Notes on the Book of Deuteronomy, Volume IMackintosh, Charles Henry
Religion
Notes on the Book of Deuteronomy, Volume I
Mackintosh, Charles Henry
Bible. Deuteronomy -- Commentaries
Further, let us ever bear in mind that if we are dead to the law, we
are dead to this present evil world also, and linked with a risen,
ascended, and glorified Christ. Hence, we are not of the world, even
as Christ is not of the world. To contend for position in the world is
to deny that we are dead to the law; for we cannot be alive to the one
and dead to the other. The death of Christ has delivered us from the
law, from the power of sin, from this present evil world, and from
the fear of death. But then all these things hang together, and we
cannot be delivered from one without being delivered from all. To
assert our freedom from the law, while pursuing a course of carnality,
self-indulgence, and worldliness, is one of the darkest and deadliest
evils of the last days.
The Christian is called to prove, in his daily life, that grace can
produce results that law could never reach. It is one of the moral
glories of Christianity to enable a man to surrender self and live for
others. Law never could do this. It occupied a man with himself. Under
its rule, every man had to do the best he could for himself. If he
tried to love his neighbor, it was to work out a righteousness for
himself. Under grace, all is blessedly and gloriously reversed--self
is set aside as a thing crucified, dead, and buried; the old "I" is
gone, and the new "I" is before God in all the acceptability and
preciousness of Christ; He is our life, our righteousness, our
holiness, our object, our model, our all; He is in us and we are in
Him, and our daily practical life is to be simply Christ reproduced in
us by the power of the Holy Ghost. Hence, we are not only called to
love our neighbor, but our enemy; and this, not to work out a
righteousness, for we have become the righteousness of God in Christ:
it is simply the outflow of the life which we possess--which is in us,
and this life is Christ. A Christian is a man who should live Christ.
He is neither a Jew "under law" nor a Gentile "without law," but "a
man in Christ," standing in grace, called to the same character of
obedience as that which was rendered by the Lord Jesus Himself.
We shall not pursue this subject further here, but we earnestly
entreat the Christian reader to study attentively the fifteenth
chapter of Acts and the epistle to the Galatians. Let him drink in the
blessed teaching of these scriptures, and we feel assured he will
arrive at a clear understanding of the great question of the law. He
will see that the Christian is not under the law for any purpose
whatsoever; that his life, his righteousness, his holiness, are on a
different ground or principle altogether; that to place the Christian
under law in any way is to deny the very foundations of Christianity
and contradict the plainest statements of the Word. He will learn,
from the third chapter of Galatians, that to put ourselves under the
law is to give up Christ, to give up the Holy Ghost, to give up faith,
to give up the promises.
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