Plain Sermons, preached at Archbishop Tenison's Chapel, Regent Street. Second Series

by James Galloway Cowan

We have here the question of a Jewish lawyer, who is said, in propounding it, to have tempted our Lord. This does not necessarily, or even probably, mean, that his object was simply to ensnare and entangle Jesus in his speech: but rather that he was putting Him to the test, that he might judge of the qualifications and orthodoxy of the New Teacher. But, besides this, he seems, from the commendation presently passed on him, to have had a better motive; to have been like the scribe who was not far from the kingdom of heaven, to have felt personal anxiety about salvation, and to have sought from our Lord, in an honest, though somewhat professional and self-sufficient manner, the resolution of a real doubt. “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He had listened to the words in which Jesus reminded His hearers, that they had greater privileges than those who lived before them (“Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them, and to hear those things which ye hear and have not heard them”), and rightly concluding that they were an announcement of the arrival of Gospel times, and the setting forth of their speaker as the Great Gospel Teacher, he asked, what was there new for him to hear and learn, and what consequently remained for him to do, that he might inherit eternal life. The reply of our Lord is remarkable. “What is written in the law? how readest thou?” There is nothing new, nothing taken away, nothing added or altered. I come, to fulfil the ceremonial law, to enforce the moral law, what does that bind upon thee? And he answering said, with much wisdom—much spiritual discernment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself. And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live:” i.e., shalt have eternal life. Observe, throughout this lawyer’s speech, how correct is his theology. “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” not to gain, to purchase, to earn it, but to inherit it. “I do not claim it as a profitable servant, I am not so foolish as to suppose that I can procure it by any surrender, or exchange, or labour. It comes (to those to whom it comes at all) as an inheritance, to the children of the covenant, the heirs of faithful Abraham. And this heirship is not a natural, but a spiritual one. I am a Jew outwardly, but I do not therefore claim to be certainly a Jew inwardly. They are not all Israel who are of Israel. Abraham’s child according to the flesh, I would also be, what I am not necessarily, what indeed I am not at all of mere natural birthright, Abraham’s child according to the promise.” And next observe, how he seeks to secure the inheritance. “What shall I do?” Eternal life is not the reward of service, it is not the fruit of labour, it is the privilege of a spiritual relationship; but still it cannot be enjoyed by those who are indifferent about it, or by those who only desire it. It must be laid hold on by real active efforts; it must be maintained by a particular course of conduct; salvation must be worked out. “What must I do” to secure it? Truly he is an enlightened scribe! He knows that eternal life is the free gift of a God, Who is no respecter of persons; Who recognises no birthright, no personal merits; Who will have mercy on Whom He will have mercy: but that yet grace does not fall, as the rain from heaven, alike upon the barren and the fertile, the thankless and the thankful, the careless and the anxious, the indolent and the active; but is ever guided by a discerning and distinguishing hand, is ever bestowed upon righteousness. And so he asks, What is the righteousness that inherits grace: knowing well what was the prescribed righteousness of the law, how men were to be saved in times past; but expecting that under the Gospel, an additional, perhaps a different course was to be followed.

We have already seen that Christ referred him back to the law, as revealing and enacting all that was necessary. “What is written in the law? How readest thou?” It is in his answer to this question that we see chiefly the perfection of his religious theory and his great intellectual superiority to the scribes generally. For, observe, he does not reply “We must be circumcised; we must be sprinkled with the blood of goats and heifers; we must keep the Passover; we must wait on the temple-services; we must give tithes of all that we possess.” Nor, again, does he say, “We must observe all moral precepts; we must refrain from all idolatry; we must do justice and love mercy; obeying implicitly the commandments of the two tables.” No! in theory he is wiser than that: he has no reliance on external rights and ceremonies: he is sure that God demands something better than a servile conformity with certain precepts and restrictions. God, he knows, looks to the heart, requires the spirit rather than, i.e., beyond the letter. The law has taught him this: Moses gave him from heaven ceremonies to perform, and moral commandments to keep; but Moses told him, that mere outward conformity with these things was not righteousness; that the law was spiritual; that the acts done and refrained from under it were only exhibitions of a principle which must reign within: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.” Even so, “Thou hast answered right,” said Christ. “Thou hast learnt under the law, all that the Gospel would teach. To exhibit this is the bent of My life on earth, to enforce it will be the mission of My Church. Love is the fulfilling of the law. This do, and thou shalt live.”

