The Blessing and Curse of the Law

“Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.”—Psalm cxix. 18.

The passage: The psalmist prays that God would open his eyes so that he may see wondrous things in God’s law.

The Collect, Epistle, and Gospel read yesterday and again today connect the old world with the new, the Jew’s obedience with the Christian’s. The link is Jesus’ obedience to the Law. We are taught that we have a stake in Circumcision because He submitted to it, and that in its highest sense Circumcision belongs to the citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. The subject matters deeply, both historically and personally. A preacher should not skip it on the pretext that the Church’s services handle it better than he can. From those services we may carry away only a vague sense that our position is somehow like and unlike the Jew’s. Or we may find out what the likeness is, and so come to see the difference fully. We may be content with phrases about formal, literal obedience and moral obedience, or we may learn why one is better than the other and how to exchange one for the other. I know no better meditation for a new year, which should join memories with hopes, and repentance for the past with manly, humble resolutions for the future.

I have chosen a verse from Psalm 119, which expresses what a true Israelite felt about the law of his fathers, the Law he was born under. It is one of many verses on the same theme. Sometimes the Law, the Commandments, and the Statutes seem to fill the writer’s whole mind. But Understanding, Knowledge, and Sight recur just as often, and always in connection with them: “Give me understanding, that I may keep thy Law. Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy Law.” There is little sign here of dry, mechanical submission to a mere rule. The psalm assumes that the law cannot be kept without a faculty that enters into its meaning. It seems to treat the great reward of obedience as something inward, not external or accidental: the ability to discover the mind of the Lawgiver.

1. Where did the Jew get this insight? He was under a rigid, unbending rule, which he was told came from divine authority and which it was death to break. Could such a law exercise the understanding? Must it not simply have filled him with terror of breaking it, knowingly or not, and of incurring its fearful penalties? We have reason to think this was its actual effect on the man who revered it above all his countrymen, who was “blameless” as to its righteousness. St. Paul tells us it lay on him as a heavy, intolerable curse, and that he received Christ as the deliverer from that curse. He meant the moral law, not merely the ceremonial. He dwells on the words “Thou shalt not covet,” which frightened him and even awakened in him the very sin they forbade. Surely he never delighted in the law as David did, and never prayed to see wondrous things in it. What would have been shown him but the blackness of darkness and death?

2. It may seem a strange answer to say that David learned his secret about the Law from the Covenant of Circumcision. St. Paul was circumcised on the eighth day, and his great fight after his conversion was with those who boasted of circumcision. Yet I believe this is the true answer. Understood fully, it explains the puzzling facts and reconciles David’s experience with St. Paul’s.

The rite, which Abraham’s children received from their ancestor, spoke like this: “God Himself, the unseen God, has chosen you to be His people. You have earthly, sensual, idolatrous tendencies. He has not chosen these; He has chosen you, in order to separate you from them and overcome them in you. He will give you your true rights as men and save you from sinking into animals, or from worshipping animals or anything you see, however vast and glorious. He will teach you to worship Him.”

3. Here was the foundation of the Israelite’s life: a revelation of the righteous God, and a sign and pledge that He cared for his fathers and for him. The great proof of that care would be redeeming them from low, grovelling habits, from the tyranny of the senses and every inclination that bows to the senses. This Covenant long preceded the Law written on tables. It was wholly living and personal, made by a personal guide and friend with the man and his descendants. It joined itself to family life and household sympathies, and it condemned the tempers that divide brother from brother and children from fathers. Every violation of brotherhood and every child’s rebellion helped interpret it, since they plainly came from forgetting it. Brothers thought they could keep the peace without remembering who made them brothers. Children thought natural affection would hold them to their father without remembering who created the relationship and gave the affection. It did not work. The instinct of self-indulgence was stronger than their sympathies. It was shown that there can be no true family union unless a God upholds it.

