BY THE REV. PROFESSOR BENJAMIN B. WARFIELD, D.D., LL.D.,
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, U.S.A.
(Continued from page 319.)
IT was not merely natural but inevitable that in this positive proclamation of universal human duties to a particular people, a special form should be given their enunciation specifically adapting them to this particular people in its peculiar circumstances; and it was eminently desirable that they should be so phrased and so commanded as to open a ready approach for them to this particular people’s mind and to bring them to bear with especial force upon its heart. This element of particularity embedded in the mode of their proclamation, however, has no tendency to void these commandments of their intrinsic and universal obligation. It only clothes them with an additional appeal to those to whom this particular proclamation of them is immediately addressed. It is not less the duty of all men to do no murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal, not to bear false witness, not to covet a neighbour’s possession, that the Israelite too is commanded not to do these things, and is urged to withhold himself from them by the moving plea that he owes a peculiar obedience to a God who has dealt with him with distinguishing grace. And it is not less the duty of all men to worship none but the one true God, and Him only with spiritual worship; not to profane His name nor to withhold from Him the time necessary for His service, or refuse to reverence Him in his representatives, that these duties are impressed especially on the heart of the Israelite by the great plea that this God has shown Himself in a peculiar manner his God. The presence of the Sabbath commandment in the midst of this series of fundamental human duties, singled out to form the compact core of the positive morality divinely required of God’s peculiar people, is rather its commendation to all peoples of all times as an essential element in primary human good conduct.
It is clearly this view of the matter which was taken by our Lord. How Jesus thought of the Ten Commandments we may easily learn from His dealing with the rich young ruler who came to Him demanding: “Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” “Thou knowest the commandments,” our Lord replied; “If thou wouldst enter into life, keep the commandments.” Nothing new is suggested by our Lord: nothing but the same old commandments which Jehovah had given Israel in the Ten Words. “Thou knowest the commandments,” says he; “the commandments.” They are the well-known commandments which every one in Israel knew well. “I have nothing else to say to thee except what you already know . . .” so one of the
most modern of modern commentators (Johannes Weiss) paraphrases our Lord’s response: “He who would be worthy of the kingdom of God must keep the primeval commandments of God.” And that no mistake might be made as to His meaning, our Lord goes on to enumerate a sufficient number of the Ten Commandments to make it clear even to persistent misunderstanding what commandments He had in mind. “Thou shalt not kill.” He specifies, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother, and, He adds, summing up as much of them as He had repeated, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” So little does Jesus imagine that the Ten Commandments were of local and temporary obligation that He treats them as the law of the universal and eternal kingdom which He came to establish.
Nor has He left us to infer this merely from His dealing with them in such instances as this of the rich young ruler. He tells us explicitly that His mission as regards the law was, not to abrogate it, but “to fulfil it,” that is to say, “to fill it out,” complete it, develop it into its full reach and power. The law, He declares, in the most solemn manner, is not susceptible of being done away with, but shall never cease to be authoritative and obligatory. “For verily I say unto you,” He says, employing for the first time in the record of His sayings which have come down to us, this formula of solemn asseveration—”Verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished.” So long as time endures, the law shall endure in full validity, down to its smallest details. The concluding phrase of this declaration, rendered in our Revised Version “until all things be accomplished,” and perhaps even more misleadingly in the Authorised Version, “till all be fulfilled,” is not a mere repetition of “Till heaven and earth pass away,” but means, in brief, “until all which the law requires shall be done, until no item of the law shall remain unobserved.” So long as the world stands no iota of the law shall pass away—till all that it prescribes shall be performed. The law exists not to be broken or to be abrogated, but to be obeyed; not to be “undone,” to employ an old English phrase, but to be “done.” It is to be obeyed, and it shall be obeyed, down to the last detail; and, therefore, in no detail of it can it be set aside or safely neglected. “The thought is,” remarks H. A. W. Meyer justly, that “the law will not lose its binding obligation, which reaches on to the final realisation of all its prescriptions, so long as heaven and earth remain.” Now, the law of which our Lord makes this strong assertion of its ever-abiding validity, includes, as one of its prominent constituent parts, just the Ten Commandments. For, as he proceeds to illustrate His statements from instances in point, showing how the law is filled out, completed by Him, He begins by adducing instances from the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill”; “Thou shalt not commit
adultery.” It is with the Ten Commandments clearly in His mind, therefore, that He declares that no jot or tittle of the law shall ever pass away, but it all must be fulfilled.
