The Commentary | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 15, 1867

The Commentary.

Tell me the meaning of Scriptures. One gem from that ocean is worth all the pebbles of earthly streams.—M‘Cheyne.

The Law. Romans iii, 31.

“Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid; yea, we establish the law.”

The following is good testimony that divines of all denominations have usually acknowledged the distinction between the two laws, moral and ceremonial, as the only way of harmonizing the New-Testament scriptures which speak of these laws. This testimony is especially valuable at the present time when so many, to avoid the claims of the fourth commandment, deny this distinction, and then plead for the abolition of the whole. We extract it from an article on The Law, in Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature.

“The great importance ascribed by the Reformers to the right understanding of the law is thus tersely expressed by Phillip Melancthon: ‘This alone is Christian knowledge, to be acquainted with the demands of the law, to know whence to obtain the power requisite for fulfilling the law, and whence to obtain pardon for sins committed; to know how to raise up the drooping soul against the devil, the flesh, and the world, and how to comfort the afflicted conscience.’”

“Christ and the apostles express themselves respecting the authority of the law so variously, that in order to reconcile their apparent contradictions, the divines of various Christian denominations have usually felt themselves compelled to distinguish between different portions of the law, some of which, they assert, were abolished by Christ, while they maintain that others were established by him. For instance, when Christ says, in the sermon on the mount, that he was not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them, it has usually been asserted that he meant this merely in reference to the moral law, but that he nevertheless abolished the ceremonial and civil law of the Jews. And again, when he declines to enter into the debate pending between the Samaritans and the Jews, concerning the proper place where God ought to be worshiped; when he states as the reason for not entering into this debate, that God is a Spirit, and that his true worshipers must worship him in spirit and in truth; when he promises a Comforter, the Spirit of truth, who would lead his true disciples into all truth; and when he indicates that this would be the period up to which the law would remain in force, namely, until all things are fulfilled—divines usually say that this future cessation of the law under the authority of the Spirit could never apply to the moral, but only to the ceremonial and the civil law. In a similar manner the abolition of the law, most clearly set forth in the epistles of Paul to the Romans and the Galatians, where the apostle teaches that Christians are as free from the authority of the law . . . as the adult is free from the authority of the schoolmaster who ruled his infancy, is said to apply only to the ceremonial and civil, but not to the moral law; while the latter alone is held to be referred to when the Apostle, in apparent contradiction to the general tenor of his epistles, says that ‘we establish the law by faith.’ Rom. iii, 31.”