4. Such were the lessons of patriarchal history, and each willing Jew learned them again from his own experience. Suppose he took them to heart. Suppose he became convinced that the living God, because He watched over the nation and wanted each member’s good, was making him aware of the evils fatal to fellowship and to his own manliness and blessedness, and was promising to uphold him against them. Suppose he believed the worst misery possible was to lose hold of this loving God and serve false gods. What would he think of the Law? I do not know that he would distinguish one part from another; such distinctions come gradually. He would believe that all of it, the local or ceremonial part as well as the universal and permanent, showed the vigilance and wisdom of One devising the fittest means to protect His people, especially from their own downward tendencies. He would see that these tendencies were leading individuals and nations to death: idolatry first, then carelessness about the unseen God’s name, forgetting the distinction of work and rest, neglect of parents, indifference to life, breaking the marriage vow, moving a neighbour’s landmark, false witness, coveting. To be warned of these, to be told where they lead amid thunder and lightning, and to have the warnings kept for all generations in fixed letters on stone tables in the Tabernacle, was fresh proof that no stubbornness or rebellion had alienated God. His punishments, like His gifts, were meant to break their stubbornness and reform them. So the lesson of the whole Bible, Old Testament as much as New, took root: faith is the only foundation of obedience, and you cannot truly obey a Being whose character you do not entirely trust, to whom you attribute caprice or anything arbitrary and unrighteous. That conviction was strengthened by their own evil deeds, their countrymen’s, and the heathen’s, all of them fruits of suspicion toward the One who in various ways had been revealing His goodness to all. And what follows from such conviction, and from the trust it declared reasonable, indeed the very exercise God asks of men? A desire to know more and more of the purpose and meaning of His Law, to see how truly human society was built on it and how it expresses His own nature. “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold these wondrous things out of Thy Law.”

5. Now suppose a Jew lost sight of this great meaning of Circumcision and the witness it bore against and for him. Suppose he saw it merely as a sign of separation from the other peoples, of God’s hatred for them and His arbitrary partiality for one race. How would the Law look to him? First, he would glory in it as much as in the Covenant. It was part of the national inheritance. “Poor miserable Gentiles! God has not chosen that they should know it. They must perish for want of it.” “Indeed! And what of you, child of the Covenant, who have this Law and boast of it? It says, Thou shalt not covet. Do you not covet? Do you covet less for knowing the sin is forbidden? Do you not covet more? Is the Law then not true? Does it not mean what it says? Does it denounce others and excuse you? Think of the trumpet that sounded so loud and long when it was proclaimed, the burning mountain, the lightning and thunder. Were they not all aimed at you? Will they not find you out?”

6. Such was the Law’s aspect to Saul of Tarsus, the Hebrew of the Hebrews, who thought the Covenant and Law were devised against the Gentiles. He was shown that he had in him what every Gentile had: a nature that would not submit to God’s Law and hated it. But he was shown a still more wonderful thing: that he also had within him something that delighted in God’s Law, acknowledged it as altogether good, and wanted to obey it. The question was whether God identifies me with the evil or with the good, with what fights against Him or with what cries out for Him. Or does He not recognize the difference at all? Does He only seek to damn me for the evil I do, not to save what in me cries out against it, and would pray for deliverance if it knew how to pray and to whom?

7. “I thank my God,” he exclaims, “through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Accepting Christ as the revealer of God’s will and purpose, as the manifestation of God and the daysman between God and man, I know that God does not want to damn me for the evil I have yielded and am yielding to, though He will damn that evil for ever. He is seeking to save this spirit, this inner man which protests against the evil, out of its dominion. I thank God through Jesus Christ, who perfectly fulfilled the Law, not as a slave but as a child. He submitted to all its demands because He knew they were meant for men’s benefit and elevation, and He bore its punishments that we might bear them. I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord because, as Head and Redeemer of our race, He claims us as sons of God and gives us the Spirit of sonship, which is His own Spirit.

8. Here, first, was the reconciliation of St. Paul with David. Paul had learned, as David had, the distinction between flesh and spirit that Circumcision signified. He had learned to regard God’s Covenant as an assurance of help to the spirit against the flesh, and to know God as a Deliverer out of bondage, as the first commandment declared. So when Saul’s conscience most reproached him, the Law confirmed the verdict, and he was shut up in an apparently hopeless prison. He learned to call on the Lawgiver, to tell Him all he had done and was, to ask for a clean heart and a right spirit, to be true in his inward parts and to know wisdom secretly. So far he was recovering his Jewish standing-ground, exchanging the lore of the rabbis for that of kings and prophets, and seeing that wondrous things lay hidden in the Law which only God could open his eyes to see.

