep it. You could not now. Only one man ever did, and that is the man Jesus Christ. Wherefore then the law?

Now I ask your patient attention to the following thought: When we say the law, we mean that law as then promulgated and written. Why promulgated and reduced to writing? That is what that meant. But the promulgation of these ten words, and the writing of them by Moses and the writing of them by God himself, did not create the obligations they imposed. The obligation of that law did not commence with its announcement and was not dependent upon the people’s knowledge of it for validity.

Law is law, not because it is put in the form of a statute, but it is put in the form of a statute because it is law.

Law is not law because you know it, but you should know it because it is law. The intent in the mind of the Creator when He brings a being into existence, is the law, at the last analysis, that governs. Whether it shall afterwards be expressed in a statute depends, but when it is so expressed and so published, that expression and that publication do not originate obligation. Obligation arises from the nature of the being and his relation to God. So then, the question I ask, "Wherefore then the law?" means, "Wherefore the written law?" Not law per se, not law as embodied in the mind of God, but wherefore put that law in writing, and announce it, and make it known to the people? What is the object of that? The intent of the Creator when He makes a being, is the law of that being, whether that being knows anything about the law or not, and if that being is one who propagates his species, then that intent, as the primal law, is binding upon that posterity to the remotest generation, and that posterity is under that law, entirely regardless of environment.

Environment may be favorable or unfavorable. If it be favorable, nothing is added to the commandment; if it be unfavorable, nothing is taken from the commandment. It is a fixed quantity, being the intent of God when He made man. If some of that posterity, through an ancestor, however remote, has inherited certain vicious propensities and tendencies to evil, that does not modify the law an atom. Over that child, inheriting from an ancestry a predisposition to evil, weak through the flesh, the law of God, in its unclouded serenity, shines just as bright as it does over an angel in heaven. No jot of it, no tittle of it, at any time, or under any circumstances, upon any descendant of the original man, is for one moment mitigated.

Now, as man has fallen, as his posterity are weak through the flesh, as now they cannot keep that law, wherefore write it out, accompanying its promulgation with thunder and lightning and trumpet and voice? Why ratify it solemnly with blood?

Well, the answer is that the object is to bring out in a written code, clearly expressed, the original intent of the Creator in making man. That written code was added because of transgression. Now what does that mean? It was added because of the transgression. It was added to discover the transgressor. Paul said, "I had not known sin except by the law," i.e., when that law said, "Thou shalt not covet," and he had that in writing, as he had that statute of God before him, why that revealed to him how much he had been transgressing. The law was added then because of transgression ¾ that is, with a view to disclose transgression.

Here were the fallen descendants of a fallen ancestor, continually crossing the path of rectitude, now to the right hand, now to the left hand, not knowing they were in sin; and their knowledge did not affect the question of sin, not knowing that they were continually going against the law. The law now was added in order that these transgressions might be made manifest; as if men in the dark had been continually going out of the path, and light comes and shines down, revealing a straight and narrow path, revealing the pitfalls and quagmires to the right and to the left. The object of the law was to disclose, to make known, the sin of which the man had been guilty; not only to disclose it, but to disclose it as exceedingly sinful; that sin might be made to appear as sin-that it might be stripped of its disguises, that it might stand in its own naked reality and deformity and beastliness and ghastliness, as odious and abominable in the sight of God. A standard was brought and placed by the side of men to help them to walk and follow a light, and that straight rule would instantly reveal any deviation, as that plumb-line, let down from the top of the wall going up, would show whether that wall had been going up straight. It was judgment to the line and righteousness to the plummet. The object of the law was to bring out the inequality, the deviation, the irregularity, the sins of men, and make them appear to he sin.

Now, the real law was there all the time, but the man did not know it. Wherefore then serveth the law-that is, the written law, the promulgated law, the Sinaitic law? It was to show that all mankind had gone astray-that there was none that did good, no, not one. No man loved God with all his heart. No man loved his neighbor as himself. The shining of that light upon the lost world brought out the startling fact that among the descendants of Adam there was not one ¾ no, not one ¾ that could expect to be acquitted at the judgment bar of God on his own righteousness. Wherefore, says the Apostle, "The law was our school-master to bring us to Christ." How that? If a man who has no clear light, and has no conception of the broadness and spirituality of the commandment, whose standard of righteousness has been lowered to his own life; if that man is under the delusion that when he comes and stands before the judgment bar of God, he will be acquitted and not condemned, I am sure you can never induce him to look to a Savior; but if you can take that man and drag him to the mountain that smoked and was crested with fire and shaken with thunder, and if you can turn that mountain over on him, with its denunciations and penalities, if he can hear that trumpet and hear that voice, and see how exacting is law, how undeviating is law, how holy and just and good is law, then he will know that he is a lost soul in himself. He will know that. He says, "The case is already against me. It is already adjudicated. I am gone. Who will deliver me?" By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. On account of the weakness of the flesh, on account of a fallen nature, the mind cannot be in harmony with God. The carnal mind is enmity against Him and not subject to His law, and neither, indeed, can be. The revelation of the law is a revelation of death. "I was alive without the law once," said Paul; that is, "I did not know it, but when the commandment came sin was made apparent and I died. I saw myself a dead man, a lost man."

