NOT UNDER LAW by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 5, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 14.

NOT UNDER LAW.

By Editor

A CORRESPONDENT, writing from Kansas City, Kan., under date of Jan. 6, 1894, asks that the SIGNS be discontinued, and says:—

I thank God I am not under law but under grace. If I mistake not the law was given to stop your mouth as well as mine, that we might all become guilty before God, that he might give us eternal life by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, and not by our Sabbath-day keeping. The word says, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death,” which takes in the man who is trying to work his way to heaven by law keeping.

It is very infrequently indeed that we receive such communications. Although many persons have the disposition, they yet have sufficient conscience left to prevent them from making such a shameless avowal as the above. Of course the writer of the above believes in taking God’s name in vain, dishonoring father and mother, worshiping idols, taking men’s lives, committing adultery, and stealing. He reasons that he is not under the law, and is therefore not bound to obey the law; for it is the same law which enjoins the seventh-day Sabbath that says, “Thou shalt not kill.” If remonstrated with for breaking this law, our correspondent would say, I thank God I am not under law, but under grace, and therefore I am not to win life by refraining from killing.

Now he knows, if he has read the SIGNS, and so do all our readers, that we have never so much as intimated that we shall be saved or justified by law keeping, or Sabbath keeping. But we do teach this, because God’s word teaches it, that he who is in Christ, who has been made free by grace, who is led of the Spirit, fulfills the righteousness of the law. Rom. 8:1–4. He who professes to be justified by Christ and still transgresses God’s law, makes Christ before the world “the minister of sin.” But Christ did not come to save in sin but from sin. Matt. 1:21; Titus 2:14. As sin is the transgression of God’s law (1 John 3:4; Rom. 7:7), it follows that the mission of Christ is to save men from transgressing it. He does this by taking away the carnal mind, which “is not subject to the law of God neither indeed can be,” and implanting in man his own Spirit of loving obedience. Man then will have the faith which brings Christ’s life, which “worketh by love,” which keeps all God’s commandments willingly. In other words, faith will live out the righteousness which God puts within, and the law will bear witness that the man is just.

Christ kept all his Father’s commandments (John 15:10), the Sabbath included; and “he that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk even as he walked” (1 John 2:6). This is God’s way, a way that never seems right to a man, and never will unless his will is submitted to God’s will. We entreat our correspondent to submit to the will of God. See Matt. 7:21–23.