2289.—The Mediator of the New Covenant.
Please explain Heb. 8:6, 7. A Disciple minister claims that the Ten Commandments were destroyed or annulled, nailed to the cross, and we only have to keep those mentioned in the New Testament, and that the fourth is not mentioned. He also refers to Heb. 10:9; Rom. 6:14; 7:1-4; Gal. 3:23-29; Col. 2:13-17, etc., etc. W. E. P. All these scriptures and others will be troublesome to us until we can settle upon the great principle of God's government; first, that God is all-perfect, all-wise, omniscient; that because of this He is unchangeable; that His government is always the same, His moral requirements are always the same, under all circumstances, in all ages, through His dominion; that His requirements in one age for the development of character are just the same as in all other ages; that He is no respecter of persons; and that Jesus Christ is simply God's manifestation of love to bring men back to the great and wonderful unity that there is in God. Because of man's sin, God has given certain object-lessons through all the ages, and these object-lessons have changed as human circumstances have changed, but the one purpose of the object-lessons has always been to bring man back to God. In Abel's day it was the simple sacrifice of the lamb upon the altar. In Israel's day these object-lessons were made fuller and more complex in all the great symbols and types, offerings and sacrifices, imposed on them until the time of the reformation. Heb. 9:9-11. There were necessarily laws regulating these types and offerings which all pointed forward to Jesus Christ. When He came, the type reached the antitype, the symbol the thing symbolized, the lamb and the kid vanished before the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world; the shadow reached the substance, and all those laws and ceremonies by virtue of that very fact expired by limitation and were nailed to the cross. But God's Sabbath existed before sin ever entered, or before type or symbol was ever made. God's Decalogue, written on tables of stone, was eternal, and it would be a perversion of language to speak of tables of stone being nailed to the cross. Jesus Christ did not come to give a new law or set forth a new plan. He declared, "I and the Father are one." John 10:30. He came to bring men back to God, as expressed by Paul, "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." He Himself had not changed, the sinful world had changed, and sin is the transgression of the law. The old covenant, resting on men's promises, could not enable man to keep the law, but Jesus Christ, the very personification of all the Ten Commandments, the one perfect Sabbath-keeper, in men's hearts, could enable them to observe God's law. Christ takes away all the self-righteousness of sin and establishes in the heart the obedience of faith. All Scripture is in perfect harmony with this. The Scriptures are full of absurdities and contradictions and confusion looked at from every other standpoint. God becomes a changeable being, one no longer to be trusted, and His government is a matter of the whim of the sinful subject and not the great perfect order of divine procedure.