Law or Love

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.—Romans 8:3-4.

1. The passage with which the previous chapter closes is one of the most interesting perhaps that St. Paul ever wrote, because, in describing there his own feelings and experiences, he has depicted so faithfully, so graphically, the feelings and experiences of all earnest souls. The passage reveals pathetic secrets of theirs, arrests them with a vivid portrayal of themselves. “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. To will is present with me, but how to perform I find not, for the good that I would, I do not, and the evil that I would not, I do. I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see a different law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members.” What heart is there in which these words are not more or less echoed? Have we not known what it is, while perceiving and admiring the right, to be baffled by contrary impulses in our wish and purpose to practize it? We have seen its Divine claim and majesty, and have meant, have craved and struggled to respond to it, yet could not, held down and overborne by the weight of something lower belonging to us.

As one whose footsteps halt,

Toiling in immeasurable sand.

And o’er a weary, sultry land,

Far beneath a blazing vault,

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,

The city sparkles like a grain of salt.

2. The question is how to be delivered from the thraldom of moral evil. Man is in contact with law, the transgression of which recoils upon him at every step. He does not need to be for ever told of it. The question is how to take his feet from the toils; how to get the desire and the power to love and obey; how to silence that conflict between the conscience and the lower desires which makes the soul a house divided against itself. Here is man loaded down with his passions, coming into the world with heavy tendencies on the animal side, depraved, inheriting the sinful blood of generation upon generation, exposed to all evil and overborne by temptation, ignorant, weak, fallible, limited in his powers, finding causes for his sinfulness which inhere in the very structure of his body and his mind, how shall he keep the moral law? How shall he get the desire to keep it? To do that which is right, says Paul, is with me, but “how to perform” that which I would, that is the difficulty. Who shall deliver me from the body of this death—who shall deliver me from this spiritual deadness of the soul, this corruption of the affections, this impotence of the will, this unwillingness to love and obey? That is the need of men in temptation. That is the cry of every heart who ever made a struggle to lead a clean and noble life. The law man knows; and all religious teachers take care that he shall continue to understand it, and that he shall not forget it. But this is not the main trouble, the trouble is how to get the willingness, the desire to obey the law. Well, Paul answers that question. The Gospel is the answer to it. While men are still without moral strength, Christ dies for the ungodly. The power of the new life in Christ Jesus delivers us from the old power of sin and death. If Christ be in us, the flesh is dead in respect of sin, the spirit is alive in respect of rectitude and obedience. Christ creates the motive of love.

3. The text would be unintelligible unless we observed its antithetical setting. It is a contrast between law and love as redemptive forces in human life. Paul does not discuss it with the philosopher’s pleasure in abstract reasoning. He is dealing with facts. Law was a fact. Love was a fact. In times past God had sought to govern the world by law. Now, through Jesus Christ, God was seeking to rule life by love. Which was the successful redemptive principle? On this point Paul’s mind was absolutely convinced. Law is powerless, helpless, impotent. Love is infinitely capable and eternally omnipotent. “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh,” God has achieved by “sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh,” and He, being “an offering for sin, condemned sin in the flesh,” and, because of that, the end of the law is attained, “the ordinance of the law” is now “fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.”

The text contains the following statements:—

1. The Law could not free us from sin and death,—its failure being due to the weakness of the flesh.

2. God sent His own Son

(1)  in the likeness of sinful flesh;

(2)  and (as an offering) for sin.

(3.)  He thus condemned sin in the flesh.

(1)  In order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us.

(2)  Who walk not after the flesh but after the spirit.

I

The Failure of the Law

i. The Fact of the Failure

1. What is it that the Law could not do? It could not condemn sin in the flesh in such a way as to ensure that the righteousness of the law shall be fulfilled in us. The law demands righteousness: the law condemns sin. But the law cannot secure the fulfilment of the demand which it makes upon us; it cannot accomplish the destruction of the sin which it condemns; in other words, it cannot condemn sin effectually. It has indeed a terrible power to condemn; it can, it does, condemn the sinner most effectually, so as to secure his destruction; but it cannot effectually condemn the sin rooted in the flesh, so as to effect its destruction.

