WHAT A CONCEPTION! by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Sep 24, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 39.

WHAT A CONCEPTION!

By Editor

A religious antinomian weekly in speaking of the Decalogue remarks:—

“This Decalogue was given as the best those could receive to whom He gave it. It was intended to so utterly destroy hope as to drive to Christ for salvation—a pedagogue to bring, or drive, us to Christ; but, after Christ came, we are no longer under the tutor. Gal. 3:24, 25.”

The idea is that it took fifteen hundred years to drive that people who knew the Decalogue to Christ, that during this whole time they were hopeless, or that God sought so to make them. What a conception of God such an interpretation of Gal. 3:24 gives! Generation after generation were to be driven to despair by the Decalogue, but no deliverer came; nor did He come until the whole nation was so given up to dead formalism and satisfied self-righteousness that the great mass of people rejected Him!

“But does not Gal. 3:24 say, ‘Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith?’” It does. But does Paul mean that for 1,500 years the law was the schoolmaster of himself and the Galatians to whom he was writing, through generation after generation of hopelessness, before they could be brought to Christ? Does he mean that Moses and Joshua and Samuel and David and Elijah and Isaiah and Malachi all died in this utterly hopeless condition? Every true conception of God's love and goodness revolts from it. But the law was then Paul's schoolmaster to bring him to Christ. Romans 7. It was the schoolmaster of every converted Galatian to bring him to Christ. It was the schoolmaster of Moses and Joshua and Samuel and David and Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and the good of all ages to bring them to Christ; and they found Him, one and each and all; found Him there and then when and where they lived; found Him the Redeemer, the Justifier, the Saviour from sin.

The law condemns the sinner. It shuts him up in the prison-house of sin. It holds him in bondage to sin. It is over him a tormenting lord. It presents but one avenue of escape—Christ Jesus. Moses was condemned by the glory of the law, pressed home upon his heart by the Holy Spirit, and it drove him to the Angel of God's Presence, where he found pardon. Nay, more, for the power of forgiving love wrote the law in his heart, and the transfigured soul shone out in the glory of his face. So Samuel found Him. So David found him. So all others have found Him who alone is able to save. And so Paul declares: “The law hath been our tutor to bring us to Christ” (R.V.); “is become our tutor” (American Standard R.V.). It has been that all the way. It is become that to every one, even as in Paul's day it became that to the idolatrous Gentile Galatians. Gal. 4:8.

Why are we thus brought to Christ?—To “be justified,” brought into harmony with the law, to have the law written in our hearts. When the law is written within us, what change does it make in our condition?—“We are no longer under the law,” no longer condemned by it. What is our relation to it?—The law is within the heart; and the language of the soul is: “O, how love I Thy law; it is my meditation all the day.” “This is the love of God that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not grievous.”