THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 25, 1900

THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL.

(Concluded.)

How blind is a poor, self-righteous sinner, trying to live unto God by his morality! How much blinder still is the poor, self-conceited sinner, trying by “science falsely so called,” to reason out his life in God! How the gospel of blood opens the blinded eyes to the terror and weakness of law, to the futility of all philosophy, however excellent and useful as a rule for the present life! And how, in the very light of all law and philosophy, it brings before them Jesus, “the one altogether lovely and the chiefest among ten thousand!”

Beneath the cross we can discover the exceeding sinfulness of sin, God’s vindictive justice satisfied; and we can behold, as contained in the law, but never revealed by it, how he so loved the world as to give his only begotten Son to die for it. The very law demands this sacrifice of infinite and eternal love; and in the very sacrifice of love we can behold the dignity and the supremacy of the law. Herein we behold the solution of an otherwise undemonstrated problem,—how God could be just to sin and yet love the sinner, and how he could at the same time justify the ungodly according to law.

This fact in the scheme of human redemption, revealed by the gospel, pours the brightest flood of light back upon the significance and value of the divine law, which is the moral transcript of God’s will and the moral reflection of God’s life. Morality is the essence of God, and is eternal, the spirit and essence of his law; and the gospel reveals that moral guilt can alone be atoned for by the sacrifice of infinite moral dignity. The law typified and foreshadowed this vital and central truth of Christianity, but the gospel makes it luminous and refulgent on Calvary.

In all these things it takes the law first of all to make an intelligent believer of the gospel; but it takes this intelligent believer of the gospel alone to look back upon Sinai and see and acknowledge the supremacy and dignity of God’s divine law of life, inexorable when unsatisfied; and yet made potent and living by the atoning blood of Christ when written by the Holy Spirit upon the tablets of the regenerate heart.

Take the ceremonial law with all its symbolic institutions. What wonderful types and shadows of the “good things to come” under a gospel dispensation! Yet how incomprehensible except under the light of that gospel! The bloody sacrifices of the law would be a horrible and hideous butchery if they did not set forth the altar of Calvary with its sacrifice of Christ, the “propitiation for the sins of the world.” No wonder the poor, blinded Ingersollian sees nothing but the shambles, in the sacrifices of the Jewish dispensation. He does not see Christ, and not seeing Christ in all, he can not comprehend Aaron any more than he can comprehend Moses and his so-called “mistakes.”

It is a fearful and awful fact that God can not come short of, nor go beyond, blood, to save; because he can not come short of, nor go beyond, his law, to help the sinner. “Without shedding of blood is no remission,” said the law; but who could ever have understood this fearful maxim but for the adumbration of the fact in the light of Calvary’s cross? Salvation is a legal transaction as well as a moral transformation. There can be no display of divine mercy without the vindication of justice; and it was the part of infinite and eternal love, foreshadowed on Sinai and consummated on Calvary, to step down and out of glory, tread the wine press alone, walk amid the woes of hell, taste the horrors of death, and shed the judicial blood of an atoning sacrifice for sin.

Blood, blood, blood! Awful but glorious display of God’s legal supremacy and dignity to the infantile apprehension of the old dispensation; but, blessed be God, with one stroke of divine justice, once for all and forever, infinite Innocence died on the cross, closed the holocaust of centuries, and opened up the dim and cloudy past to the midday splendors of the Sun of righteousness, redeeming the world, transforming the centuries, and paving the way to the millennium of glory.

So we might speak of the types of the priesthood, the temple, and the kingly offices of Israel. How incomprehensible, but for their revelation and fulfillment in Jesus! Aaron and his robes, the altar and the laver, the table of showbread, and the candlestick and the incense altar, the holy and the most holy place, the ark of the covenant, and the Shekinah between the cherubim, the wonderful veil rent in twain at the crucifixion and uncovering the most holy place, the two goats on the great day of atonement,—all these who could have ever understood but for Calvary and its consummation? These things would have been enigmas, glittering and insoluble mysteries without significance, but for the gospel. How clear and beautiful and glorious do they kindle now to the believer’s eye, and what strong confirmation do they give in proof of Holy Writ and of our glorious Christianity?

So we might speak of prophecy, which is a kindred development of the legal dispensation. The prophets of the Old Testament would be regarded as fanatics and visionaries but for the gospel. Yet how loftily and authoritatively do they speak to all generations when Christ and his apostles confirm their declarations, and when the gospel and the kingdom of God fulfill their marvelous predictions! David pictures the very crucifixion in all its details, and predicts the very words of Christ’s crucial agony: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Isaiah foretells the Son of God by name—Immanuel, God with us, born of a virgin, and called “Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Daniel portrays the glory of his “everlasting kingdom,” counts the very days and years to the time of his crucifixion, when “everlasting righteousness” should be brought in, and when Messiah should “be cut off, but not for himself.” Joel blazes forth the pentecostal splendors, and they all conspire to proclaim the establishment, progress, power, and consummation of the church down to the millennium, in minute and unmistakable detail to the intelligent reader and believer of the gospel. How grandly do the prophets point to the cross and the kingdom of Christ! and how resplendently do their predictions

and doctrines glow under the interpretation and fulfillment of gospel light!

Hoary seers of the centuries gone by! I see you marching through the obscurity of ages, with stately step and awful form, toward Calvary and the cross, and then I behold you grow radiant and luminous in the light of Christ and his apostles, as did Moses and Elijah, the representatives of the law and the prophets on Tabor’s top. Then, as the transfiguration scene passes from my vision, I behold Moses and Elijah gone, and but One left in the midst of his representative apostles, while high Heaven exclaims, “This is my beloved Son; hear ye him;” while the everlasting record of God writes, in letters of gold, “JESUS ONLY.”

He is the “Alpha and Omega” of both dispensations—the “all and in all” of every age; and in him the law and the gospel, the prophets and the apostles, center as one complete unity, the complement and counterpart of each other. The old points forward to the new, and the new points back to the old, and both the old and the new meet as the two parts of God’s divine and eternal indenture, the will of the dead and living Testator, Christ; signed, sealed, delivered, in his own blood; probated in the courts of heaven; and executed, administered, and applied to a perishing world, by the Holy Ghost.