2. What is needed is that the sinner should be brought heartily to renounce the service of sin, and heartily to embrace the service of God, that, in the words of the Apostle himself, he should become “dead to sin” and “alive unto God.” The sinner must be brought into thorough, hearty agreement with God’s opposition to sin; and the law cannot produce such a change of heart as this: it may prevent the man from committing overt acts of sin, but that is a very different thing from destroying the love of sin itself, and inspiring a heart-hatred of the abominable thing which God hates. That the law could not do this for him, Paul had learned from his own experience. So long as he remained a stranger to God’s saving grace, the law, far from delivering him from the dominion of sin, only roused to greater activity the evil principles that were within him. He had to learn, by passing through struggles of the most painful kind, that it is not to the law that we must look for deliverance from the ruling power of sin.

The makers of our human laws know that they are weak. They know that while they promulgate their regulations they cannot reckon on obedience. We have laws against gambling, but gambling still goes on. We have a great body of laws to regulate the drink traffic, but you cannot pick up the newspapers without reading of the prosecution of some offender, or of some crime for which some one should be punished. It is because we know the law is weak that we engage inspectors and policemen. We build prisons, and penitentiaries, and reformatories, and keep them up at great expense, because we know that, while the laws are known, the simple knowledge is no guarantee of obedience.1 [Note: J. G. Bowran.]

3. But, even though the law is weak, it cannot be said to be useless. It serves other and necessary purposes. The Apostle recognizes that. “Through the law cometh the knowledge of sin.” “Where there is no law neither is there transgression.” “Sin is not imputed where there is no law.” “Howbeit, I had not known sin except through the law.” It is by the law that we have the knowledge of sin. If we crossed the field and never saw the signboard, while we should be actual transgressors, there would be no guilt in the trespass. If, however, we saw the signboard, and sinned against knowledge, we should be verily guilty. And so, God, by the promulgation of His law, has created a conscience of sin, even as the State, by the announcement of its laws, has created a national sense of sin. The law, then, is necessary as an educational factor. It is the “schoolmaster.” But, as the pedagogue cannot manufacture geniuses, so the law cannot make saints.

If not with hope of life,

Begin with fear of death:

Strive the tremendous lifelong strife

Breath after breath.

"

Bleed on beneath the rod;

Weep on until thou see;

Turn fear and hope to love of God

Who loveth thee.

Turn all to love, poor soul;

Be love thy watch and ward;

Be love thy starting-point, thy goal,

And thy reward.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

ii. The Cause of the Failure

1. It is natural enough that we should think in the first instance of the law as the agency fitted to bring about the desired result. What can be needed to secure men’s fulfilling the righteousness of the law but just that they should have its most reasonable requirements set plainly before them, clothed with the august authority of God Himself? It might seem as if the law coming to men thus, having its claims enforced, moreover, by the promise of reward in the case of obedience, and by the threat of punishment in the case of disobedience, were the very agency fitted to secure the object desired, did not experience prove that it is utterly powerless to accomplish it. That the powers of the law might be fully tested, it was solemnly promulgated at Mount Sinai, in the hearing of all Israel, amidst the most overwhelming manifestations of the Divine majesty and glory. But even when thus proclaimed in the most impressive manner by God Himself, it failed to secure the fulfilment of its just requirements. And what was it that rendered the law powerless? It was weak, the Apostle says, “through the flesh.”

2. The law is good in itself, but it has to work through the sinful nature. The only powers to which it can appeal are those which are already in rebellion. A discrowned king whose only forces to conquer his rebellious subjects are the rebels themselves is not likely to regain his crown. Because law brings no new element into our humanity, its appeal to our humanity has little more effect than that of the wind whistling through an archway. It appeals to conscience and reason by a plain declaration of what is right; to will and understanding by an exhibition of authority; to fears and prudence by plainly setting forth consequences. But what is to be done with men who know what is right but have no wish to do it, who believe that they ought but will not, who know the consequences but “choose rather the pleasures of sin for a season,” and shuffle the future out of their minds altogether?

