p. 12 | Keeping the Law by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 11, 1910

Keeping the Law

By C. M. S.

The Lord told Moses that if the people forsook him, and broke his covenant, he would forsake them and hide his face from them till, as a nation, they would be devoured. On the other hand, if they would do his commandments, he would set them “on high above all nations of the earth,” and make them “the head, and not the tail.” See Deuteronomy 28.

God had a wonderful purpose in view for the people of his choice, and all who were willing to come under the rule of his government. The only thing that stood between them and the fulfilment of all that God purposed concerning them was their unwillingness to obey his law. Because they would not come under the beneficent rule of his government, he was compelled to leave them to become the plaything of the tempests of tribal strifes and the ambitions of other nations. In place of being a light to all the nations around, their refusal to keep the law put out their light, blotted out their inheritance, and scattered them like the “chaff of the summer threshing-floor” into every corner of the earth, till their very name has become a byword.

Mohammed on the Jordan, with his temple of worship on Zion’s hill, witnesses to Israel’s disloyalty to God, and, through that disloyalty, to the complete frustration of the glorious purpose God had in view for them as a nation. They

would have been the greatest nation in the world—God so declared it—if they had kept his law. They would not keep it, and now they are nothing. That law and the blessing of God upon their keeping of it would have made them more than ever their brightest hopes could picture. What a contrast, and what a lesson for this generation!

Every calamity that overtook the Israelitish nation as a result of the disobedience of that people was faithfully pointed out to them before ever they crossed into Canaan. The twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy is a faithful presentation of the end to which the nation would come if they turned away from God and his law. They came to that end, and their history is written as an admonition and warning for the people of this very age,—this generation, which is to witness the entering in of the spiritual Israel into the real land of rest.

The law went before ancient Israel, and made a way through every obstruction. It will do the same in this generation for the faithful and triumphant children of God. His orders are: “Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples” (Isa. 8: 16); and he says of the redeemed: “Here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.” Rev. 14: 12. The victory is assured, and that inheritance will not be taken by another. C. M. S.