George Bethune
LECTURE II.
Ans. Out of the law of God.
Ans. Christ teaches us that briefly, Matt. xxii. 37-40: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind," and with all thy strength. "This is the first and great commandment; and the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
Ans. In no wise; for I am prone by nature to hate God and my neighbor.
THE blessed Master himself declares the reason and purpose of his mediatorial work, when he says: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." Had not God been angry with us we should not have been miserable; had we not sinned against God, he would not have been angry with us; had we the power of reconciling ourselves to God, we should not have needed a Saviour; had not our condemnation been very great, we should not have needed so great a Saviour; and had not God, our righteous Judge, been infinitely merciful, he would not have "sent his Only Begotten Son, that who so believeth in him might not perish but have everlasting life." It was our ruin that moved the pity of God, our helplessness that brought his Son to be our Saviour, our guiltiness that made the Saviour a sinless sufferer in our nature, obedient until death on our behalf. To understand and appreciate the salvation by Christ, it is necessary that we should know our misery, its source, its extent, and our utter dependence upon divine grace through Christ for pardon, favor, a new life, and immortal happiness. To teach us this is the design of the Church, as opened in the section of her Catechism for the second Lord's day: from which we learn,
First: The Test of our condition: The Law of God.
Secondly: The Requirements of the Law: Supreme love to God our Lord, and love to our neighbor as ourselves.
Thirdly: Our Inability to fulfil those Requirements: Being prone "by nature to hate God and my neighbor."
First: The Law of God is the test of our condition: According to the Second Question and Answer, the first branch of Christian inquiry is: "How great our sins and miseries are." The Third Question is: "Whence knowest thou thy misery? "the term sin not being repeated; yet the answer is: "Out of the Law of God; " which is an implied assertion that our misery is penal or the effect of sin, being our punishment as sinners, and, therefore, in proportion to our sins. The word and character of God allow of no other conclusion, since we cannot believe that he who delights in goodness and mercy would willingly, or without reason, afflict his creatures. Our misery can come only from his anger, and he is angry only with the wicked. His favor, which includes all blessings, is promised to the obedient; his curse, which includes all miseries, is threatened against the disobedient. The degree of our sin is, therefore, the measure of our misery, and that we may ascertain this we must look into the Law of God; for if we have not kept its precepts, the penalties annexed show the guilt, or obnoxiousness, liability to punishment, which we have brought upon ourselves. Hence the Law of God is the only true test of our condition. This is the argument in brief, which we may, not without profit, examine more particularly.
1st. God is Sovereign; by which we understand, that he has the right to rule, that he has the power to rule, and that he does rule over all. To deny this were atheism; for the fundamental idea of God is: The First Cause of all things. The First Cause must be self-existent and independent of all. The same will which alone could create, alone can preserve; and, therefore, God must rule over all. The creation includes moral beings, or beings who have a sense of right and wrong, with powers to act accordingly; therefore, the admisistration of the Supreme Will must be a moral government. Thus the fact of our existence proves that we belong to God; the fact of our preservation, that we are under the control of God; and the fact of our moral consciousness, that we are subject to the moral government of God. If our lives be in harmony with the principles of the divine government, no evil can reach us, because our Preserver is Sovereign over all; but if we are at variance with his will, no good can reach us for the same reason.
But how may we obtain a knowledge of the divine will which should be the rule of our lives, and in our conformity or opposition to which we are to find happiness or misery? The Catechism answers: "Out of the Law of God;" that is, out of the Law which God has revealed in the Holy Scriptures. For it is clear that none but God, whose infinite wisdom arranged and ordained the principles on which he administers his will, can discover what those principles are. These may be dimly perceived in the processes of Providence around us, or what is sometimes called the fitness of things; but not sufficiently, for besides that we cannot, from the weakness of our reason, accurately trace the visible effects back to their unseen causes, the development of those effects is as yet very partial. If we were left to learn the will of God concerning our duty from the manifestations of his providence, we should have to wait until eternity before we could begin our obedience, for only in eternity those manifestations are complete. There are a thousand seeming discrepancies in the providential administration of human affairs, which God will not vindicate until he consummates his mighty scheme at the catastrophe of the Judgment. So oppressively embarrassing are these difficulties, that the very advocates of Natural Religion, who bid us learn the character of God and our duty from the fitness of things, make them their strongest, but far from satisfactory, argument for a future state of reward and punishment.