This is the essential weakness of all law. The tyrant is not afraid so long as there is no one threatening his reign but the unarmed herald of a discrowned king. His citadel will not surrender to the blast of the trumpet blown from Sinai.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

3. The weakness of the law is accentuated when we think of its penal aspects. Even when the law rebounds upon the offender it seldom reclaims and improves. It is punitive and not remedial. You may send a man to the tread-mill, but as he performs the revolutions he may be evolving fresh schemes of crime. You may keep the thief in solitary confinement, hoping to silence him into honesty, but the probability is that he is worse on the day of his liberation than on the day of his apprehension. Of law, both Divine and human, the Apostle’s analysis is correct. It is weak, and weak through the flesh. Its chief design it cannot accomplish. It cannot secure compliance.

It is the universal experience that human nature rebels against the severities of repression. Is not that what Paul means when he says: “For I had not known coveting except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet; but sin, finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting.” There is a strange perversity in the flesh. There is nothing so tempting to us as the thing prohibited. We see the signboard: “No road this way. Trespassers will be prosecuted,” and through love of rebellion we select the prohibited path. The railway companies demand that every passenger shall have either a pass or a ticket, but, through sheer love of duping the law, men attempt the journey free of cost. The father who plays the despot in his family will create a household of rebels. The State where anarchy is rife is the State where tyrants rule.1 [Note: J. G. Bowran.]

4. This is the Gospel, or, one may say, this is the essence of the Gospel, that Christianity is not simply a new and more impressive declaration that men are sinners, but a new power, greater than the world has ever known before, to help men out of the snares of sin, that they may be sinners no longer. For a long time now men have been told they are sinners. For six thousand years man has heard thundered in his ears the lesson of the law. It has been driven in upon his thoughts by all the penal inflictions of the Divine judgment; by the fires that rained ruin on the cities of the plain; by the waters that overswept the world in the days of Noah; by the handwriting on the wall that doomed the proud city of Babylon; by the sword and fire that fell on sacred Jerusalem; by the decay of Rome, sapped and undermined by its own vices; by all the records of the woe that has fallen on wicked men since time began. Men know that fire burns and that water drowns; so they know also that selfishness withers, that intemperance ruins, that ambition overleaps itself and falls on the other side, that avarice belittles the mind, and licentiousness blasts the body and the soul; men know, on the other hand, that virtue brings happiness and that uprightness brings peace. Men know this. But that is not the point. The point is to get a working motive that will lead them to act upon this knowledge.

“One may deal with things without love, one may cut down trees, make bricks, and hammer iron without love, but one cannot deal with men without love.”2 [Note: Leo Tolstoi.]

Paracelsus believed that knowledge is power, and it was that that kindled and kept alive for a time his transcendent ambition. And when he was defeated, when his mistake had become clear to him, it was natural that he should say:

What wonder if I saw no way to shun

Despair? The power I sought for man, seemed God’s.

But he had learned a deeper lesson than that. He had come to see that there is a force surpassing in its majesty and might any that could possibly accrue from the acquisition of boundless stores of learning:

I saw Aprile—my Aprile there!

And as the poor melodious wretch disburthened

His heart, and moaned his weakness in my ear,

I learned my own deep error; love’s undoing

Taught me the worth of love in man’s estate,

And what proportion love should hold with power

In his right constitution; love preceding

Power, and with much power, always much more love;

Love still too straitened in his present means,

And earnest for new power to set love free.1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 146.]

II

The Method of Love

i. God sent His own Son

1. The words imply that the Divine Sonship of Jesus was not a relationship built up in the course of His life upon earth by acts of obedience and spiritual fellowship. A king can only send as his messenger and representative one who has already grown into such ripe wisdom and proved loyalty that he can fulfil the trust imposed upon him. To be sent implies an antecedent character and personality which qualify for the special mission.

We cannot feel the power of God’s condemnation of sin by the Cross till we have a just conception and realization of the truth of the person of Him who endured the Cross and despized the shame. Then the thought becomes overwhelming. Whether God has any other way by which He can more forcibly and solemnly express His sense of the evil and demerit of sin to others of His creatures, we do not know; but we can conceive of no way in which He could have more forcibly and solemnly expressed it to us than the way He has chosen—through the voluntary death of His own Divine Son on the malefactor’s cross.

