The Law

It is true  that conformity to the will of God must be first a condition of the heart, created by the Spirit's regenerative grace and fostered by his sanctifying presence. Upright conduct can never coexist with impurity of heart. Merely external and servile conformity to precepts of law does not constitute obedience. Upon none did the anathemas of our Lord descend with such severity as upon the legalistic Pharisees who made clean the outside of the cup and of the platter but who were within full of malice and hypocrisy, who were like whited sepulchers outwardly beautiful but within full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness. Without the inward condition of purity and the inward impulsion of love obedience is impossible.

But in these watchwords of our modern exponents of the Christian ethic there is also devastating error. We are not saved by obedience to the law, but we are saved unto it. In their insistence upon love they have placed love in opposition to law. We have just to remind them with well–balanced emphasis that love is the fulfilling of the law. It is not love in opposition to law but love fulfilling law. What our modern apostles of love really mean is the very opposite of this: they mean that love fulfills its own dictates, that love not only fulfills, but that it is also the law fulfilled, that love is as it were an autonomous, self–instructing and self–directing principle, that not only impels to the doing of the right but also tells us what the right is. This is certainly not what Paul meant when he said, "love is the fulfilling of the law." He tells us not only that love fulfills, but also what the law is which it fulfills. "Owe no man anything but to love one another, for he who loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet, and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this word, in this,thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."[2] It is noteworthy that Paul cites four precepts. He reminds us by the brief sentence, "and if there is any other commandment," that he does not consider these four as the complete sum of man's duty to man. He has cited four to exemplify his meaning. But what I wish especially to stress is first, that these four he enumerates are four of the well–known ten commandments. It is in the decalogue that Paul finds the epitome of moral law. And second, it is that law that love fulfills. The directing principle of love is objectively revealed statutory commandments, not at all the dictates which it might itself be presumed to excogitate.

A study of another passage in Paul will yield the same result. This passage is more negative, just as the preceding is more positive. It is I Cor. 6:9-11. There Paul is condemning sin-fornication, idolatry, adultery, effeminacy, sodomy, thievery, covetousness, drunkeness, reviling, extortion. They who commit such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. The most cursory review of these sins will show that the obligatoriness and authority of the ten commandments underly his whole exhortation and doctrine. Idolatry-the first and second commandments; adultery-the seventh commandment; thievery and extortion-the eighth commandment; reviling-the ninth and perhaps the third; covetousness-the tenth. He has not exhausted the list of sins; elsewhere he mentions others not specifically mentioned here. But he has enumerated enough to evince to us that the underlying presupposition of his thought is, that summarily, at least, the decalogue is the norm by which sin is to be known as it is also the norm of that righteousness which characterizes the kingdom of God and those who belong to it. He says in effect what the apostle John says that "sin is the transgression of the law."Abolish or abrogate law and you deny the reality of sin. Where no law is there is no transgression