THE LAW AND THE SAINT

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 72.51KB 24 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

THE LAW

AND

THE SAINT

Arthur W. Pink

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

THE LAW AND THE SAINT

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

----------

1. INTRODUCTION

It has been said that every unregenerate sinner has the heart of a

Pharisee. This is true; and it is equally true that every unregenerate

sinner has the heart of an Antinomian. This is the character which is

expressly given to the carnal mind: it is "enmity against God"; and the

proof of this is, that "it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed

can be" (Rom. 8:7). Should we be surprised, then, if we find the underlying

principles of Phariseeism and Antinomianism uniting in the same mind? Surely

not. There is no more real opposition between these apparently opposing

principles, than there is between enmity and pride. Many a slothful servant

has hated his master and his service, and yet had he pride and presumption

enough to demand his wages. Phariseeism and Antinomianism unite, like Herod

and Pilate did, against the Truth.

The term Antinomian signifies one who is against the Law, hence, when

we declare that ours is an age of lawlessness, it is only another way of

saying that it is an age characterized by Antinomianism. There is little

need for us to pause and offer proof that this is an age of lawlessness. In

every sphere of life the sad fact confronts us. In the well-nigh total

absence of any real discipline in the majority of the churches, we see the

principle exemplified. Not more than two generations ago, thousands, tens of

thousands, of the loose-living members whose names are now retained on the

membership rolls, would have been dis-fellowshipped. It is the same in the

great majority of our homes. With comparatively rare exceptions, wives are

no longer in subjection to their husbands (Eph. 5:22,24); and as for obeying

them (1 Pet. 3:1,2,5,6), why, the majority of women demand that such a

hateful word be stricken from the marriage ceremony. So it is with the

children - how could it be otherwise? Obedience to parents is almost

entirely a thing of the past. And what of conditions in the world? The

abounding marital unfaithfulness, Sunday trading, banditry, lynchings,

strikes, and a dozen other things that might be mentioned, all bear witness

to the frightful wave of lawlessness which is flowing over the country.

What, we may well inquire, is the cause of the lawlessness which now so

widely obtains? For every effect there is a cause, and the character of the

effect usually intimates the nature of the cause. We are assured that the

present wide-spread contempt for human law is the inevitable outgrowth of

disrespect for Divine Law. Where there is no fear of God, we must not expect

there will be much fear of man. And why is it that there is so much

disrespect for Divine Law? This, in turn, is but the effect of an antecedent

cause. Nor is this hard to find. Do not the utterances of Christian teachers

during the last twenty-five years go far to explain the situation which now

confronts us?

History has repeated itself. Of old, God complained of Ephraim, "I have

written to him the great things of My Law, but they were counted as a

strange thing" (Hosea 8:12). Observe how God speaks of His Law: "The great

things of My Law"! They are not precepts of little moment, but to be lightly

esteemed, and slighted; but are of great authority, importance, and value.

But, as then, so during the last few years - they have been "counted as a

strange thing". Christian teachers have vied with each other in denouncing

the Law as a "yoke of bondage", "a grievous burden", "a remorseless enemy".

They have declared in trumpet tones that Christians should regard the Law as

"a strange thing": that it was never designed for them: that it was given to

Israel, and then made an end of at the Cross of Christ. They have warned

God's people to have nothing to do with the Ten Commandments. They have

THE LAW AND THE SAINT

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

denounced as "Legalists" Christians of the past, who, like Paul, "served the

Law" (Rom. 7:25). They have affirmed that Grace rules the Law out of the

Christian's life as absolutely as it did out of his salvation. They have

held up to ridicule those who contended for a Christian Sabbath, and have

classed them with Seventh-Day Adventists. Having sown the wind, is it any

wonder that we are now reaping the whirlwind?

The characters of the cause determinates the character of the effect.

Whatsoever a man sowth that (the same in kind) shall he also reap. Unto them

who of old regarded the great things of God's Law as a strange thing, God

declared, "Because Ephraim hath made many alters to sin, alters shall be

unto him to sin" (Hosea 8:11). And because many of our Christian leaders

have publicly repudiated Divine Law, God has visited us with a wave of

lawlessness in our churches, homes, and social life. "Be not deceived; God

is not mocked"!! Nor have we any hope of stemming the onrushing tide, or of

causing Christian leaders to change their position. Having committed

themselves publicly, the examples of past history warn us that pride will

keep them from making the humbling confession that they have erred. But we

have a hope that some who have been under the influence of twentieth century

Antinomianism will have sufficient spiritual discernment to recognize the

truth when it is presented to their notice; and it is for them we now write.

In the January 1923 issue of a contemporary, appeared the second

article from the pen of Dr. McNichol, Principal of Toronto Bible School,

under the caption of "Overcoming the Dispensations". The purpose of these

articles is to warn God's children against the perils which lie "in the way

of much of the positive pre-millennial teaching of the day". Quoting, Dr.

McNicol says:

"1. There is danger when the Law is set against Grace. No scheme of

prophetic interpretation can be safe which is obliged to represent the

dispensations of Law and Grace as opposing systems, each excluding the other

and contrary to it. If this were the case, it would mean that God had taken

opposing and contradictory attitudes towards men in these two different

ages. In the last analysis this representation of the relation of law and

grace affects the character of God, as everything which perverts the

Scriptures, disturbing thereby the mirror of His mind, ultimately does.

"So far from being opposing systems, law and grace as revealed in

Scripture are parts of one harmonious and progressive plan. The present

dispensation is spoken of as the age of grace, not because grace belongs to

it exclusively, but because in it grace has been fully manifested. When John

declared that `the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus

Christ', he was contrasting law and grace, not as two contrary and

irreconcilable systems, but as two related parts of one system. The law was

the shadow, Christ was the substance. The law was the pattern, Christ was

the reality. The grace which had been behind the law came to light through

Jesus Christ so that it could be realized. As a matter of fact, grace had

been in operation from the beginning. It began in Eden with the first

promise of redemption immediately after the fall. All redemption is of

grace; there can be no salvation without it, and even the law itself

proceeds on the basis of grace.

"The law was given to Israel not that they might be redeemed, but

because they had been redeemed. The nation had been brought out of Egypt by

the power of God under the blood of the slain lamb, itself the symbol and

token of His grace. The law was added at Sinai as the necessary standard of

life for a ransomed people, a people who now belonged to the Lord. It began

with a declaration of their redemption; "I am the Lord thy God who brought

thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Ex. 20:2). It

rested on the basis of grace, and it embodied the principle that redemption

implied a conformity to God's moral order. In other words, the very grace

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

THE LAW AND THE SAINT.pdf

共24页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

THE LAW AND THE SAINT

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: