The Moral Law

Our Christian faith is a body of fact and doctrine. It is not a vague sentiment, some mystical feeling of communion with the unseen. It produces true sentiment and results in communion with the great unseen God, but it is first of all a faith in certain well–defined and unchangeable data of fact and teaching. But as truly as it is a faith it involves a life. And just as there is the unchangeable and immovable in the realm of what we call faith, so there is the unchangeable and immovable in the norms and principles of life. God does not change; his moral perfections do not change; his moral law does not change. Times change; conditions change; we change. But under and through all there remains man's conscience, man's responsibility, and over all there is the unchanging holiness, justice, and authority of God, issuing in the commands that bind man's conscience and with a divine imperative must regulate his life, in one word, the moral law.

Recognition of this datum of awful sanctity and republication of it with conviction and authority is the only path of repentance and restoration. As we recognize the sanctity that surrounds the law, we shall certainly be crushed with a sense of our own hell–deserving guilt and hopeless inability. We shall be constrained to cry out 'Woe is me for I am undone." "Surely I am more brutish than any man, and I have not the understanding of a man."[5] But in that condition there falls upon our ears and into our hearts the sweet news of the gospel, the gospel of a crucified and risen Redeemer and Lord. "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us."[6] We shall be constrained to come to Calvary.

But when we come to Calvary for the expiation of our guilt and the remission of our sin, it is not to diminish our esteem of that law nor relax our sense of its awful sanctity and binding authority. Oh, no! As the brilliant and eloquent James Henley Thornwell spoke and wrote a hundred years ago, "He that stands beneath the cross and understands the scene dares not sin; not because there is a hell beneath him or an angry God above him, but because Holiness is felt to reign there the ground on which he treads is sacred, the glory of the Lord encircles him, and, like Moses, he must remove the shoes from his feet. The Cross is a venerable spot. I love to linger around it, not merely that I may read my title to everlasting life, but that I may study the greatness of God. I use the term advisedly. God never appears to be so truly great, so intensely holy, as when from the pure energy of principle, He gives Himself, in the person of His Son, to die, rather than that His character should be impugned. Who dares prevaricate with moral distinctions and talk of death as a greater evil than dishonor, when God, the mighty Maker, died rather than that truth and justice should be compromised? Who at the foot of Calvary can pronounce sin to he a slight matter?"

When we are possessed by the sense of the authority and sanctity of the moral law we must come to Calvary if any true and living hope is to be engendered within us. But when we rise from our prostration before the cross, it is not to find the moral law abrogated but to find it by the grace of God wrought into the fibre of the new life in Christ Jesus. If the cross of Christ does not fulfill in us the passion of righteousness, we have misinterpreted the whole scheme of divine redemption. "For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh."[8] Is it that the moral law might cease to bind and regulate? Oh, no! But "that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit."John Murray