Prior to any looking toward Christ, must come the conviction that you are lost. Conviction of sickness precedes an appeal to a physician; conviction of death precedes an appeal to a Savior; conviction of bondage precedes appeal to a liberator. "Wherefore then serveth the law?" "The law is our schoolmaster unto Christ." It, by showing us the utter groundlessness of any hope of salvation in ourselves, our unworthiness, our fallen nature, our utter and hopeless condemnation, makes us see our ruin, when a voice says, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Now, I come to a thought that you may not be willing to accept, but it is true. If, then, God knew man could not keep that law as a covenant of life, when a man becomes a Christian, is he under that law? The Apostle says, "Wherefore you are not under the law, but are under grace." Does that mean that when it says, "Thou shalt love God," I am not bound to do it? That when it says, "Thy shalt honor thy father and thy mother," I am not bound to do it? That when it says, "Thou shalt not kill," that I am under no obligation to restrain a murderous hand? No sir, it does not mean that. Well, what does it mean then?

It means that I am not under the law as a covenant of life. That is what it means. The writer to the Hebrews says that we are not come to that mountain, that smoke, that fire. We do not enter into an obligation that if we fail in any particular that we are lost. We are not under it as a covenant of life, but as a standard of righteousness we are under it, and if we go to hell we will be under it. In hell that law, that original intent in the mind of God, as to its oughtness will be just as when God first made man. But if we go to heaven, in heaven, brought there by grace, the oughtness of the Ten Commandments will be our standard of righteousness there.

There never will come a time when it will be right for us not to love God. There never will come a time when it will cease to be wrong for us to dishonor our parents. There never will be a time under any economy when it will be proper for us to covet anything that is our neighbor’s.

Well, what follows then? Now, here is the thought that I said that you might not be willing to accept-that as the law was the schoolmaster unto Christ, so Christ is the schoolmaster under the law. I mean to say that Christ’s work, all of it ¾ the obedience ¾ part of it, the dying-part, of it, the sacrificial part of it, the intercession, the whole of it, from His birth to His glorification is designed to bring us ultimately into a state of conformity, in heart, life and action, with that unchanging law; and He is a schoolmaster under that law.

How does that operate? You are not under the law as a covenant of life, but you are under the law to grace, and the first thing that grace does for you, of which you have any consciousness, is the work of the Holy Spirit upon your heart, convicting you of sinning against these very Ten Commandments. That is the first thing. Then when your nature, by regeneration is changed, what is the object of the change? It is to give you a disposition to keep the law, or the Ten Commandments, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. That is the object of it. That is the work of grace.

You do not by faith make void that law. It is the object of faith to bring you into conformity with the law. By your regeneration a new nature is given, a new life is implanted, and the outgoings of that life are longings after conformity to the law. You no longer say, "I hate God," but "Oh, how I love Him!" You no longer say, "I hate my neighbor," but "I love him. I am grieved that I do not love him more. I am grieved that I fall short in my duty to my neighbor." So Christ is the schoolmaster under the law. He is reversing the process now. You are doing it imperfectly. You are falling short in loving God and in loving your neighbor. You are falling short on every one of these Ten Commandments, but your mind, your inner man, is in harmony with Him. Your mind approves it. You wish you could do it. You want to do it. You try to do it.

Now comes in the next work of grace, and that is the work of sanctification. What does that work do? That makes a man love God more and more. That makes him love his neighbor more and more. That process continually goes on and on, until he comes to the last lesson of death, and then the soul goes into the presence of God. And what is the state of that soul in the presence of God? John says, "I saw under the altar the souls of them that had been slain for their testimony to Jesus." Paul says, "Thou art coming unto the spirits of the just made perfect." What is made perfect? Why, that soul up there loves God supremely. That soul keeps the Ten Commandments. When Christ was the schoolmaster under the law, the object of what He did was to bring that soul back into conformity to that law, and when that body sleeps and rots and moulds and decays and turns to dust, and ages elapse, and that voice of the trumpet is heard again, unlike anything else on earth, and those dead people wake up, they wake up in what condition? They were sown in weakness. The law could not be performed on account of the weakness of the flesh. They were sown in weakness. They were raised in power. They were sown in dishonor. They were raised in honor. They were sown in corruption. They were raised in incorruption. They were sown mortal. They were raised immortal. And now that body like that spirit is in complete conformity with the law.

