HOW ARE YOU RELATED TO THE LAW?
BEFORE us lies a tract, which starts out with Jer. 31:33,—God's promise that He will write His law in the "inward parts" and "hearts" of Israel, His people. The writer truly says that the law was written in the heart of man when God created him, but that man has broken that law; that God wrote it on tables of stone; that He repeated this when the tables were broken; that it is one law, not two. All this is true, and it will ever remain one law, even as God is one. But this writer makes a discovery that there is but one command in the ten that does not contain a principle of eternal righteousness—the fourth. When God was put to the necessity of promulgating a written law, He had a right to place anything in it that suited Him, and it would seem that His purpose was to place the fourth command here.(!) Be it not overlooked that had it not been for the necessity of a written law, the fourth command would have found no place in man's history. And this would be unworthy of notice, did not people believe it. Let the reader note:— 1. The Sabbath came in thousands of years before the giving of the law. God made it and ordained it in Eden before man fell. Gen. 2:2, 3. It was a part of His perfect scheme. It involves the principles of righteousness and right relationship as truly as does any other commandment. 2. "The righteous Lord loveth righteousness." He loved His people. He gave them His law of love. The fourth precept, guarding the Sabbath, is a part of that law. It pleased the righteous God to place it there. Can it please Him to have men attempt to remove it? He showed the unity of that precept with the law by placing it in the law's center, so that the sacrilegious hand of man could not even attempt to remove it, till it had torn away three immutable precepts on the one side or six on the other, before the fourth could be reached. "They stand fast forever and ever, and are done in truth and uprightness." "All Thy commandments are righteousness." These are all the words of Inspiration. 3. The law in Jeremiah's day, B.C. 600, was the law written on tables of stone. It is this same law that God promises in the new covenant, in all ages of sin, to write in the heart of the believer. It is not some other law; it is not that law revised, amended, or repealed in part. It is the one entire law of God, the law that was in Christ's heart, the law which He observed in its entirety, that God will write in the heart of the believer. 4. We are told by the tract in question that—Christ, in His millennial work, will prepare the second fleshly tablets of the heart for the law of God to be rewritten upon for the eternal ages. But that is what the Lord is doing now to every soul submitted to Him. The great mass of mankind are still under the old covenant. The greater part of the Jews of old were. But not all. Moses, and Joshua, and Eleazar, and Caleb, and Samuel, and Elijah, and thousands of others, had believed beyond the condemnation of the outward law on the tables of stone to the glory of God's forgiving grace and regenerating power, which wrote the law within their hearts, as a part of their life. It is as true to-day. The man who rejects God's plan, in whole or in part, is endeavoring to save himself by some work or plan or scheme of his own, and is under the old covenant. The man who rejects the human in toto, and yields all to God that God may dwell in Him, is a new-covenant subject, to whom God is writing His holy law. If the law is without, it condemns and will eternally condemn. If it is within the heart, it is loving service to do its every command. What is your relation to the law?