Christ Our Pattern by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. · Sep 25, 1913

Christ Our Pattern

By C. M. S.

He who came to live our example and die our sacrifice has left us a very plain lesson indeed in the matter of obedience to the law of God. Never in anything that he said or did is there even the most vague intimation that he had come to set up a will or a law of his own in opposition to the law and will of God.

He expressed his purpose in such words as these. "I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." John 5:30. "I am come down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." John 6:38. He taught his disciples to pray, "Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth." And when it came to the supreme test where he must lay down his life for man's transgression of the law of God, he prayed: "My Father, if this cannot pass away, except I drink it, thy will be done." Matt. 26:42. "I delight to do thy will, O my God; yea, thy law is within my heart." Ps. 40:8.

That is our example, our pattern in loyalty; that brings God and man into harmony, makes them at one. That removes the enmity—that child of a carnal heart—of the natural man toward the law of God. "For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." Rom. 8:6, 7. While the carnal mind, or the fleshly mind, is dominant in the man, there is opposition to the law of God; and opposition to the law of God means opposition to God himself, whose character is expressed in that law. Christ manifested none of that feeling. He was here to teach us the very opposite. As was prophesied of him in Isa. 42:21, he did "magnify the law, and make it honorable."

Christ could not have been the Saviour of men if he had taken any course other than the one he did,—a course of complete submission to the law of God; for there is only one final authority in the universe of God, and that is God. For Christ to attempt to change the law of God or to set up a law of his own, would be to put himself in the place of God, to set up another government, and bring in discord, disharmony, rebellion,—the work which Satan did.

Instead of attempting to do any such work, Christ humbled himself and became obedient to the established order and law of the Father. It was Satan's work of opposition to the law and the established order of God's government that made necessary Christ's work of reconciliation, obedience, and sacrifice. The works which he did he declared to be the works of the One who sent him. His whole ministry was a ministry of reconciliation—not to reconcile God to man, but to reconcile man to God. See 2 Cor. 5:18-20.

Then, when Christ returned to the Father, and left with his followers the same "ministry of reconciliation," he left with them the example of his own life to follow. Thus speaks the disciple John: "He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk even as he walked." 1 John 2:6. How must we walk in order to walk as he walked? The same writer tells us in the sentences just preceding the above quotation: "Hereby we know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoso keepeth his word, in him verily hath the love of God been perfected. Hereby we know that we are in him: he that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk even as he walked." 1 John 2:3-6. That, says John, is the test which we may apply to ourselves, to know whether we are in him or not. If we walk as he walked, we are "in him;" if we do not, then we are not "in him."

If Christ had set up laws of his own in opposition to the will of the One who sent him, he would have nullified his own mission, and made the breach between man and God wider than ever. That would have placed him also in the ranks of those who needed to be reconciled. Lucifer, the one-time covering cherub, did that very work; and the load of sin under which the universe groans today is the result of that act.

Notwithstanding that fact, and in the plain light of the terrible consequences of that act, our Lord Jesus Christ is continually accused—and by those who profess to honor him—of doing the same thing, of setting up another law, instituting another sabbath, thus supplanting the law written by the finger of God upon the tables of stone and upon the hearts of men; and that accusation is made in the face of the plain and emphatic declaration of Christ recorded in Matt. 5:18, "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled."

That was the uncompromising position which Christ himself took. It was the only position he could take and be man's Redeemer. The law which he magnified was the established law of the Father. He set up no will but the will of him that sent him. He wrought no works for his own glory, but rather emptied himself of the glory that he had with the Father before the world was—all that he might establish in the hearts of men the law which man had broken. That law is the very law which professed Christians are today accusing him of having abolished, supplanted,

overthrown; the very law (his word) which the psalmist declares is settled forever in the heavens. Ps. 119:89.

Nothing would have suited Satan better than to have caused Christ to transgress that law or seek to abolish it. So he tempted Christ on both tables of that law. If Christ had fallen down and worshiped Satan as Satan demanded, he would have broken the first table. If he had allowed himself to covet the kingdoms of this world, as Satan sought to cause him to do, he would have broken the last table of the law. But he yielded in neither. The ground of man's hope in Christ is the fact that he was a lawkeeper rather than a lawbreaker, a law-changer, or a law-abolisher. Christ loyally adhered to and magnified the law of God; and they that are his will do as he did. Knowing his example we must follow it, or we cannot expect his approbation in the great day of God.

C. M. S.