Sinai may thunder on the portals of hell; it may frown in clouds of ominous blackness, and growl in thunder and glare in lightning; but the raised body, reunited to the soul, can come up in front of it and say, "O Sinai, I am in perfect accord with every requirement you make."

I say that the object of Christ’s death is that you may escape the penalty of the law broken, but not intending to turn criminals loose; not intending to snatch murderers and liars and adulterers from the jaws of death and let them remain liars and thieves and murderers, to the great confusion of the universe, but to remake them, that they may be, not murderers, not liars, not thieves, but pure and holy men. That is what Christ does.

Now you see the truth of what I said, that the law is the intent in the mind of the Creator when He made the man; that the subsequent expression of that intent in a statute did not originate obligation, but that it was subsequently expressed in a statute to bring out lack of conformity, to make it appear that conformity had not been, and to drive the nonconformist to a Redeemer, and then, through the power of that Redeemer, working through the Holy Spirit, to refit him inside and out, until he is at last in full co-operation with every requirement of that law. So faith does not make void the law. It conforms to it, and the law is not against the promises, and the promises are not against the law. And I will tell you that you deceive yourself with an antinomian delusion if you think that because Christ was made the curse of the law for you, that therefore you can go on and love sin. If that work has been efficacious in you, you have now a mind that hates sin. You have a mind that loves God. You have a mind that wants to do right.

I tell you, brethren, you could not do any better than to go and get that old Presbyterian catechism on the Ten Commandments and study it and teach it to every one of your children. I tell you those Ten Commandments constitute the standard of righteousness in heaven, and they will remain the standard of righteousness over the lowest hell. There never, never will be a time when any of those ten words will lose any of their obligatory force. That is why, all over this earth, rulers and statesmen lift their hats when they go to Matthew Sinai, when they look at those Ten Commandments, as the sublimest expression of the principles of law the human ear ever heard, the human eye ever saw, the human heart ever conceived of. It is true that you are not under the law in the covenant of life. It is true that the law as a standard of righteousness never changes. It is true that the object of grace is to make you square with that standard ultimately. It will put you there. But there is the sin of unbelief. There is the justification of hell, that men are not able to keep the law, and their inability not disproving its righteousness, for it is holy and just and good, and it cannot be lowered, not an atom, not a jot, not a tittle.

Law is law, and those men that cannot keep it, and with an unrenewed nature turn away from Christ, who removed the curse of that law through His death on the cross, and who by the Spirit renews the fallen nature, giving a love for God and man, and by santification perfects the love for God and man, they, by unbelief in Jesus Christ, have earned and richly deserve and certainly will receive the eternity of hell. That man is a rank anarchist, that man is an advocate of confusion, for social rottenness and world destruction, that says, "I do not need Christ. I do not need my nature renewed. I need no atoning blood. I need no Holy Spirit to regenerate and sanctify." And all his life he walks high-stepping through the world, and he says, "I believe in law. I believe in a man’s bearing the penalty of wrong doing, and I stand on my record."

Well, let him stand on it, and if that law does not show him to be exceedingly sinful, if it does not show that he has broken every one of the Ten Commandments, if it does not show that he has broken them in spirit and in letter, if it does not show that he has broken them in all of his life, if it does not show that he has broken them in nature and in practice, then there is no such thing as the manifesting power of light. And God could not ¾ I speak reverently of Omnipotence God could not save a man and leave him a bad man.

He could not pardon a man and turn a criminal loose on society, on the universe. If he saves him, He must save him by works of grace, bringing him back into perfect correspondence with every requirement of the law of God.

Ever since my mother took my childish hands and held them while I knelt at her knee and repeated those ten words, "Thou shall have no other God before me; thou shalt make no graven image to fall down and worship it; thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy; honor thy father and thy mother; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor’s," from the day that my mother taught me those ten words they have been to me as the one unvarying standard of real righteousness, and all that Christ has done for me so far has been in the direction of bringing me into conformity to it. When His work is ended and my soul is sanctified, being now regenerated; when it is made perfect, and when my body is raised from the dead, and sanctified soul and body I stand before God, then I will love God with all my heart, and I will love my neighbor as myself, and the commandments of God will show clear through, ten thousand times more powerful than an X-ray, and find nothing in me at variance with its requirements. That is my answer to the question, "Wherefore then the law?" Let us pray.