02.09. ESSAY NO. 9

ESSAY NO. 9

Between the promise to Abraham and its fulfill­ment in Christ, God gave the law through Moses in order to teach man that under law, which required him to earn his justification by his own doing, he was a lawbreaker, condemned to death. This universal, perpetual human failure was supposed to shatter man’s religious faith in himself, and to prepare him to ac­cept justification as a gift procured by the doing of another. Herein lies the chief advantage of Chris­tianity over Mosaism. Were Christianity just anoth­er law for man to keep, still he would fail.

"God Is One" As the foundation of Jewish religion, Moses taught that "Jehovah our God is one Jehovah" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Even men without the Bible have so much evidence in nature that they are without excuse, if they do not see the unity, power, and infinite goodness of God, the Maker and Governor of all (Acts 14:17; Romans 1:20). When God promised old, childless Abraham an in­numerable progeny to occupy, centuries later, a land three or four times as large as Texas, he was pleased to grant Abraham the assurance he asked. At God’s direction, Abraham divided some animals into halves and laid the pieces opposite each other with a passage­way between. From time immemorial when two or more parties made an important covenant, they, to seal the compact, walked together along such a pas­sageway. God used this, then, ancient, familiar cere­mony as Abraham’s pledge. But very singularly only a flaming torch, representing God, passed between the pieces of the offering. The reason Abraham did not so pass was twofold: first, he was only the recipient of a free promise and was not himself promising anything; second, the re­lationship between the two was so personal, unifying, and binding that any difference between them, need­ing a mediator to compose, was impossible. "Abra­ham my friend" (Isaiah 41:8), was God’s own char­acterization of this remarkable man. To his friends, the promise of the great "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14), is always, in both natural and religious mat­ters, enough.

Both the circumstances under which and the man­ner in which the temporal Mosaic covenant was made preclude the idea that it was to supersede the Abrahamic covenant. Despite all that God had done for them in Canaan, Egypt, and the wilderness, over a period of 430 years, the Hebrews utterly failed to un­derstand and appreciate God’s promise to Abraham. Moreover, they were so far from realizing their great distance from God and the depth of their depravity that the indirect, parenthetical, legal covenant, with its mere angelic ministry and human mediator, be­came necessary to reveal to them their miserable mor­al condition.

Since in God’s promise to Abraham only one party was bound, there could be no mediator to arrange terms between two parties. But in the inferior Mosaic cove­nant much mediatorial work was required. Moses made three up-and-down trips between the people at the base and God at the summit of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:1-25). Even after the people in ignorance and conceit had lightly answered Moses, "All that Jehovah hath spoken we will do," Moses toiled up and down the rugged mountain twice more, cooperating with God to solemnize and sanctify the occasion, to deepen the people’s sense of sin and separation from God, and to lead them to make their side of the contract profound­ly religious and sacred. But even so, they had scarce­ly agreed to the terms of the covenant before they flagrantly broke it with their golden calf. So much for men under law, flesh, and self.

All this underlies Paul’s reasoning with the Galatians when he says of the Sinaitic covenant: "It was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one." In dealing with each other, God and his sons are not two parties, requiring the services of a medi­ator. Christians are so incorporated into Christ’s personality, so instinct with his life that one nature serves the whole Christian organism—head and body alike. They are so surrendered to Christ, so identi­fied with Christ, and so absorbed into Christ that, with all differences and discords silenced, Christ and his friends (John 15:15) become one party, with all need of human mediation forever eliminated. What else can Christ’s high priestly prayer to his Father, "That they may all be one, even as we are one; I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one" (John 17:22-23) mean? Paul thought this reasoning should show the Galatians their folly and sin in thinking that the law could add anything to God’s everlasting promise to Abraham, fulfilled in Christ. He hoped it would crush their legality, com­pletely and permanently. Can Christians, now, but learn and yield themselves to the truth that God through Christ in the Spirit takes them to his great fatherly heart in a gracious, loving, friendly, personal oneness, they will have the only way of pressing "on unto perfection" that infinite wisdom, power, and love provide.

Law As A Jailor

Because all men are foolish and slow of heart to believe that law never makes alive, but ever kills, Paul, to his beloved Galatians, yearningly lingers over this vital truth. In the last of Galatians 3:1-29, he represents law as a jailor who herds all men into a vast house of death, and securely locks them in. Man is truly a sinner by nature. When he knows but little law, he is a slave to his unbridled flesh. Since "the power of sin is the law" (1 Corinthians 15:56), when he knows law he becomes a rebel, therefore a greater sinner, by breaking it. Verily, law is a huge jailor who has men fast confined in his great jail till—"Till the seed should come to whom the promise hath been made." Law, therefore, with his massy, iron key of sin, curse, and death shuts all in his prison till grace comes with her golden key of faith, justification, and life to open doors for all who, to their imprisonment, prefer freedom. Why do doomed men even hesitate to accept deliver­ance from sin by God’s unmixed grace and their un­mixed faith! The final teaching of the chapter is that Christian­ity is a universal religion, without restrictions of race or rite. "There can be neither Jew nor Greek . . . bond nor free ... no male and female; for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus." This does not mean, of course, that Christianity obliterates distinctions in races, social status, and sex, but that, ignoring such things, it offers equal blessings and opportunities to all human beings alike.