2. God sent Him. For the condemnation of sin by Christ God owed to Himself as the righteous God who hates sin; and He owed it also to us, whom He is anxious to save from sin; and instead of dispensing with it in the fulness of His Fatherhood, as some would tell us, His Fatherhood made it the more obligatory. The doctrine of the Fatherhood of God can in no way conflict with the true doctrine of the Atonement, but confirms it; for the true father must ever have a regard to what may affect the welfare of his children; and what could have more to do with our welfare than the conveyance to us of the heavenly Father’s own sense and estimate of sin?

There was more fatherhood in the Cross (where holiness met guilt) than in the prodigal’s father (where love met shame). There was more fatherhood for our souls in the desertion of the Cross than in that which melts our hearts in the prodigal’s embrace. It is not a father’s sensitive love only that we have wounded, but His holy law. Man is not a mere runaway, but a rebel; not a pitiful coward, but a bold and bitter mutineer. Does not Kant confess as a moralist the radical evil in man, and Carlyle speak of his “infinite damnability”?1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, The Holy Father and the Living Christ, 27.]

ii. In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh

Christ was sent “in likeness of sinful flesh,” not as if He had taken on Him the “likeness of flesh” in the sense of a semblance of body instead of its reality: but St. Paul means us to understand likeness to the flesh which sinned, because the flesh of Christ, which committed no sin itself, was like that which had sinned—like it in its nature, but not in the corruption it received from Adam: whence we also affirm that there was in Christ the same flesh as that whose nature in man is sinful.2 [Note: Tertullian.]

1. The phrase, “the likeness of the flesh of sin,” implies the real humanity of Jesus, and His perfect sinlessness; and suggests the first way in which He condemns sin in the flesh. In His life He repeats the law in a higher fashion. What the one spoke in words the other realized in “loveliness of perfect deeds”; and all men own that example is the mightiest preacher of righteousness, and that active goodness draws to itself reverence and sways men to imitate. But His life lived in human nature gives a new hope of the possibilities of that nature even in us. The dream of perfect beauty “in the flesh” has been realized. What the Man Christ Jesus was, He was that we may become. In the very flesh in which the tyrant rules, Jesus shows the possibility and the loveliness of a holy life.

St. Paul speaks of Christ as having been “God’s own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh”—that is, here was a man with a nature like ours, including flesh like ours, the very flesh which in us is always bringing forth sin, always causing us to fail and fall short, in spite of our truer vision and aspiration, and the hindering, defiling influence of which we often deplore as irresistible and not to be prevailed against; and this man was “God’s own Son” in the flesh, without spot and blameless, exhibiting in it a sustained perfection of filial obedience.1 [Note: S. A. Tipple.]

2. That the Son of God had to take upon Himself the likeness of sinful flesh was perhaps the bitterest and most agonizing humiliation of His earthly lot. The fact that He received at birth a body susceptible to pain, frailty, privation, with a sentence of death written upon its constituents, was not the saddest part of His destiny. If one of our children were to show constitutional symptoms, marking him out for a career of weakness and long-dragging pain, it would trouble us less than if, through some inexplicable cause, he were to resemble in features a notorious criminal, or carry to the grave a birthmark linking him with some scene of infamy and shame. Upon the form assumed by Him, who was the express image of His Father’s glory, the likeness of a criminal race was stamped. The spirit and character of Jesus could not fail to refine and beautify the flesh with which He was invested, and painters are true to the genius of the Gospel when they idealize His features into celestial charm. But the Eternal Father could not forget that it was into the likeness of sinful flesh the Son entered through His birth on earth, a likeness in which traits sacred and Divine were curiously mixed with the lineaments we associate with moral deformity and transgression; nor could the Son Himself forget this burning humiliation through which He must pass in His work of saving men.