9. But he could not reach this position without reaching a lower and a higher one. He could not speak the language of the kings and prophets until he confessed a Crucified Man as the King and Prophet, the Lord of his own spirit, his nation, and all men. Otherwise he must go on regarding the Law and the God of Abraham as his enemies. He would be persecuting on behalf of Judaism while renouncing the Jewish faith, unless he could believe that One had come who delighted to do God’s will, had the Law in His heart, and was willing to offer soul and body so that the Law might be written in men’s hearts and God’s will be done on earth as in heaven. Was this a great humiliation for the righteous Paul? In making it he took a position higher than David’s and the prophets’. He claimed to be a son, not a servant. His power to delight in the Law came from daring to call its Author his Father, and from receiving it, thunders and lightnings included, as the message of a Father determined that His children’s enemies shall be put down and exterminated.

10. In this process of discovery, then, a new covenant is involved, a covenant with sons, yet carrying the same pledge of war against evil, the same wrath against it, and the same separation from it as the covenant with servants. But for whom was it designed? Who might dare to call themselves by the audacious name Sons of God? Stripped of all personal and national pretensions, forced to see the Law as aimed at his sin and the Covenant as a separation between him and his evil nature, St. Paul had nothing left but to become an apostle of the Gentiles. He must preach the Covenant of Sonship to all without exception. The Son of God, having taken man’s flesh and died man’s death, must be declared the Head of every man. It must be every man’s right and duty to confess himself a member of Christ, and to thank God through Jesus Christ for adopting him into His family, promising to govern him, and giving him the true circumcision of the spirit. Paul’s gospel could have no limit unless he denied Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection. There is no danger in calling men Sons of God unless we suppress the further message: that He who claims them as sons and accepts them as righteous in the only-begotten Son also takes them under His education and gives them His Spirit, to make them aware of their parentage and destroy whatever in them contradicts it. That is the Baptismal Covenant; so it interprets our existence and the condition of mankind.

11. The Church has been teaching this doctrine in its full length and breadth during the last week, and will continue to this week. The Circumcision falls between Christmas Day and the Epiphany. The ground is laid in the revelation of the Divine Word, the only-begotten Son, in our flesh. There we have the true regenerate constitution of humanity, announced by angels and made known to shepherds at the manger in Bethlehem. Then comes the witness of the old dispensation, not against universality but for distinction: that man is a spiritual being, that his constitution is spiritual, and that what in him is base, selfish, and divisive will not submit to it and must perish. So by the Jewish road, which is straighter and nearer than any byway, we arrive at the full manifestation of the Redeemer and King to all the nations. We arrive also at the prayer in which David’s “Open mine eyes, that I may see wondrous things” reaches its highest point: “That we, which know Thee now by faith, may after this life have the fruition of Thy glorious Godhead.”

12. I do not intend to enter this afternoon on the festival that suggested that prayer; the Circumcision is enough for one day. I hope you see that the Apostle who says we “are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands” was not trifling with words, nor using a Jewish analogy suited only to his time. He was giving the real sense of the old institution as the seers of his land saw it and as it shaped all their history. He was giving the result of a long, humbling, elevating experience of his own. And he was teaching what we have needed in every past year and will need in this one. The flesh that resists law, human and divine, is in all of us. You may coerce it by punishments, and make law and government, man’s or God’s, terrible and much hated. But you will not produce free and fruitful obedience in a man, a child, or a nation unless you confess that there is something besides this flesh: a spirit that craves law and government, and craves still more a righteous Lawgiver and Governor. Do justice to yourself and to every fellow-creature by appealing to this, the true man, the man after God’s heart. Tell it of One who has claimed fellowship with it, redeemed it, and won for it the right to say “Abba, Father.” Say that the Eternal God sees it, and sees all human beings, in this Redeemer and Son, and wishes to renew all in His image. When we believe this, we shall not complain that law is burdensome. We shall hail Divine Law as a direct means, and human law as a subordinate means, for educating the spirit and crushing what hinders its expansion and freedom. “Circumcise our hearts and our members,” we shall pray, “in whatever way Thou, the All-seeing, deemest best for bringing us to true obedience. Open Thou our eyes, that we may behold in every one of Thy laws, for men or for nature, Thy wondrous wisdom and love.”