[X.]
The Tables of Stone.
BROKEN; alas! Shivered and broken! The gift of the Most High—the tables inscribed with the Law which was uttered in the thunders of Sinai, with the commandments which Israel had thrice vowed to keep—all broken through the baseness of man!
But man is not willing to own this. He has gathered the broken fragments together, as the shivered pieces of a precious ancient vase were once gathered, and has placed them together, fitting bit to bit, and has fastened them firmly, as he deems, with the cement of his own self-righteousness. He believes that there are few particles missing. Perhaps, indeed, he has not kept the Fourth Commandment in all its integrity; perhaps some fragments are wanting in the Tenth; but still, on the whole, he believes that he can present fair, almost faultless, tables, on which God will look with approval, and fellow-creatures with applause. When the Pharisee's eye rested on the tables of the Commandments—that proud eye detected no flaw—he cried, "God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men!" When the young ruler was questioned by the Lord, he, too, marked no breach in the heaven-given Law: "all these things have I kept from my youth up," was the complacent answer of a conscience at rest.
The Lord Jesus, the Source and Fountain of Light, threw such radiance on the Law of God, which man had broken, that the flaws and fractures in it became terribly manifest to every unblinded eye. Christ showed that the Commandment extends to the words of the lip and the thoughts of the heart. How self-righteousness melts under the burning power of that declaration from the Saviour, which sums up all the Commandments in two! "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the First Commandment. And the Second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." No one, but Him who gave the Law, could keep that Law unbroken!
Yet still, even to the present day, man takes self-righteousness to cement the fragments, and in his secret soul believes his work to be successful. He regards the Tables of Stone as holy; he knows that they were given by God; and his object, sometimes secret, but sometimes even avowed, is to make of them stepping-stones in the way to Heaven, so that he may pass the river of death without fear. He says, in his heart, that he has so carefully kept the Commandments, that he may safely rest upon them, and so receive the reward of obedience.
But woe to man, guilty man, if he trust his safety to that which has been broken again and again, and which never can be effectually joined together again by human effort. Not to his faithfulness in keeping God's Commandments, can the highest saint look for salvation. He knows that he might as well place his foot on a foam bubble floating on a torrent, and trust to that bubble to keep him from sinking, as rest on the broken Law to save him from being swept away to everlasting destruction.
They who have tried most carefully to keep the Law, are most ready to own this truth. Well does the Church of England make her children's response to each Commandment a petition for "mercy." Then at the close of all comes a prayer that God would write His Laws in our hearts, in allusion to His own gracious promise: "I will put My laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts; and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people."
When our Lord sojourned upon earth, a sinner was brought before Him who had notoriously broken the Law. Christ appealed to the consciences of her accusers, and conscience convicted them all of having, likewise transgressed God's Commandment. Twice on that memorable occasion, "Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote upon the ground." No action of the Lord recorded in Scripture can be without significance. If we humbly try to penetrate the meaning of this one, may we not find that the Lord would remind man, that though scribe, Pharisee, and those whom they condemned, had all broken the Law contained in the Tables given through Moses, yet that Christ could write that Law so indelibly in dust and ashes, "with the Spirit of the living God, not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart," that it should ever remain there? Thus every true believer becomes, in the forcible language of St. Paul, the epistle of Christ; the Law being inscribed therein by "the finger of God," not as a ground of acceptance, but as a token of adoption.
And let us never forget that what is written in the heart will assuredly be read in the life; none will so earnestly endeavour to keep the Commandments in thought, and word, and deed, as he who has received them in the spirit as well as the letter, "whose obedience is the cheerful heart-service of the man whose transgression is pardoned, whose sin is covered."