A missionary traveller in inland China once had to reach a ferry by taking off shoes and socks and traversing a muddy pathway from which the flood had only just retired. After walking a few paces he noticed a poor unsightly leper, a few yards ahead, slowly moving to the same point. The marks of his disfigured feet were imprinted in the mud, and it caused a shudder as the missionary found himself treading, with bare feet, in the steps of a loathsome beggar. The contact was indirect, and perhaps there was no risk, but the sickening association haunted his imagination for days. If the identification had been more intimate, and the white man had been compelled to shelter in the sufferer’s grass-hut, to share the same couch, to wear his contaminated raiment, it might have maddened an over-sensitive brain.1 [Note: T. G. Selby.]

A well-known American story by Wendell Holmes, in which romance and scientific speculation are curiously blended, deals with the problem of prenatal inoculation by snake-bite. The mother of Elsie Venner, into whose blood the poison of the rattlesnake has entered, dies in giving birth to her baby girl. The child grows up with eccentricities bordering on insanity, and becomes an object of dread to neighbours and school-companions. She is gifted with a curious power of fascination, and is able to dominate those upon whom she fixes her weird and glittering eyes. Her movements are serpentine, and she shows a special fondness for snake-like trinkets of gold. Sometimes she secludes herself in a mountain cave haunted by the creatures of whom before her birth she was an unconscious victim. All her gestures are suggestive of this tragic misfortune known only to her father and her nurse. Before she dies, her nature is softened and beautifully humanized. If such an incident were possible, of course the law of moral responsibility could cover only one half of her life. But that question apart, what a distress to the father to find his child shunned and abhorred, although he himself might know the secret of her birth and have faith in the complete innocence of her deepest nature. The assimilation of the child for a time to a lower and a dreaded type of life—a type that has been an age-long symbol of malignant and deadly temper—must surely have been a tragedy of the deepest and most mysterious distress.

iii. And for Sin

The phrase may be rendered (as in the Revised Version) “as an offering for sin,” since it is the usual equivalent in the Greek New Testament for a sin-offering. But the context demands a wider reference, since it includes, along with the expiation, the practical condemnation and destruction of sin. Christ has come “for sin.” That is to say, His incarnation and death had relation to, and had it for their object to remove, human sin. He comes to blot out the evil, to bring God’s pardon. The recognition of His sacrifice supplies the adequate motive to copy His example, and they who see in His death God’s sacrifice for man’s sin cannot but yield themselves to Him, and find in obedience a delight. Love kindled at His love makes likeness and transmutes the outward law into an inward “spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”

It is of great importance that you see the sacrificial character of Christ’s condemnation of sin in the flesh—that besides seeing that Christ clearly declared the flesh to be evil, and, in so declaring, did manifest God’s righteous condemnation of sin, and completed this testimony in giving Himself to die, you must also see that He did this as a sacrifice for sin. If not done as a sacrifice, the fact itself would merely leave us where we were. It would shed light on the evil of our state, but would not grant us deliverance from evil. But when we see Christ doing this as a sacrifice for sin—when we see Him coming into our nature, and taking it up, and presenting it holy to God, and doing this as a sacrifice for sin—then our thoughts are turned to the history of sin, and to the fact that He is not the only being who has this flesh. Our thoughts are turned to the whole human race; and we are taught concerning them that this deed has reference to them, and that it was not for a mere display of the power of the Son of God, taking an unclean thing and making it clean, that Christ came and took our flesh, but that He came with reference to those who were dwelling in this flesh, and for them shed His blood.1 [Note: J. M‘Leod Campbell.]

III

The Success of Love

i. He condemned Sin in the Flesh

He condemned sin in the flesh, in which sin exercises its usurped dominion. And how did God condemn sin in the flesh, i.e. in human nature generally? (1) By exhibiting in the person of His Incarnate Son the same flesh in substance, but free from sin, He proved that sin was in the flesh only as an unnatural and usurping tyrant. Thus the manifestation of Christ in sinless humanity at once condemned sin in principle. But (2) God condemned sin practically and effectually by destroying its power and casting it out; and this is the sense especially required by the context. The law could condemn sin only in word, and could not make its condemnation effectual. Christ, coming “for sin,” not only made atonement for it by His Death, but, uniting man to Himself “in newness of life,” gave actual effect to the condemnation of sin by destroying its dominion “in the flesh” through the life-giving sanctifying power of His Spirit.

