II. The law of God to be reverenced.—1. Because it was ordained or delivered by angels. 2. We are to fear to break the least commandment, because the angels observe the keepers and breakers of it, and are ready to witness against them that offend. 3. If thou offend and break the law, repent with speed, for that is the desired joy of angels. 4. If thou sin and repent not, look for shame and confusion before God and His angels.
III. God, the Author and Source of law, is one.—1. He is unchangeable. 2. His unchangeableness the foundation of our comfort. 3. We should be unchangeable in faith, hope, love, good counsels, honest promises, and in the maintenance of true religion.—Perkins.
Ver. 19. The Use of the Law.
- It is a standard to measure our defects.
- It is a sword to pierce our conscience.
- It is a seal to certify that we are in the way of grace.—Tholuck.
No Trust in Legal Prescriptions.—St. Paul, with the sledge-hammer force of his direct and impassioned dialectics, shattered all possibility of trusting in legal prescriptions, and demonstrated that the law was no longer obligatory on Gentiles. He had shown that the distinction between clean and unclean meats was to the enlightened conscience a matter of indifference, that circumcision was nothing better than a physical mutilation, that ceremonialism was a yoke with which the free, converted Gentile had nothing to do, that we are saved by faith and not by works, that the law was a dispensation of wrath and menace introduced for the sake of transgressions, that so far from being, as all the Rabbis asserted, the one thing on account of which the universe had been created, the Mosaic code only possessed a transitory, subordinate, and intermediate character, coming in, as it were in a secondary way, between the promise of Abraham and the fulfilment of that promise in the Gospel of Christ.—Dean Farrar.
The Use of the Law under the Gospel.
I. The law never was intended to supersede the Gospel as a means of life.
II. The most perfect edition of the Gospel, so far from having abolished the least tittle of the moral law, has established it.
III. The use of the law.—1. To constitute probation. 2. The law is our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. 3. The law serves to give beauty and symmetry to the hidden man of the heart. 4. To vindicate the conduct of our Judge in dooming the impenitent to eternal death.
Lessons.—1. Since the law as a covenant has been superseded by a covenant better adapted to our guilty and helpless circumstances, let us make a proper use of the mercy, acquaint ourselves with its demands, and abound in the holiness it enjoins. 2. Mark those who set aside the law, shun their company, and pray for their repentance.—Iota.