CHAPTER XXIV. Justification by Faith, and obedience after it.-The Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus. THE windings of the River of the Water of Life, supposed as a stream on which the soul is sailing, land a man, at whatever point he would effect a landing, only on the ground of Justification by Faith. Many a man has endeavored to save himself by a new life of his own, by the careful, costly manufacture of a morality, by which he would fain meet the demands of a violated law, but has come to the discovery that what he needs is a new life in Christ, with Christ and not self, as the soul of it. What he needs is first of all a Saviour, not a helper, for that merely could do him no good, but a Saviour; a Saviour for him in his sins, and without any morality; a Saviour from his sins, and then, thus saved, thus justified, before there is any the least imaginable ground of justification in himself, love produces a morality which self could not produce, a morality which is true piety, a morality which is the consequence of Christ in the soul, and not a propitiatory bribe to induce him to come to the soul. He comes, and then there is true morality; but there is no morality until he comes. There may be great and painful efforts after it; waxen figures wrought out and exquisitely painted, and great endeavors to breathe the breath of life into them; but all such attempts do but increase the anguish in any man's soul, who is truly in earnest as Luther was, and do but unveil to him more clearly his guilt and misery. The effort is like pouring oil upon a house in flames. All attempts at self-amendment and salvation apart from Christ are like that sick woman's physicians, on whom, before Christ came, she had spent all her living, and never grew better, but rather grew worse. While refusing to submit to God's way of salvation through and in Christ, every resort, expedient, and effort of the soul, and its very anguish and restless fever of anxiety and inward conflicts, are but a disclosure of sin perpetually increasing, and of the obstinacy of a self-will still holding out against God. These things only return back upon the hardened sinner to increase the already intolerable weight upon his soul. So that in endeavoring to mount the ladder of his own repentance and morality towards heaven, a man is like those who mount the scaling-ladders against an impregnable besieged castle, only to have the ponderous ladders themselves thrown back upon them to crush them. A man must quit his physicians and his scaling-ladders, and throw himself only upon Christ. There are three great laws, or forms of law, to which our immortal being bears an inevitable and eternal relation. These are, first, the Law of God, for our government; second, the Law of Sin and Death in our depraved nature; third, the Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ. Jesus. Under the first we are, as immortal beings, eternally responsible; under the second we are, if not redeemed by grace, eternally in bondage; under the third we are not in subjection naturally, but may, by divine grace, if we will, be brought beneath its blessed power, redeemed by it from sin for ever. By the two first of these laws there is nothing but condemnation. God's law itself is a law of sin and of death, because it convinces of sin, and can give to the sinner nothing but the penalty. It is a law of sin, because it makes sin appear. It discovers the guilt of transgression. The light, though it is a law of transparency only, might be called the law of colors and of shadows, because it reveals colors, and is the occasion for shadows to appear. So the law of God, though in itself holiness, and a law of holiness, may be called a law of sin, as showing what sin is, and demonstrating its existence. It is a law of sin, showing man to be a sinner. And it is a law of death, because it adjudges him to death. By the second of these laws, or forms of law, there is both condemnation and execution, and nothing else; for the law of sin and death in our nature is an active, indwelling principle. It is a life, which itself is sin and death, in our mind, heart, will, conscience; in our habits of alienation from God, in our selfishness and unbelief. It is character; and the law of fixed character is as stable as the law of the universe. It is a voluntary, innate, permanent, active, habitual tendency and disposition. This being a disposition to sin, our chosen corrupt nature is to us a law of sin and of death. We are slaves to it, and the fact of its being a voluntary bondage makes it incomparably more disastrous. We are alive only to evil, and dead only to good. Left to ourselves, we are unceasingly under an evil self, as our law, and of course under condemnation of God's law. By nature, in our evil will, we are children of wrath. Our bondage is chosen and self-inflicted, and therefore the worst that possibly can be. The principles of our nature are the law of our nature. If the principles of our nature are selfish, and the habits of our nature correspondent, supreme selfishness is more certainly the law of our nature, than if there were for us, as an external law, the precept, Thou shalt love thyself supremely. If it were the voluntary principle and habit of our nature to steal, this world would be a surer, stronger law to us, than if it were a precept of our decalogue, Thou shalt steal. Of all forms of law, an evil will is the most certain in its operation. This is the dread law to which the Apostle Paul refers, as the law of sin and of death. Of all conceptions, or imaginations, or realities, or possibilities of evil, it is the worst. Of all forms or essences of hell, that ever entered into the field of thought, vision, or superstition, swept over by an angry conscience, the dominion of such a law, the existence of such a nature, is infinitely the most horrible. All the miseries in the universe do not amount to any possibility of comparison with the misery of being under such a law. All the blessings of the universe, though we were put in possession of them, could do us no good, could make no alleviation of our state of unescapable woe beneath this law. It is a law that makes evil triumphant over good, and converts good into evil. For a being of an evil nature there is no possibility of good; the evil will come out and conquer. This nature will be developed, will burst up out of all restraints and artificial concealments, and over all dykes, and will rule supreme above everything. The element, as the element of fire, if not eradicated, will conquer. It is under restraint now, the restraint of a state of probation, the restraint of God's mercy in the arrangements of the scheme of redemption, the restraints of the gospel, of the Word of God, of Divine Providence, of grace, of prudence, of friends, families, neighbors, of fears and hopes, of human laws and hindrances. It is modified, balanced, checked, repressed, concealed; but it is still the law, the ruling principle, the principle of nature and of destiny; and when all surrounding influences are gone, when the arrangements of a probationary state no more encompass the soul, when nothing but evil encompasses it, and exasperations and developments of evil principle, then it will show itself supreme and eternal. We may be insensible to it now, we may deny it now, and demand more evidence; but let it be remembered that full evidence would be our ruin. Full evidence, compulsory evidence, the evidence of complete experience, and demonstration by experience, would be the entire development and conquest of the evil principle, converting earth itself into hell, a world of probation into a world of consequences, ourselves into demons, our state into that of unalterable sin and despair. It is the very peculiarity of our evidence, that it is evidence for future action, evidence from God's Word and our own partial experience, and not demonstration in experience filled up and finished, which would be simply our ruin in hell. It is evidence of tendency, sure, unalterable tendency, given in a world of probation and mercy, for warning and recovery. The partialness of the evidence is the very result of God's mercy, that we may fly while it is partial, before we are in the burning deep, to him who only can save us from that deep, to which the law and tendency of our nature is rapidly and surely conducting us. Therefore, to make the partialness of this evidence a reason for denying it, is to make the very mercy of God the means of our destruction. And yet there are those who deny the essential depravity of their hearts and of all mankind, because it does not break out in nothing but depravity; because, they say, your doctrine makes men demons; your doctrine is, that men hate God, and if it were so, the world would be filled with nothing but enmity, whereas there is in it a vast deal of goodness, of benevolence, of kindness, of the recognition of God's bounty, and regard to his laws. And who does not see that it could not be otherwise, if God maintains a state of probation, if he checks, restrains, and softens human depravity so far by goodness and mercy, as to render the offer of the gospel possible and appreciable; if he does not let the tendency and law of human nature go on to its completion, to make indeed a hell on earth, in which there would be no possibility of change. Who does not see that the evidence of entire depravity in man must be partial except on God's authority, if God in mercy stops that depravity in its mid-career, and does not let men yet |