There is needed to-day a great challenge to be thrown at an unbelieving world, a testimony that cannot be answered,—Christians walking at liberty, men and women living in the midst of these awful days of stress with the “freedom indeed” which belongs only to sons of God. But instead of that an unbelieving world is constantly face to face with the puzzling spectacle of professing Christians who are bondservants of sin, who do not know the meaning of liberty.
For let us remember the word of the Master, and not nullify it with theological explanations to make it fit into the experiences of Christians: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin.” And Christians are bondservants of sin because they are living under law and not under grace. They are not using, not enjoying, the freedom that Jesus Christ purchased for us.
Have We Nothing to Do with Law?
So fundamental is the correct understanding of the Christian’s relation to the law, that if Satan is not able to beguile Christians into staying in bondage under the law he will seek to drive them into an opposite error that is just as deadly to true liberty. This is the notion that a Christian has nothing to do with the law, and is under no obligation to have his life conform to it. Young Christians who have seen something of the wonder of their deliverance from the law have jumped to the conclusion that the Old Testament books that deal with the dispensation of law have such an indirect bearing upon their lives that they can neglect them. Portions of the New Testament are also divided in this fashion from the rest of the Word, and even Christians with a deep spiritual vision have argued that the Sermon on the Mount had little in it for them because it was on legal ground, and we are under grace. Their teachers may not have intended this application of their instruction about freedom from the law, but it illustrates the danger, and shows the need of clear light from the Word to avoid the pitfalls on each side.
So the Word of God urges on the one hand, “For freedom did Christ set us free: stand fast therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1), and cautions on the other, “For so is the will of God, that by well-doing ye should put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: as free, and not using your freedom for a cloak of wickedness, but as bondservants of God” (1 Peter 2:16).
And Paul puts the two messages together in Galatians 5:13 and 14: “For ye, brethren, were called for freedom; only use not your freedom for an occasion to the flesh, but through love be servants one to another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Law in the New Testament
But in what sense are we freed from the law, if we are still to keep the law? The New Testament takes hold of the law of God as revealed in the Old, and makes it infinitely higher in its requirements.
Some men say that their Gospel is the Sermon on the Mount.
It is the most hopeless Gospel a sinner ever struggled with.