The Law in the Heart by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 10, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 44.

The Law in the Heart.

By Editor

One of our first-day contemporaries, anxious to be rid of the Sabbath, gravely informs us that the Decalogue is not the law that God writes in the hearts of his people under the new covenant, but it is just such laws as we find in the New Testament. Of course the writer does not see what this leads to. Opponents of the Sabbath rarely consult logic, consistency, or Scripture. But if only such laws as are written in the book called the New Testament are obligatory, what is there to prevent the marriage of brother and sister, of aunt and nephew, or other marriages equally abhorrent? Where are our New Testament marriage laws? What is there to prevent the manufacture of graven images for the purpose of worship, or the worship of such images? What is there to prevent the taking of God's name in vain? Again, the law written in Christ's heart (Ps. 40:7, 8) was the law he obeyed, and that was the law comprehended in the Decalogue, Sabbath and all. Does he write a different law in the hearts of his people than was in his own heart? Once more, in Jer. 31:31-34 the Lord promises the confirmation of the new covenant, and promises to write his law, as existing six hundred years before Christ, in the hearts of his people. Has God fulfilled this promise? The Decalogue was his law when he made that promise. To say that the great moral law of God, the Decalogue, is not written in the heart, is to deny that God will do what he promised to do. There are many other things which show the inconsistencies of anti-Sabbath argument; the above are sufficient for the nonce. The fact is that the new covenant was in existence in the beginning, assured to Abraham with an oath, but was not confirmed till the death of Christ. It is called "new" not because latest made but because latest confirmed, but it was operative all the way through.