It appears to me, brethren, that in this conversation, carefully considered, we may find a clue to the satisfactory interpretation of those perplexing sayings about the differences between the law and the Gospel: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” “Ye are not under the law,” “the ministration of condemnation;” “The covenant that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law which was 430 years after cannot disannul.” “The Law and the Prophets were until John.” “I am not come to destroy the law.” “This do and thou shalt live.”

It is a common notion that there is an essential difference, amounting even to a contradiction between the law and the Gospel. God is supposed—as if He were an imperfect Being changing His ways capriciously—to have suspended the Covenant of Grace which He had made with Abraham, from the time of Moses to that of Christ, and to have given the Jews in its stead a Covenant of Works, which He well knew they could not keep, and under which, therefore, they were sure to be destroyed: or, if He accepted any of them under the law, then, it is said, that inasmuch as their obedience was of course imperfect, He must have been content with less than He had required, and have disregarded His own decree, “The soul that sinneth it shall die.” Nay, more than this: that He dispensed for a time with the merits of Christ’s atonement and the finding of salvation through Him, and dealt with man on his own merits, and rewarded him for an imperfect obedience. But now, it is urged, all this is once more changed. The law, having served its purpose of showing men that they could not obey God in the letter, having concluded them all under sin by disallowing the things they were prone to, and requiring what they could not do, having disappointed and balked them in their efforts to obtain salvation by it, and so caused them to abandon its observance in despair, and to inquire for another way of salvation—thus being a schoolmaster to lead them to Christ—has now been wholly repealed; so that we have nothing more to do with it, being brought out of bondage into liberty, and what we find forbidden or required by it, is not forbidden or required by us because it is in the law, but may be done or left undone, notwithstanding what the law says, unless some eternally moral principle, independent of Jewish sanctions and restrictions, would be thereby violated! I have put this in plainer and stronger words than any of yourselves probably would use, or are accustomed to hear: but I have not exaggerated the matter. In proof, let me ask, Are there not many who think the rehearsal of the Decalogue out of place in the Communion service? who object to moral preaching as savouring of the obsolete law? who talk about the “filthy rags” of their own righteousness, as if they were something wrong in keeping in the law? who believe that Christ is glorified most when they do least? who boast of a liberty to use or use not ordinances and means of grace? who reproach others with being, for instance, Sabbatarians? who speak of the God of the New Testament almost as if the God of the Old Testament were another Being, of different attributes, enacting different laws? And even among those who have not distinctly set the law and the Gospel in opposition, is there not a vague notion that somehow the Old Testament does not concern us Christians, and that our way of salvation is different from that of the Jews, and much easier to follow? O how do such persons reconcile with their notions Christ’s teaching of the lawyer, whom He not only told to look for the way of salvation in the law, but commended for finding it there, and enjoined to keep it as the condition of salvation: “This do, and thou shalt live.”

The fact is, the way of salvation has always been the same, since man became a sinner. Eternal life has always been a free gift in Christ. Not for their merits or deservings does God love men; not by their own inventions or labours do they procure acceptance. The precious blood of Christ shed (in effect) before the foundation of the world, has ever been the fountain for sin; the intercession of Christ has ever been the means of reconciliation; the grace of Christ’s sanctified human nature applied by the Holy Spirit has ever been the leaven of regeneration, of conversion, of perfection in holiness and fitness for the inheritance of the saints in light. But God has never been indifferent to the way in which men receive His free gifts. He at first created man for His own glory, and He has redeemed, and would sanctify him for His glory. He made man to love Him, to depend on Him, to render Him the grateful homage of a free-will service, to reflect His own glorious attributes of holiness and love. The sin of Adam and Eve was not that they ate of a particular fruit reserved from them, but that they frustrated the end for which they were created; that they found not their delight in the way of God’s will; that they chose for themselves out of Him; that they doubted His truth, gave themselves over to the influence and dominion of another lord. They would have sinned as greatly, as hatefully, had they scrupulously refrained from the deed of sin, but in their hearts longed after it, and in their hearts murmured against the restriction, and disputed the importance or the justice of it. And so the holiness of pardoned man does not consist in the mere mechanical, servile, or selfish rendering of outward obedience, in the number of enjoined things which he does, and the number of forbidden things which he avoids; but in the inward love and gratitude which he feels towards God, in his filial reverence of his Heavenly Father, in his delight to carry out God’s known will, and his anxiety to learn more, that he may do more of it, in his heart’s beating, so to speak, in unison with God’s heart, and his life’s reflecting God’s light and love.