Like Master, like disciple. There is an illuminating passage in the Epistle of James, in which the law is so adverted to as to throw a strong emphasis on its unity and its binding character in every precept of it. “For whosoever shall keep the whole law,” we read, “and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all.” “The law is a whole,” comments J. E. B. Mayor; “it is the revelation of God’s will; disregard to a single point is disregard to the Law-giver, it is disobedience to God, and a spirit of disobedience breaks the law as a whole.” If then, we keep the law, indeed, in general but fail in one precept, we have broken, not that precept only, but the whole law of which that precept is a portion. We might as well say, if we have broken the handle or the lip or the pedestal of some beautiful vase, that we have not broken the vase but only the handle or the lip or the pedestal of it, as to say that we have not broken the law when we have broken a single one of its precepts. Now, the matter of special interest to us is that James illustrates this doctrine from the Ten Commandments. It is the same God, he declares, who has said, Thou shalt not commit adultery, and Thou shalt not kill. If we do not commit adultery but kill, we are transgressors of the holy will of this God, expressed in all the precepts and not merely in one. It is obvious that James might have taken any others of the precepts of the Decalogue to illustrate his point—the Fourth as well as the Sixth or Seventh. The Decalogue evidently lies in his mind as a convenient summary of fundamental duty; and he says in effect that it is binding on us all, in all its precepts alike, because they all alike are from God and publish His holy will.
An equally instructive allusion to the Decalogue meets us in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul is dwelling on one of his favourite themes—love as the fulfilment of the law. “He who loveth his neighbour,” he says, “hath fulfilled the law.” For, all the precepts of the law—he is thinking here only of our duties to our fellow-men—are summed up in the one commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” To illustrate this proposition he enumerates some of the relevant precepts. They are taken from the second table of the Decalogue: “Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet.” Clearly the Ten Commandments stand in Paul’s mind as a summary of the fundamental principles of essential morality, and are, as such, of eternal validity. When he declares that love is the fulfilment of these precepts, he does not mean, of course, that love supersedes them, so that we may content ourselves with loving our neighbour and not concern ourselves at all with the details of our conduct toward him. What he means is the precise contrary of this: that he who loves his neighbour has within him a spring of right conduct towards his
neighbour, which will make him solicitous to fulfil all his duties to him. Love does not abrogate but fulfils the law.
Paul was not the originator of this view of the relation of love to the law. Of his Master before him we read: “And He said . . . Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hangeth the whole law, and the prophets.” That is to say, all the precepts of the law are but the development in detail, in the form of announced obligations, of the natural workings of love towards God and man. The two tables of the Decalogue are clearly in mind as respectively summed up in these two great commandments. And the meaning is, again, not that love to God and man supersedes the duties enumerated in these two tables, but that it urges prevailingly to their punctual and complete fulfilment. As loving our fellow-men does not so fulfil all our duty towards them that, loving them, we are free to rob and murder them; so loving God does not so fulfil our whole duty to Him that, loving him, we are free to insult His name or deny Him the time necessary for His service. Love, again, means not the abrogation but the fulfilment of the law.
It cannot be necessary to multiply examples. Nothing could be clearer than that the Ten Commandments are treated by our Lord and the writers of the New Testament as the embodiment, in a form suited to command them to Israel, of the fundamental elements of essential morality, authoritative for all time and valid in all the circumstances of life. All the references made to them have as their tendency, not to discredit them, but to cleanse them from the obscuring accretions of years of more or less uncomprehending and unspiritual tradition, and penetrating to their core, to throw up into high light their purest ethical content. Observe how our Lord deals with the two commandments, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, in the passage near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, to which we have already had occasion to allude. Everything external and mechanical in the customary application of these commandments is at once swept away; the central moral principle is seized with firmness: and this central moral principle is developed without hesitation into its uttermost manifestations. Murder, for example, is discovered in principle already in anger; and not in anger only, but even in harsh language. Adultery, in the vagrant impulses of the mind and senses; and in every approach to levity in the treatment of the marriage tie. There is no question here of abrogating these commandments, or of limiting their application. One might say rather that their applications are immensely extended, though “extended” is not quite the right word: say rather, deepened. They seem somehow to be enriched and ennobled in our Lord’s hands, made more valuable and fecund, increased in beauty and
splendour. Nothing really has happened to them. But our eyes have been opened to see them as they are, purely ethical precepts, declaring fundamental duties, and declaring them with that clean absoluteness which covers all the ground.
(To be continued.)