Your ShelfYour Projects

IN THAT FORM

14%

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 23, 1876

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 48, No. 21.

Read the full edition

“IN THAT FORM.”

By R. F. Cottrell

When a minister of the gospel says he thinks the ten commandments are not now binding in that form in which they are given in the Old Testament, does he not know that he is quibbling? When he pretends that the Saviour, in Matt. 5, made them either more or less than they ever had been, don't he know better? Does he really believe that those “of old time” could hate a brother and not be a murderer, or look upon another's wife with impure desire and not be an adulterer in heart?
If the ancients, as he pretends, might indulge hatred and lust, and yet not be murderers and adulterers in God's sight, as judged by his law, the decalogue, then there will be two classes in Heaven, one with the heart all unconverted, living in hatred, lust, and covetousness, though not committing the very acts of murder, adultery, or theft, and the other class living under the new “form of the law,” as given by Jesus, which demands that the heart itself be cleansed from every sinful desire, made holy and pure, like Jesus and the angels, whose society they are fitted for by this genuine and thorough conversion.
If such two classes of character are to be admitted there, it will necessitate a partition more formidable than the Chinese wall. But if none but the truly converted are saved, then the law of God was just as broad as it is now, when David said by the Spirit, “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul;” and those who argue that Christ enlarged or diminished that law are either self-deceived, or wicked deceivers.
The truth is, Cain was a murderer before he shed his brother's blood, and David was an adulterer when he formed his design in regard to the wife of Uriah. And our friends might know, if they would, that all such silly evasions of the law of God, as it is, would never have been resorted to had not “the church” (of Rome) “put in place of the Sabbath the day we now call Lord's day.” But to sustain this change of “times and laws” by the “man of sin,” no one would now argue that Jesus changed the decalogue in the least.
R. F. COTTRELL.