Neither can conscience be a trustworthy oracle. For conscience does not itself determine right or wrong, but is only our faculty of recognizing the distinction between the right and the wrong, when they are presented to us. Recognition is very different from discovery. It is one thing to perceive a path when it is marked out for us, and another to find out a path for ourselves; so it is one thing to see the right when God makes it known, and another to decide upon what is right without his aid. This last is utterly beyond the prerogative or the power of conscience. Indeed, conscience needs education like any other human faculty, and education supposes some fixed fundamental rules to which it must be conformed. No faithful parent leaves his child to learn morals from its conscience, but presses rules of right upon its conscience. The variety of moral opinions among men is so great, that were it possible to hold an oecumenical council of consciences, there is scarcely a point of morals on which their decree would be unanimous. Nay, the revolutions of moral sentiment in the same man at different stages of his experience and knowledge, show how uncertain and even capricious the judgments of conscience are when left to itself.
Besides, obedience to the dictates of conscience, without a distinct reference to the will of God, is not right, since that were making conscience and not God our Judge and Lord. For a man to think that he can do no wrong while he follows his conscience, unless his conscience be regulated by the will of God, is a selfidolatry and an atheistical pride. A human government does not try its subjects by their consciences, but by its own laws; and excuses a violation of its laws only in those who are not capable of perceiving what those laws require. So will God try us by the laws of his kingdom, not by our own imaginations.
The judgments of individuals being so imperfect, the general opinions of mankind must be also unworthy of confidence. A long and traditional experience of the good or ill effects consequent upon certain courses of action, may have led the world to agree respecting some matters immediately affecting our interests; but history proves the failure of all attempts to frame a system of morals without wisdom from above. The best and wisest of the classical philosophers differed widely among themselves as to the very definition of virtue; while some, especially Socrates, the most exalted of them all, humbly confessed that the line dividing right from wrong could be drawn only by the finger of him who presides over the universe.
God has himself excluded all question on the subject, by giving, in his own revealed word, the law to which he commands our conformity on pain of his curse.
The Christian, therefore, goes directly to God for instruction, trusting neither to the discoveries of his reason, the dictates of his conscience, the opinions of men, nor the practices of the world. God has the sole right to his service, and he asks from God only how that service should be rendered. Thus he makes the law of God the sole test of his condition, sees his crimes in his transgressions of it, and his misery in the punishment which it threatens. Until he looks at himself in that mirror of infallible truth, he can never judge of his moral character; until he gets a response from that unerring oracle, he can never know what awaits him at the hands of his God. He learns his "misery out of the law of God."
Secondly: The requirements of that law.
These the Catechism shows by citing the words of our blessed Lord, Matt. xxii. 37-40; though it must be noted that, in giving the first great commandment, the last clause, "and with all thy strength," is added from the parallel passage, Luke x. 27; and that our translator of the Catechism, by carelessly neglecting to copy the Scripture immediately out of his Bible, has allowed a slight but displeasing variation from the English text, which difference we shall correct.
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind;" and, from Luke, "with all thy strength." "This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
Our divine Saviour did not give these comprehensive precepts as of himself, but brought them together from separate parts of the Pentateuch; the first from Deut. vi. 5: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might:" the second from Lev. xix. 18: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." All that the older scriptures contain of divine morals, of our duty to God and our service to man for God's sake, are summed up in these two commandments. As the Apostle Paul says, Rom. xiii. 10: "Love is the fulfilling of the law; " and again, 1 Tim. i. 5: "Now the end of the commandment is charity (love), out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned;" and the Apostle John in his first epistle, iv. 16: "He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him;" iv. 21: "This commandment have we from him: That he who loveth God, love his brother also."