1. God’s condemnation of sin, understood in this light, comes to us, indeed, in other ways than through the death of Christ. It comes in the constitution of nature, in which, binding sin and misery together in a nexus more firm than iron, and which no power of man can dissolve, He has revealed from heaven, for all the ages of time, His wrath “against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” It comes through the conscience, that sensitive magnet in man’s soul which ever points (very feebly indeed in many) to the pole of God’s own righteousness, and which, until utterly darkened and perverted by sin, ever condemns sin. It comes through His revealed law, whose very office it is to condemn sin, and in every denunciation of sin in His written Word. But at last it came in another and entirely different way—through the suffering and death of the righteous Christ, God’s own Divine Son. And it was evidently in this new way of declaring the mind or judgment of God against sin that Christ could do what the law was impotent to accomplish.

2. God condemned sin by allowing it to condemn itself. Just as some atrocious act of wrong, of violence, or of shame condemns crime, in the eyes of men, by showing them what crime can do, so He allowed sin to condemn itself by showing for ever what sin can do. It could reject and cast out the Divine Christ, the Holy One of God, and nail Him to a malefactor’s cross. And this itself proclaimed, and proclaimed for ever, sin’s need of atonement. But this was not the only way in which our Lord condemned sin by His death. He became “obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the Cross,” which marks the extent of His obedience. His act of obedience even unto death, yea, the death of the Cross, must have been, therefore, an act of obedience to God. And why did God require this act of obedience? The only answer is that of the Apostle: to “show his righteousness”; to “condemn sin in the flesh” (by Christ’s dying a sacrifice for sin in the flesh); to condemn it, not by a blind act of suffering and death, but through the mind and will of His own Son expressing themselves through voluntary suffering and death.

3. By the Death of Christ upon the Cross, a death endured in His human nature, He once and for ever broke off all contact with Sin, which could touch Him only through that nature. Henceforth Sin can lay no claim against Him. Neither can it lay any claim against the believer; for the believer also has died with Christ. Henceforth when Sin comes to prosecute its claim, it is cast in its suit and its former victim is acquitted. The one culminating and decisive act by which this state of things was brought about is the Death of Christ, to which all the subsequent immunity of Christians is to be referred.

Sin in the flesh was tolerated and condoned before Jesus came down to live His sinless life amongst men. It was accepted everywhere as a necessity inherent in the visible organic framework of things. It is interesting to think that the old tradition which makes a Persian king one of the Magi lends itself to an instructive interpretation, because the religion of the ancient Persians held that matter was inherently evil and could never by any possibility become good. The Babe before whom he bowed was to prove in His personal history and example that it was not so.

Men often go on sinning, avowing that sin is no sin, for want of hope. They accept it as part of the inevitable order when no remedy appears. It is despondency which marks out much of our social wreckage as irretrievably derelict. Many unhappy beings around us have given up the fight and see no encouragement to attempt better things. They justify themselves in wrong-doing and invert all ethical classifications, because it seems no longer possible, at least for such as they are, to reap the rewards of virtue. The new voice of hope which speaks in the heart, the voice of the Incarnate and sin-atoning Saviour, is a sentence of death upon the evil which has so long been rampant in the flesh. God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh wrote a sentence of final condemnation upon sin in the flesh. Through our union with the Redeeming Head, sin in us is sentenced to its final overthrow.

ii. That the Requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us

That unreserved consent of Christ to the full demands of the law which gave His death its atoning value and efficacy was not an act of merely negative value—valuable, that is to say, in the way of annulling and abolishing the evil which sin had wrought. It was at the same time an act of the highest positive worth, the one transcendent act in which the entire moral force of the new spiritual humanity concentrates and embodies itself, the absolute perfection of righteousuess. And this righteousness of God is revealed to faith; by faith we appropriate it and make it in very truth our own.

