The obligation to obey this law and to be conformed to God's perfect moral character is based upon man's original ability and the gifts which God bestowed upon him at the beginning. Created in the image of God, it is man's duty to render back to God that which God first gave, enlarged and improved by growth and culture (Luke 19:23—“wherefore gavest thou not my money into the bank, and I at my coming should have required it with interest”). This obligation is not impaired by sin and the weakening of man's powers. To let down the standard would be to misrepresent God. Adolphe Monod would not save himself from shame and remorse by lowering the claims of the law: “Save first the holy law of my God,” he says, “after that you shall save me!”
Even salvation is not through violation of law. The moral law is immutable, because it is a transcript of the nature of the immutable God. Shall nature conform to me, or I to nature? If I attempt to resist even physical laws, I am crushed. I can use nature only by obeying her laws. Lord Bacon: “Natura enim non nisi parendo vincitur.” So [pg 542]in the moral realm. We cannot buy off nor escape the moral law of God. God will not, and God can not, change his law by one hair's breadth, even to save a universe of sinners. Omar Kháyyám, in his Rubáiyát, begs his god to “reconcile the law to my desires.”Marie Corelli says well: “As if a gnat should seek to build a cathedral, and should ask to have the laws of architecture altered to suit its gnat-like capacity.” See Martineau, Types, 2:120.
Secondly, the law of God as the ideal of human nature.—A law thus identical with the eternal and necessary relations of the creature to the Creator, and demanding of the creature nothing less than perfect holiness, as the condition of harmony with the infinite holiness of God, is adapted to man's finite nature, as needing law; to man's free nature, as needing moral law; and to man's progressive nature, as needing ideal law.
Man, as finite, needs law, just as railway cars need a track to guide them—to leap the track is to find, not freedom, but ruin. Railway President: “Our rules are written in blood.” Goethe, Was Wir Bringen, 19 Auftritt: “In vain shall spirits that are all unbound To the pure heights of perfectness aspire; In limitation first the Master shines, And law alone can give us liberty.”—Man, as a free being, needs moral law. He is not an automaton, a creature of necessity, governed only by physical influences. With conscience to command the right, and will to choose or reject it, his true dignity and calling are that he should freely realize the right.—Man, as a progressive being, needs nothing less than an ideal and infinite standard of attainment, a goal which he can never overpass, an end which shall ever attract and urge him forward. This he finds in the holiness of God.
The law is a fence, not only for ownership, but for care. God not only demands, but he protects. Law is the transcript of love as well as of holiness. We may reverse the well-known couplet and say: “I slept, and dreamed that life was Duty; I woke and found that life was Beauty.” “Cui servire regnare est.” Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 56—“In Plato's Crito, the Laws are made to present themselves in person to Socrates in prison, not only as the guardians of his liberty, but as his lifelong friends, his well-wishers, his equals, with whom he had of his own free will entered into binding compact.” It does not harm the scholar to have before him the ideal of perfect scholarship; nor the teacher to have before him the ideal of a perfect school; nor the legislator to have before him the ideal of perfect law. Gordon, The Christ of To-day, 134—“The moral goal must be a flying goal; the standard to which we are to grow must be ever rising; the type to which we are to be conformed must have in it inexhaustible fulness.”
John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:119—“It is just the best, purest, noblest human souls, who are least satisfied with themselves and their own spiritual attainments; and the reason is that the human is not a nature essentially different from the divine, but a nature which, just because it is in essential affinity with God, can be satisfied with nothing less than a divine perfection.” J. M. Whiton, The Divine Satisfaction: “Law requires being, character, likeness to God. It is automatic, self-operating. Penalty is untransferable. It cannot admit of any other satisfaction than the reëstablishment of the normal relation which it requires. Punishment proclaims that the law has not been satisfied. There is no cancelling of the curse except through the growing up of the normal relation. Blessing and curse ensue upon what we are, not upon what we were. Reparation is within the spirit itself. The atonement is educational, not governmental.” We reply that the atonement is both governmental and educational, and that reparation must first be made to the holiness of God before conscience, the mirror of God's holiness, can reflect that reparation and be at peace.
The law of God is therefore characterized by:
(a) All-comprehensiveness.—It is over us at all times; it respects our past, our present, our future. It forbids every conceivable sin; it requires every conceivable virtue; omissions as well as commissions are condemned by it.
Ps. 119:96—“I have seen an end of all perfection ... thy commandment is exceeding broad”; Rom. 3:23—“all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God”; James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and [pg 543]doeth it not, to him it is sin.” Gravitation holds the mote as well as the world. God's law detects and denounces the least sin, so that without atonement it cannot be pardoned. The law of gravitation may be suspended or abrogated, for it has no necessary ground in God's being; but God's moral law cannot be suspended or abrogated, for that would contradict God's holiness. “About right” is not “all right.” “The giant hexagonal pillars of basalt in the Scottish Staffa are identical in form with the microscopic crystals of the same mineral.” So God is our pattern, and goodness is our likeness to him.
(b) Spirituality.—It demands not only right acts and words, but also right dispositions and states. Perfect obedience requires not only the intense and unremitting reign of love toward God and man, but conformity of the whole inward and outward nature of man to the holiness of God.