Here is the legislation infinitely perfect. The statutes of human governments fill many volumes, and are then proverbially indefinite, while every attempt to condense them has only made the uncertainty worse; but the whole law of God is written in two sentences, the whole duty of man in one word: Love. This clear, concise rule covers all the specifications of service which God requires of us in all the various circumstances in which we can possibly be placed. Love is the bond of perfectness, the golden chain, which, depending from the throne of our Father God, and returning to it again, is cast around the brotherhood of his human children, binding us in sweet harmony with him and with each other.
Love has never been accurately defined, nor can it be; but we know its meaning from our consciousness and from its effects. We love that being whose character we approve, of whom we delight to think, whose excellences we endeavor to imitate, whose wishes we desire to fulfil and in whose favor we find happiness. Such affection we may, without inconsistency, have at the same time towards several, even many of our humankind, according as they have, through Providence, claims upon us; but our supreme love, comprehending all exercises of love towards his creatures, is demanded by God for himself alone: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength."
These several terms: "heart," "soul," "mind," "strength," do not, it should be stated, convey to us the precise meaning of the Greek or Hebrew originals which they translate, but collectively in the entire verse they give the full meaning of the Scripture. To define each of them particularly would not be easy, and, if practicable, would require a nice criticism too prolix for the aim of our present discourse. Let us, therefore, devoutly consider the scope of this first and great commandment, which is, that We must render the Lord our God a supreme, intelligent, zealous love, freely consecrating all our faculties to his praise, and all our energies to his service.
We are to love God supremely. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart." Every motive which prompts love, should urge us to love God above all. If intellectual excellence attracts our admiring regard, God is omniscient, the author of all light, the source of all truth; if moral beauty wins our affectionate esteem, his holiness, justice, goodness, and mercy are infinite; if favors received and favors expected, claim pur gratitude, from him alone is our being, with all its capacities of enjoyment, and all we do or can enjoy; If rightful authority, administered in faithfulness and considerate kindness, be entitled to a prompt, unswerving, devoted loyalty, he is our Owner because our Creator, our Ruler because our Presei'ver, our Lawgiver because Supreme Lord of the universe, whose precepts are our sure only guides to happiness, because obedience is accordance with his will; and his chosen glory, the design of his government, is the best good of his intelligent subjects, comprehending all, vet overlooking none. No creature, therefore, should be allowed to rival him in our affections; he must have all our hearts, and none be admitted there except in harmony with our highest reverence, esteem, and love for him who is the Lord our God.
We are to love God intelligently. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind." God has endowed us with understanding and reason, that we may know him and perceive the arguments which he addresses through our minds to our affections. The faculty of will or choice which he grants us, cannot be exercised rightly unless intelligently. We are not to love even the Lord our God without motive, or an appreciation of his claims upon our love. We are, therefore, to employ our minds, above all else, in the study and contemplation of those claims that we may by the very force of logic, cheerfully, yet, as it were, of a moral necessity, fix our hearts supremely upon him to whom of right they belong. We must diligently read his Word, in which he reveals himself for our learning; we must observe his works, in which he demonstrates himself to our senses; we must investigate his doctrines, meditate on his attributes, apply his laws to our consciences, trust in his promises, set his threatenings between us and what he has forbidden, while we practice his commands, that through experience we may be continually acquiring greater proof of their wise goodness; and especially must we seek by earnest, humble prayer the sanctifying grace of his illuminating Spirit, that in close, personal, habitual communion with God, we may grow more like him as we know more of him. Thus consecrating all our faculties to his praise, we shall love the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our minds.
We are to love God zealously.--
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and with all thy strength."
Soul, here, according to both the originals, signifies the will, or rather the determined purpose of a man; and strength, his powers of external action. The two, therefore, may be expressed by zeal, which, as we ordinarily understand it, is ardor of pursuit, or earnest purpose carried out in correspondent action. A supreme, intelligent love for God our Creator, Sovereign, and Judge, cannot be inoperative. The reasons for which we love God, his authority and character, show how our love is to be proved. If we love him as our Creator, all our faculties should be consecrated to his glory; if we love him as our Ruler, we should delight to obey all his commandments; if we love him as our Benefactor, gratitude should make us continually intent upon rendering him returns for his kindness. Thus we truly love him with all our hearts and with all our minds, only when we endeavor to serve him with all our powers in their utmost energy. Hence, love comprehends our fidelity to God as his subjects, and our dutifulness as his children. If we love him with all our hearts, and know what he requires of us, the entire conformity of our lives to his will is certainly secured.
