4. The fourth use is to form habits of faith.—As Judaism was a system calculated to nurture habits of obedience, so was it one which nourished the temper of faith. All education begins with faith. The child does not know the use of the alphabet, but he trusts. The boy beginning mathematics takes on trust what he sees no use in. The child has to take parental wisdom for granted. Happy the child that goes on believing that nothing is wiser, better, greater, than his father! Blessed spirit of confiding trust which is to be transferred to God.
II. The time when restraint may be laid aside.—1. When self-command is obtained. Some of us surely there are who have got beyond childish meanness: we could not be mean; restraint is no longer needed; we are beyond the schoolmaster. Some of us there are who have no inclination to intemperance; childish excess in eating and drinking exists no longer. Some of us there are who no longer love indolence. We have advanced beyond it. The law may be taken away, for we are free from law. True Christian liberty is this—self-command, to have been brought to Christ, to do right and love right, without a law of compulsion to school into doing it.
2. When the state of justification by faith has been attained.—There are two states of justification—by the law and by faith. Justification by the law implies a scrupulous and accurate performance of minute acts of obedience in every particular; justification by faith is acceptance with God, not because a man is perfect, but because he does all in a trusting, large, generous spirit, actuated by a desire to please God. In Christianity there are few or no definite laws—all men are left to themselves.
3. Restraint must be laid aside when the time of faith has come, whether faith itself have come or not.—It is so in academical education. We may have attained the full intellectual comprehension of the Gospel, but religious goodness has not kept pace with it, and the man wakes to conviction that the Gospel is a name and the powers of the world to come are not in him. You cannot put him to school again. Fear will not produce goodness. Forms will not give reverence. System will not confer freedom. Therefore the work of childhood and youth must be done while we are young, when the education is not too late.—F. W. Robertson.
Ver. 24. The Law preparing for Christ.
I. The law led men to Christ by foreshadowing Him.—This was true of the ceremonial part of it. The ceremonies meant more than the general duty of offering to God praise and sacrifice, since this might have been secured by much simpler rites. What was the meaning of the solemn and touching observance of the Jewish Day of Atonement? We know that what passed in that old earthly sanctuary was from first to last a shadow of the majestic self-oblation of the true High Priest of Christendom, Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. Each ceremony was felt to have some meaning beyond the time then present, and so it fostered an expectant habit of mind; and as the ages passed these expectations thus created converged more and more towards a coming Messiah, and in a subordinate but real way the ceremonial law did its part in leading the nation to the school of Christ.
II. By creating in man’s conscience a sense of want which Christ alone could relieve.—This was the work of the moral law, of every moral precept in the books of Moses, but especially of those most sacred and authoritative precepts which we know as the Ten Commandments. So far from furnishing man with a real righteousness, so far from making him such as he should be, correspondent to the true ideal of his nature, the law only inflicted on every conscience that was not fatally benumbed a depressing and overwhelming conviction that righteousness, at least in the way of legal obedience, was a thing impossible. And this conviction of itself prepared men for a righteousness which should be not the product of human efforts, but a gift from heaven—a righteousness to be attained by the adhesion of faith to the perfect moral Being, Jesus Christ, so that the believer’s life becomes incorporate with His.
III. By putting men under a discipline which trained them for Christ.—What is the Divine plan for training, whether men or nations? Is it not this—to begin with rule and to end with principle, to begin with law and to end with faith, to begin with Moses and to end with Christ? God began with rule. He gave the Mosaic law, and the moral parts of that law being also laws of God’s own essential nature could not possibly be abrogated; but as rules of life the Ten Commandments were only a preparation for something beyond them. In the Christian revelation God says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” When you have done this, and He on His part has by His Spirit infused into you His Divine life so that you are one with Him, you will not depend any longer mainly upon rules of conduct. Justification by faith is so far from being moral anarchy that it is the absorption of rule into the higher life of principle. In the experience of the soul faith corresponds to the empire of principle in the growth of individual character and in the development of national life, while the law answers to that elementary stage in which outward rules are not yet absorbed into principle.—H. P. Liddon.
The Law a Schoolmaster.
I. The Jewish religion brought men to Christ by the light, the constraining force, of prophecy.—First, a human deliverance of some kind, then a personal Saviour, is announced. He was exactly what prophecy had foretold. He Himself appealed to prophecy as warranting His claims.