To bring men to this state, that He may delight in them, that they may glorify Him in all things, is the purpose and aim of God’s great scheme of salvation; and, to forward that scheme, is, and has been, the object of all His dealings with men of all times (when they have not been judgments of wrath, because mercy was refused), whether they have been encouragements or remonstrances, pleadings or rebukes, blessings or chastisements, the promulgations of moral laws, the laying on or taking off of positive or ceremonial commandments. None of these things could in themselves have made men what God willed them to be, loving children of a loving Father; yet they had, or were designed to have, their effect in bringing them back little by little to a right mind, and a right life. But being used by a wise and discerning God, though their object was always uniform, the use of them has varied, one being employed in this case, another in that, according to the state of those on whom they were to operate. Thus Adam, fresh from the hand of God, full of knowledge and intelligence, and holiness and love, was left, it would appear—but with one commandment, the test of his integrity—to worship and glorify God as his own heart and mind dictated; while the Jews, coming out of Egypt, sunk in ignorance, given to idolatry, perverse in will and affections, were dealt with as babes, albut without mind and without heart. To them it was necessary to declare, that there was but one God, to command them to worship Him, to prescribe every particular of the worship, to bid them not blaspheme Him, to hedge them in by numerous restrictions, to write down every item of their duty, to encourage their obedience by immediate rewards, to check their transgressions by instant punishments! They were treated, in fact, just as wise and fond parents treat little children: their minds taught by pictures—brazen serpents, pillars of light and fire, gorgeous tabernacles, sacrifices of bulls, and goats, and lambs, burnings of incense, and the like—and their hearts and lives trained by a course of discipline suited to their comprehension, and a system of rewards and punishments which they could appreciate. These things were means to an end. They impressed upon the Jews, that reverence and obedience were due to God. They taught them to look to Him for reward and punishment, to love and fear Him. But like the arbitrary discipline we use with children, and the toys which we give or take away from them according to their conduct, they were to be set aside (as far as they were childish) so soon as more intelligent and better influences could be employed, and the children be taught to use their minds and hearts, in exercising reverence, and love, and fear, not in little observances and restrictions, not in mere literal compliance with some particular expressed laws, but according to the principle of love which would devote itself entirely, and which uses all its powers to find out what is devotion, and to practice it.

Thus, I say, the Jews were dealt with from Moses to Christ, and then men were bidden to put away childish things—the Spirit being given to raise them above childishness—and henceforth to render enlarged, enlightened, loving service to God. They were not released from reverence and submission: very few commandments hitherto observed were repealed, save those that were typical and ceremonial, and which, of course, gave way to the antitype and to the new ritual of Christianity; but henceforth, they were told, God would not be pleased with mere literal obedience: Do what you did before, but do it in the spirit, and carry it farther, and search about to see whether your own hearts and minds cannot regulate your lives in things not prescribed.

Indeed, all this had been told them before, as the quotation of the lawyer from Deuteronomy alone would suffice to show; but it was not so strictly required of them as it is of us, because allowance was made for their childish want of spiritual comprehension, and because the perfection of obedience was postponed till the full strength was given to render it, as well as the enlightened mind to understand it.

In Gospel times the law is spiritualised, the observance of the commandments is extended beyond the outward life, to the very thoughts and desires. To covet is to steal, to lust is to commit adultery, to hate is to murder! Hence, while in one sense, our obedience is easier, because we render it under the influence of enlightened minds and kindled feelings, of love and gratitude—whereas, the Jew was perpetually crossing and driving himself to keep a law which had no other recommendation to him than that its observance preserved him from immediate chastisement—in other respects, our obedience is not only more imperatively necessary, because our privileges and responsibilities are greater, but it must be more precise, because any wilful deviation from it—in us who are of a mature and enlightened age—will surely indicate an unloving heart; and he that has no love has no spiritual life!

This, after all, is the distinction between the good works of the Jew and those of the Christian; not that the former sought salvation on account of them, while the latter makes them but the tribute of praise and love for salvation—for the Jew believed that he was saved by ordinances, not by works—but that the Jew’s was the enforced obedience of slavish fear, while the Christian’s is the spontaneous expression of filial love. If the Christian were perfect in moral perception, he would be a law to himself, and would need but little of a written law; but not being thus perfect, he finds his greatest help to glorify God, in the studying and following of the Mosaic laws, which are samples and specimens furnished by God, of acceptable works, and which, moreover, are a standard whereby he may measure, not so much how near, as how far he is, from doing the whole will of God.