This is the only service which God can accept or a rational creature render. The laws of man refer only to the external conduct, because the human eye can look no further; yet is an unwilling obedience admitted to have no merit, and we always consider the good or evil of an act to lie in the motive. But God looks in upon the heart, and according as he sees that love to him is or is not the ruling principle of our actions, will he accept or disown us, whatever our overt acts may be. He, who refuses his love to God, the perfection of moral beauty and the centre of all obligation, does not love goodness or justice or holiness, evinces a spirit at war with the welfare of the universe, and is justly punished for so monstrous a depravity. On the other hand, he who renders such love to God is justly rewarded for an obedience which on every opportunity will be overtly shown.
Such service is necessary to the happiness of the creature. Our happiness can come only from God who has so fenced us in by his laws, that our welfare depends on our conformity to them; but to obey one whom we do not love, is to do what we hate, thus turning our seeming compliance with right into a source of misery. The highest reward of obedience is love, and love alone can earn it. Love is the strong charm by which God prompts the discharge of every duty springing from the relations of life, -- as the duty of the husband, the wife, the parent, the child, the friend, or the patriot. How much more is love necessary for our duties to God! If we love him, we can never do enough for him, all our inclinations will be absorbed by a desire to please him, and his honor will engross all our energies.
The Second Commandment is like to the first; like in authority, because emanating from the same divine source; and like in the character of the duty which it enjoins, Love. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." It is included in the first, because he, who has a right to all our heart and all our service, has the right of commanding our love and service for those whom he commends to our regard.
Our blessed Master, in his parable of The Good Samaritan, has clearly defined "our neighbor" to be every human being brought by the providence of God within the reach of our kindness. The duty is to God the Father of all men, and required for our fellow-man as his child. Selfishness may restrict itself within narrow boundaries, but a soul elevated to the love of God looks over all such littlenesses and comprehends the whole brotherhood of mankind.
The degree of loving service which we are to render our neighbor is to regard his welfare as we do our own. The precept clearly allows a certain degree of self-love, and insists upon no fanciful, impracticable disinterestedness. I am to love my neighbor, because God is his Father; but for the same reason I am to love myself, since he is my Father also, and he has in a peculiar degree committed my happiness to my own keeping. Our love for ourselves is taken for granted, being the standard by which our love for our neighbor must be adjusted, and therefore, not inconsistent with it; so that we should err if we regarded another's welfare to the neglect of our own. Nor can we love all men alike, since we are commanded by Scripture and Providence to love some especially, as those of our own household and those of the household of faith. We are to love ourselves consistently with the law of God, and according to its directions; so we are to love our neighbor, rendering them all that affectionate service which God enjoins with the same readiness that we would benefit ourselves.
The Master himself has given us the best commentary on the law of love to our neighbor, in Matthew vii. 12, where he says: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." That is, Whatever we could properly, according to the law of God, expect from others in certain circumstances, we are in similar circumstances to do readily for them, though they be never so unworthy of such kindness, since it is a duty which we owe not to them personally, but to God, and to them for his sake. At the same time, the promise is distinctly conveyed that such service of our neighbor has sure tendency to advance our own welfare.
How clear is this rule, and how universally applicable, when we carry the measure due to others within our own bosoms! How happy would the world be, if all men acted towards each other on this principle! But how vain must be all attempts to secure the common welfare of the race, upon any system of ethics short of that which first lifts man out of all sinful selfishness to the love of God, and then enables him from that generous fountain to mingle his love with the love of the universal Father as it descends in blessing upon all his children!
Farther discussion of these two commandments is reserved for the time when we must consider the precepts of the Two Tables, given on Mount Sinai.
Thirdly: Our inability to fulfil these requirements.
