R. W. Emerson, Woodnotes, 57—“Conscious Law is King of kings.” Two centuries ago John Norton wrote a book entitled The Orthodox Evangelist, “designed for the begetting and establishing of the faith which is in Jesus,” in which we find the following: “God doth not will things because they are just, but things are therefore just because God so willeth them. What reasonable man but will yield that the being of the moral law hath no necessary connection with the being of God? That the actions of men not conformable to this law should be sin, that death should be the punishment of sin, these are the constitutions of God, proceeding from him not by way of necessity of nature, but freely, as effects and products of his eternal good pleasure.” This is to make God an arbitrary despot. We should not say that God makes law, nor on the other hand that God is subject to law, but rather that God is law and the source of law.
Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 161—“God's law is organic—inwrought into the constitution of men and things. The chart however does not make the channel.... A law of nature is never the antecedent but the consequence of reality. What right has this consequence of reality to be personalized and made the ruler and source of reality? Law is only the fixed mode in which reality works. Law therefore can explain nothing. Only God, from whom reality springs, can explain reality.” In other words, law is never an agent but always a method—the method of God, or rather of Christ who is the only Revealer of God. Christ's life in the flesh is the clearest manifestation of him who is the principle of law in the physical and moral universe. Christ is the Reason of God in expression. It was he who gave the law on Mount Sinai as well as in the Sermon on the Mount. For fuller treatment of the subject, see Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 321-344; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257-274; Whewell, Elements of Morality, 2:35; and especially E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 79-108.
Each of the two last-mentioned characteristics of God's law is important in its implications. We treat of these in their order.
First, the law of God as a transcript of the divine nature.—If this be the nature of the law, then certain common misconceptions of it are excluded. The law of God is
(a) Not arbitrary, or the product of arbitrary will. Since the will from which the law springs is a revelation of God's nature, there can be no rashness or unwisdom in the law itself.
E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 193—“No law of God seems ever to have been arbitrarily enacted, or simply with a view to certain ends to be accomplished; it always represented some reality of life which it was inexorably necessary that those who were to be regulated should carefully observe.” The theory that law originates in arbitrary will results in an effeminate type of piety, just as the theory that legislation has for its sole end the greatest happiness results in all manner of compromises of justice. Jones, Robert Browning, 43—“He who cheats his neighbor believes in tortuosity, and, as Carlyle says, has the supreme Quack for his god.”
(b) Not temporary, or ordained simply to meet an exigency. The law is a manifestation, not of temporary moods or desires, but of the essential nature of God.
The great speech of Sophocles' Antigone gives us this conception of law: “The ordinances of the gods are unwritten, but sure. Not one of them is for to-day or for yesterday alone, but they live forever.” Moses might break the tables of stone upon which the law was inscribed, and Jehoiakim might cut up the scroll and cast it into the fire (Ex. 32:19; Jer. 36:23), but the law remained eternal as before in the nature of God and in the constitution of man. Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch: “The moral laws are just as stable as the law of gravitation. Every fuzzy human chicken that is hatched into this world tries to fool with those laws. Some grow wiser in the process and some do not. We talk about breaking God's laws. But after those laws have been broken several billion times since Adam first tried to play with them, those laws are still intact and no seam or fracture is visible in them,—not even a scratch on the enamel. But the lawbreakers—that is another story. If you want to find their fragments, go to the ruins of Egypt, of Babylon, of Jerusalem; study statistics; read faces; keep your eyes open; visit Blackwell's Island; walk through the graveyard and read the invisible inscriptions left by the Angel of Judgment, for instance: ‘Here lie the fragments of John Smith, who contradicted his Maker, played football with the ten commandments, and departed this life at the age of thirty-five. His mother and wife weep for him. Nobody else does. May he rest in peace!’ ”
(c) Not merely negative, or a law of mere prohibition,—since positive conformity to God is the inmost requisition of law.
The negative form of the commandments in the decalogue merely takes for granted the evil inclination in men's hearts and practically opposes its gratification. In the case of each commandment a whole province of the moral life is taken into the account, although the act expressly forbidden is the acme of evil in that one province. So the decalogue makes itself intelligible: it crosses man's path just where he most feels inclined to wander. But back of the negative and specific expression in each case lies the whole mass of moral requirement: the thin edge of the wedge has the positive demand of holiness behind it, without obedience to which even the prohibition cannot in spirit be obeyed. Thus “the law is spiritual” (Rom. 7:14), and requires likeness in character and life to the spiritual God; John 4:24—“God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”