Your ShelfYour Projects

GREAT PEACE

17%

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 8, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 10.

Read the full edition

“GREAT PEACE.”

By Editor

It is said by our opponents—some of whom have gone out from us, because they were not of us—that obedience to the commandments of God is a hard, comfortless legalism, which brings no peace or rest to the soul, a sort of exacting bondage, a yoke unable to bear.
Even so such “obedience” would be if one tried to obey God in his own strength, to do by works rather than to work by faith. But if Christ, the Personified Law, is in the heart, working out in the flesh of the believer what He worked out in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, no one knows the peace that such a commandment-keeper knows. Thus the psalmist has expressed it, “Great peace have they that love Thy law, and they shall have no stumbling-block.” Religion is to them a matter between God and their own soul. It matters not what others may do; they know God; they know His righteous law; they know Jesus Christ as Saviour from sin; why, then, should they turn from God and stumble over the misdoings of others, or the obstacles Satan places in their way?
John thus expresses the thought: “This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are NOT grievous.” “Here is the patience of the saints; here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.”
We wish that the opponents of the law of God, which Moses and Samuel and all the prophets and David and Jesus the Perfect Man loved and obeyed, could read the letters which come to us from all over the great field from those who have turned their feet into the path of His commandments; they would learn that to many hearts there had come a peace which can not be found in the imperfect knowledge of God's law prevalent in the churches to-day. The language of the heart is, when God's law is written there by the Spirit of Christ: “O how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” “And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance forever.”