The Eternal Law of God

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · May 20, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 21.

The Eternal Law of God.

I. Its Completeness.

ONE of the strangest spectacles in the moral field which confronts the world to-day is the attitude of professed believers in God's word, professed followers of Jesus Christ, toward the law of God, the Decalogue. It is counted to-day an obsolete thing. Its authority is utterly repudiated. Professed priests of God and ministers of Jesus Christ trample its authority, its integrity, under their feet, and often ridicule and denounce those who plead for its recognition. Here is the law, just as it was spoken by Jehovah, recorded in Exodus 20, and translated by the latest and best modern scholarship of the world, in the American Standard Revised Version:

"I am Jehovah thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.

"Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them nor serve them; for I Jehovah thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate Me, and showing loving-kindness unto thousands of them that love Me and keep My commandments.

"Thou shalt not take the Name of Jehovah thy God in vain; for Jehovah will not hold him guiltless that taketh His Name in vain.

"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath unto Jehovah thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man servant, nor thy maid servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day. Wherefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.

"Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee.

"Thou shalt not kill.

"Thou shalt not commit adultery.

"Thou shalt not steal.

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's

wife, nor his man servant, nor his maid servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."

There it is, the whole of it. Read it; learn it. It has been taught in many catechisms of many creeds. Creed after creed of the stanchest sects in Christendom have honored it as the summa summorum of all morality. Some of the greatest teachers in Christendom, as Wesley and Barnes and Spurgeon, have taught it and preached it as the compendium of all righteousness, the eternal, unchangeable law of God. Its principles cover every moral relationship between God and man, and man and man. There are certain things in and about that law which must strike the unprejudiced reader:

1. ITS REASONABLENESS.—The Lawgiver requires nothing of His children which they should not render to Him and their fellows.

2. ITS BENEFITS IF OBSERVED.—What a blessed country would that be where every one of its precepts were kept! No exaltation or worship of men; no idol-worship; no profanity or hypocrisy; no Sabbath-breaking, but holy, helpful worship; no disobedience and despising of parents; no murder, theft, adultery, false swearing or dealing; no coveting; no courts, constables, police, jails, or bolted doors. Such a land could be truly called "God's Country." What a delightful place it would be in which to live!

3. ITS UNCHANGEABLE NATURE.—Why should men wish to change it? Surely the things prohibited by it are always evil; and the things either positively or inferentially enjoined are always good, verifying the words of the psalmist, "the law of Jehovah is perfect," and the words of the apostle, "the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and righteous, and good." Such a law admits of no change.

If the unprejudiced reader be a Bible student, he will learn among many other confirmatory things:

1. That that law was honored above all others by being spoken by God's own voice from heaven. Ex. 20:1; Deut. 5:22.

2. That it was separated from all other laws by being written with God's finger upon tables of enduring stone, and placed in an ark prepared for it. Ex. 24:12; 31:18; 32:15, 16; Deut. 10:1-5.

3. That the very giving of the law was under more sublimely impressive circumstances than earth had ever before witnessed, paralleled later only by those attending the Crucifixion. Ex. 19:16-20; 20:18-21.

POST OFFICE, AMITE, LA. METHODIST CHURCH, AMITE, LA.

4. That everywhere thruout the Scriptures that law is called holy, righteous, true, faithful, everlasting, not ever liable to change or annulment, as settled as the throne of heaven. Ps. 19:7-11; 111:7, 8; 119:142, 144, 172; Isa. 51:6, 7; Matt. 5:17-20; Luke 16:17.

5. That as it is the rule of right, it is also the law which reveals sin. 1 John 3:4; Rom. 7:7; 3:19, 20.

6. That Jesus Christ both taught and observed that law in all its integrity. Ps. 40:7, 8; John 4:34; 15:10; 8:46; 1 Peter 2:22; 1 John 2:6.

7. That His death upon the cross confirmed that law in its every particular. "Sin is the transgression of the law." "The wages of sin is death." The law could not be abolished to free the sinner. Its abolition would be a reflection upon God's government. Christ must die in the sinner's stead, "the Just for the unjust," to bring us to God, and at the same time to vindicate the law. Nowhere is the divinity and integrity and immutability of the law given at Sinai taught in stronger, more indelible characters than it was written in the blood of the Son of God on Calvary. 1 Peter 2:24; 2 Cor. 5:21.

8. Faith in Christ then does not abolish or make void the law of God; it establishes it forever. Rom. 3:31; 8:4; James 2:8-12.

9. It is the rule of judgment which every soul must meet. Eccl. 12:13, 14; James 2:8-12.

10. While men in the shadow of apostasy have lost sight of that law in part, the Bible teaches that the last reform in the Christian world will develop a people of whom it is said: "Here is the patience of the saints; here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus." Rev. 14:12; 12:17.

Why then should not this law be honored after the precepts of God and the example of Jesus Christ? Why should men wish to abolish so good a law? The answer may be found in an article upon this topic next week.