" Canst thou keep all these things perfectly? "
" In no wise; for I am prone by nature to hate God and my neighbor." This melancholy truth the Christian learns from the Word of God and from experience.
The terms, ability, power, and the like, originally referring to physical matters, become very vague when applied to our moral being, the exercise of our will, judgment, and affections; nor, though some have ingeniously but unsatisfactorily dogmatized on the question, could we readily show where man's moral impotence lies, except we be content with acknowledging, what is the fact, that it is a disorganizing corruption of the entire soul. But, putting such lame metaphysics aside, and going to the unerring Word, we find there unequivocally stated the fact of our own utter insufficiency to keep the law of God. The testimonies to it pervade the whole Scripture, and the Divine Spirit labors to express, in our imperfect language and by such figures as we can understand, our complete ruin as moral creatures. It is declared that "there is none that doeth good, no, not one; " that "the heart of man is evil, and only evil, and that continually; "that "all are concluded under sin," conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniquity; that we are not only weak, but, so far as godly virtue is concerned, without any strength, nay, "dead in trespasses and sins." The plan of salvation proceeds on this fact. When we were impotent, "without strength, Christ died for the ungodly." "If righteousness" could have "come by the law (i. e. through our keeping of the law), then is Christ dead in vain." That this is true only of some is disproved by the offer of the Gospel to all men: "God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. . . . He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; but he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him."
So the sanctifying or illuminating and strengthening grace of the Holy Ghost, is radical in every one that is saved. He renews us by a fresh begetting, a re-creation, a resurrection from the dead; and no man, "except he be born again" "of the Spirit," "can enter the kingdom of God." So we see that "there is no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." "The carnal mind (i. e. the mind of man in his natural state) is enmity against God;" and since, as we have seen, love to our neighbor proceeds from our love to God, man is by nature at enmity with his neighbor.
This enmity against God and our neighbor may not at once be utter and extreme, for living, as we do, under a remedial system, the restraining grace of God's round even the unregenerate; but we are prone to it, and were the grace of God entirely taken from us, as it will be from the lost in hell, there is no depth of depravity to which we should not sink. Our enmity against God may not appear against his goodness, or his mercy, or his love; but it is naturally strong against what is equally his character -- his holiness and justice; for whenever his law or his providence clashes with our inclination, it is rampant, bitter, and obstinate. So are we enemies of our neighbor, when he crosses our supposed interest. Whence also could come such malicious crimes, such bloody wars, such envious calumnies, as those which fill "the earth with clamor and rapine and cruelty! Thus, the Apostle describes the heathen who had departed from God as filled with evil, stained by the most hideous pollutions, "covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful." It is the proneness, not of the individual, here and there, but of human nature, of the race; for everywhere we see symptoms of this depravity; everywhere men make laws to guard against it; every penal statute, every gibbet, every prison, every lock on our doors, testify to man's belief that his fellow-man is prone to hate God and his neighbor. Christianity, or other restraining influences of God's government, may modify, and to some extent hold back the tendency, but in what man has been and what man now is, when grace is not exercising some control, we see what he would be were he left alone.
The Christian's experience confirms the divine declaration. Who that looks upon these two precepts of God's law can say he has kept them, or that he could keep them perfectly? Who of us can love God, with all his heart, and his neighbor as himself? The believer knows he cannot; he knows that there is within him a tendency downward, which none but God can change; that there is a lack in him, call it what you will, and place it where you will, which nothing but God's grace can supply, but without which he is lost, powerless to do good, and prone to all evil. It is this that he expects through Christ; this he asks of God by the Holy Spirit; this he relies upon alone for eternal life.
O blessed Gospel, that thus meets us in our last extremity, turning our despair into joy! O blessed Law of God, whose very terrors drive us to welcome Christ! O blessed Bible, which thunders on the one page from Sinai the curse of eternal death, and on the next shows us Christ on the cross dying in our stead; then beyond it, Christ on his throne beckoning the penitent to eternal life! Glory to God the Lawgiver! Glory to God the Redeemer! Glory to God the Sanctifier! Glory to God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, our Covenant God, throughout all ages! Amen.
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