The Use of the Law by Editor

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 10, 1865

The Use of the Law.

By Editor

"MEN should be taught that God's law can be obeyed. It was meant for us and not for angels. Our compassionate Heavenly Father knew all our temptations from within and without. He framed its provisions to suit our condition as a race. When men endeavor to make out that the law of God is something so high, and wonderful, and mysterious that nobody ever did or ever can keep it, they in reality, though without designing it, prove that God is a great tyrant. For is not that tyranny to enact laws that cannot, by any possibility, be kept, and then affix the most fearful penalties for their violation? This is not the character of our Heavenly Father. He is just and merciful. His law is holy and just and good. The very existence of an enactment made by Him is of itself proof of the most conclusive kind that it can be obeyed by those for whom it was designed. Let men see that God's law can be kept, and ought to be kept, and then they may become scripturally convicted of sin. The terrors of hell will get hold of them. They will find themselves in trouble, and they will be glad to be helped out. They will not need a great deal of persuading to induce them to come to Jesus. Not until men discover that they are sick do they want a physician—not until they are slain by the law, will they seek to be made alive by Christ. But when they see that they are totally and eternally ruined unless a mighty deliverance is wrought out in their behalf, and when they realize that there is help for them in no other source but in the gospel, they will gladly come to the Saviour, and will not seek to make their own conditions. Their agonizing cry is, 'O wretched man that I am, Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' They will accept the gospel as gladly as the shipwrecked mariner hails the life-boat sent for his deliverance.

"For declaring THE LAW, we have the fullest warrant in the New Testament. Our Saviour says, 'Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets, I am come not to destroy, but to fulfill.' But not to preach the law as binding, is to destroy it. Paul preached very plainly the doctrine of salvation by faith. Yet he asks the question, 'Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid. Yea we establish the law.' But not to preach the law is to make it void. It is practically to assume the authority of repealing it altogether. And James declares that 'whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.' And the Revelator cries out, 'Blessed are they that do his commandments that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.

"We need a sturdier class of Christians. We shall never see them, until the law of God is again proclaimed. Sentimental preaching makes sentimental Christians. They will do to swell the numbers and make a show, but for colonizing Heaven they are worthless. As to self-denial, they are strangers to it. They can no more endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ than a child can endure the rigors of a military campaign. Place them in positions where there is a conflict between their worldly interests and the commands of God, and self invariably has the preference. Too many such disgrace the Christian name. They are not the men of whom martyrs are made.

If you would see converts that are not ready to yield to every little difficulty; who will refuse compliance with customs and fashions, however popular, that are contrary to the word of God—men and women of principle who can be relied upon in an emergency PROCLAIM THE LAW OF GOD, AND INSIST UPON ITS CLAIMS.

REMARKS.—The position assigned to the law, in the foregoing article, will be endorsed and appreciated by every S. D. Adventist. We are endeavoring to "proclaim the law, and insist upon its claims; and we trust that as the result a sturdy class of Christians is coming up, who can be relied upon in an emergency, even the emergency of the time of trouble that is before us. But we find it necessary to insist most upon the claims of that part of the law, which is most generally disregarded, namely, the fourth commandment.

We hope the "Earnest Christian" will remain true

to its principles, as above set forth, and when its attention is called to the fact, as it undoubtedly will be sooner or later, that the fourth commandment of that law requires of us the observance of the seventh, not the first, day of the week, not apostatize from its present just views of the law, as too many have done, to avoid the conclusion that the seventh day is the Sabbath, which inevitably results from the position that the law is still a living instrument in the hand of God, to convict us of our sins.