1. The one righteous demand of the law, which includes all its other demands, is holy obedience inspired by the love of God (Luke 10:27). That this “righteous demand of the law might be fulfilled in us,” was the great final cause of God’s sending His Son into the world.

2. Christ came not to insist upon a lower code of morals. It is His will not that we should be less holy, but that we should be holy as God is holy, and perfect as He is perfect. At the outset of His public ministry, He announced that not one jot or tittle of the law should pass away, but that its commandments should be obeyed far more perfectly than ever before, by conformity to its spirit rather than by dull and superficial obedience to its external demands. Only in this way would the righteousness of the law be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh but after the spirit.

Love makes obedience natural and inevitable. So Jesus taught. “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments.” “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” “If a man love me, he will keep my word.” Paul expresses it thus: “Love, therefore, is the fulfilment of the law.” It is only to the loveless heart that the law is irksome. Obedience is a pleasure when we love. The man who loves God does not need to have the decalogue read every day. Because love is in his heart, he simply cannot break the commandments. He will obey them all, not by mere compliance with the negative restrictions, but by loving fidelity to their spiritual intent. The home where love is has no need for domestic legislation. The father’s word is law. The mother’s wish is a command.

iii. Who walk not after the Flesh, but after the Spirit

This clause defines the character of those in whom the righteous requirement of the law is to be fulfilled; namely, such as “walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.” They “walk not after the flesh”—the flesh with its affections and lusts rebels against the law—“but after the spirit.”

1. By the entrance of the Spirit of holiness into a human spirit, the usurper is driven from the central fortress: and though he may linger in the outworks and keep up a guerilla warfare, that is all he can do. We never truly apprehend Christ’s gift to man until we recognize that He not merely “died for our sins,” but lives to impart the principle of holiness in the gift of His Spirit. The dominion of that imparted Spirit is gradual and progressive. The Canaanite may still be in the land, but a growing power, working in and through us, is warring against all in us that still owns allegiance to that alien power, and there can be no end to the victorious struggle until the whole body, soul, and spirit be entirely under the influence of the Spirit that dwells in us, and nothing shall hurt or destroy in what shall then be all God’s holy mountain.

2. We are brought into sympathy with the Law, because we are brought into grateful and loving sympathy with the great Lawgiver. When He could not by His commandments overcome the evil that was in us, He has by the power of His love, revealed in His long-suffering patience and boundless sacrifice, brought us into willing subjection to Himself, the subjection of a grateful love that will withhold nothing from Him, but will gladly give up everything for His sake. It is not the power of authority, but that of a transforming love, that brings into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. The devil rises up within us when it is mere force that speaks to us, but when love speaks in infinite sacrifice we are shamed out of all our indifference, and conquered in all our rebellion. The mind which was also in Christ Jesus takes possession of us, imparting new desires and new motives, so that all resistance is gone, and obedience becomes a joy and duty a privilege. This is true to the extent that we are the recipients of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, though rich, yet for our sakes became poor.

As the waxing moon can take

The tidal waters in her wake

And lead them round and round to break

Obedient to her drawings dim;

So may the movements of His mind,

The first Great Father of mankind,

Affect with answering movements blind,

And draw the souls that breathe by Him.1 [Note: Jean Ingelow.]

Law or Love

Literature

Alford (H.), Sermons on Christian Doctrine, 42.

Burrell (D. J.), The Wondrous Cross, 95.

Campbell (J. M‘Leod), Sermons and Lectures, i. 326, 355.

Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women, and Children, iv. 118.

Hutcheson (J. T.), A View of the Atonement, 130.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans, 130.

Mitchell (R. A.), Sin Condemned by the Mission of the Song of Solomon , 1.

Robertson (J.), Sermons and Expositions, 204.

Selby (T. G.), The Strenuous Gospel, 64.

Thomas (J.), The Dynamic of the Cross, 161.

Tipple (S. A.), Sunday Mornings at Norwood, 22.

Biblical World, iii. 299.

Christian World Pulpit, xi. 266 (Beecher); xxxiv. 246 (Emerson); lxii. 52 (Bowran).