p. 595 | THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL by G. K. Owen

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 18, 1900

THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL.

By G. K. Owen

Biloxi, Miss., Sept. 2, 1900.

Editor Review and Herald.

DEAR BROTHER: In this age of antinomianism, it is so refreshing to find something from a minister of another denomination that is really sound in the law, that I feel like sharing with you the reading of a chapter from “Character Sketches, or the Blackboard Mirror,” pages 239–247, an illustrated book of 454 pages. This work was written by George A. Lofton, A. M., D. D., a Baptist minister, of Nashville, Tenn., and was published by the Southwestern Publishing House. It will be useful not only as a study in itself, but in connection with our study of Galatians; and also as a testimony in favor of the downtrodden law. I see more in it upon a second reading than at first.

G. K. OWEN.

Here we discover two mountains standing opposite each other. They are old Sinai of Arabia and Calvary of Judea. A deep valley lies between them, and Jerusalem is in the distance. On Sinai stands Moses with the two tables of stone in front of him. The old mount is shrouded in clouds, which hurtle with thunders and lightnings, pealing and striking with their bolts upon Calvary. On Calvary stands Christ in front of the cross, holding the everlasting gospel in his hands, shedding the softer and more genial light of evangelical truth across the valley between, and illuminating the tables of the law in Moses’s hands. Sinai and Calvary, Moses and Christ, the law and the gospel,—these are the counterparts and complements of each other; and while the former typifies and foreshadows the latter, the latter fulfills and explains the former.

From different standpoints of observation they interpret and blend with each other, and neither the gospel nor the law could be fully understood without the other. Especially is it true that the spiritual import of the law would never have been comprehended without the illumination of the gospel. “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” says Moses; but Christ teaches that to lust in the heart is to be guilty of the act before God. So of murder, theft, lying, covetousness, and every other sin incorporated under the law of God. Hence, while a man by culture and refinement may be externally innocent of every transgression, whether by word or deed, he may be a thousand times guilty of every transgression at heart; and if he is guilty of one only, he is guilty of all. So explains and develops the law under the light of gospel interpretation, and so it is interpreted that unselfish love to man and supreme love to God can alone keep, or fulfill, the law upon our part.

Saul of Tarsus, Cornelius, the rich young ruler, were all “perfect,” as touching the external observance of the law; and yet the gospel discovered to Paul that he was the “chief of sinners;” to Cornelius, that he must be “saved” by the blood of Jesus as the meanest sinner in the world; and to the rich young ruler, that he had never had the faintest conception of the law’s spiritual significance, the end of which is salvation by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The law is not able to save, and Moses was not a savior. The law, or Moses, is simply our schoolmaster to bring us to the Saviour, Christ; but we could never understand our schoolmaster, except in the light of Christ and the gospel. All the law can do to help us is to bring the knowledge and consciousness of sin, and secure conviction and repentance toward God; but the law could not do this, except under the spiritual lamp of Christ. In the absence of gospel light the law ceases to be a schoolmaster, and becomes a tyrant over the blind and dead sinner, driven to an endless bondage of precepts and ceremonies, trying to save himself by self-righteousness, and wearing a galling yoke, which gives him no rest nor peace of body, mind, or heart.

It is only when we enter the schoolmaster’s office that we learn of Christ and exchange yokes, to find the gospel burden light and easy, restful and peaceful, to the enlightened and regenerated spirit. Without the gospel of Christ, whether in type or antitype, the Holy Spirit could never have brought us to learn the spiritual nature and import of the law upon a single human heart dead in sin. The word of Christ is the only pen, the blood of Christ the only ink, by which the Spirit can legibly write God’s law of life upon the fleshly tables of the heart, and thus kill it to sin and make it alive unto God under his divine penmanship.

The word of God, both in the Old and the New Testament, is a dead letter to the dead sinner; but when, through a belief in the gospel and the handwriting of the Holy Spirit, we are cleansed from sin and quickened to life in Christ, then we can comprehend the law in the light of the gospel. We catch its spiritual import and purpose of revelation to us, and the Old Testament kindles bright and luminous as a star, lit up by the splendors of the Sun of righteousness. We see the face of Moses and the summit of the old mount shine again with ineffable and unapproachable splendor for the moment, and then we behold them soften down into the milder and sweeter radiance of Christ, who was “touched,” and of Calvary, which can be “touched,” by the lost and ruined sinner.

The true believer of the Old Testament comprehended, spiritually, though not so fully as we, the import of the law. Abel and Enoch, Noah and Abraham, Moses and David, all saw Christ and his day afar off, by prophecy and by the typical blood of “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” The gospel, says Paul, was preached to Abraham, and so to all the rest who truly believed. Through Moses, by whom came the law, they beheld Christ, by whom came grace and truth, the life and the light of the world. And the saved of all dispensations believed on his name, were cleansed by his blood, and were quickened by his Spirit, by the same immutable law of pardon and life, before and since Christ, before and since the day of Pentecost. To the saved the law was always, as now, the schoolmaster that leads to Christ; and the gospel, whether prefigured or consummated, was always, as now, the refulgent and reflective glory that lit up the tables in Moses’s hand with their only true and divine interpretation.

Keeping the symbolism of our picture in mind, how striking are the lessons we learn as we behold, from various standpoints, the law as lit up, or illuminated, by the gospel!

Take the moral law. This is the law of life as Jesus taught the rich young ruler, if a man keep it. But to this end a man would have to be born pure and holy, perfect; and then he

would have to keep the law personally, perfectly, and perpetually, from the cradle to the grave, in order to live by it. In fact, such a man could not die, and such a man has never lived. The very idea of death presupposes sin; for by sin death came into the world, and hence all have sinned, and were born in sin—“by nature the children of wrath,” as Paul taught the Ephesians. However correct his external observance of the law, however trained and kept by the most legal culture, a man can not obey the spirit of the law.

“Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them;” and yet in essence, not one single human being born of Adam ever obeyed one single precept written in the law, much less continued in it, to do it; and yet this curse is pronounced upon the dead sinner, incapable of keeping, in spirit, one jot or tittle of God’s least commandment. Hence the necessity of Christ, who perfectly kept the law for us; who died to redeem us from its penalty; who became our Prophet, Priest, and King instead of Moses, Aaron, and David; who became the second, in place of the first, Adam; and who, having substituted grace instead of law, became for us “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption,” by the satisfaction of law. How gloriously the gospel lights up this fact when once you can make a sinner see that he can not work out his salvation under the law; and when he can be made to cast himself upon Christ, his substitute for the law!

(To be concluded.)