The Law of God | Exodus 20:1-17
Brian Hedges | February 12, 2023
Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles to the book of Exodus. We’re going to be reading today from Exodus 20.
The great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther said, “Whoever knows well this art of distinguishing between law and gospel, him place at the head, and call him a doctor of Holy Scripture.” By doctor he meant a true theologian. What Luther was saying is that right at the heart of a right understanding of Scripture is the ability to distinguish between these two things, law and gospel.
We know that God’s word comes to us in both of those forms. There is both God’s word of command and also his word of promise; his law and the gospel. It’s important for us to know how these two things are related.
It’s important, first of all, just for us to be able to read our Bibles with understanding; to be able to understand how the Bible fits together, how the Old Testament fits with the New. And it’s important for our Christian lives as well, to understand the distinction between God’s commands and his promises.
We live in a culture that doesn’t particularly like law, and a lot of times, even within Christian circles, we sometimes have an overreaction to language about the law. We fear legalism so much that we shrink from any mention of the law. We might even say, using Paul’s words, “We’re not people under the law, but we’re under grace. So, what do we have to do with the Old Testament? Why do we even bother with that part of the Bible?”
I think that’s a profound mistake. Two-thirds of our Bible is contained in the Old Testament, and it’s important for us to understand what it teaches. That’s one reason why we work sequentially through books of the Bible and why we’re currently working through the book of Exodus.
We began this series in the fall, and we looked at those first eighteen chapters of Exodus, and we saw that Exodus gives us the story of redemption in the Old Testament. If you had asked any Old Testament Israelite, “Were you redeemed?” he would have said yes, and he would have pointed you back to the events of the exodus, when God redeemed his people from slavery in Egypt through the blood of a Passover lamb. We saw that Exodus gives us the language, the images, the motifs for understanding salvation, for understanding the gospel. We saw that the first half of Exodus shows us the God who delivers.
Now we’re in the second half of this book. Last week we looked at Exodus 19, where the children of Israel come to the mountain of God. They’re at Mount Sinai, and it’s from this mountain that God will speak. In the second half of this book we learn that God is the God who dwells. He is the God who delivers his people, he is the God who dwells with his people, and right at the heart of God dwelling with his people is his revelation of himself through his holy law.
This morning we’re looking at Exodus 20, which gives us the law of God in the Ten Commandments—literally what the Hebrew calls “the ten words.” Christians throughout history have recognized the importance, the significance of these ten words. Even the way the Bible talks about them shows that they are something unique.
For one thing, these are words that God himself spoke. We rightly say that all of Scripture is inspired by God, it’s breathed out by God, it’s all the word of God for us. Of course, there are some places in Scripture where the prophets spoke and said, “Thus saith the Lord,” and they gave us the very words of God. But on Mount Sinai the word of God was revealed directly, and it was God’s voice, the voice of God that spoke. These are words “from the fire,” as we read in Scripture. Not only that, but they were written with the very finger of God, as Exodus 31:18 says. They were engraved in these two tables of stone and then were kept in the Ark of the Covenant, which was kept in that Most Holy Place in the tabernacle, and later in the temple. So there’s something unique, something special about these Ten Words, the Ten Commandments, the law of God.
We’re going to begin by reading these together, Exodus 20:1-17. Then I want to show you three important things that we need to understand if we are to understand the law of God. Let me begin by reading Exodus 20, beginning in verse 1.
"And God spoke all these words, saying, 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.'"
This is God’s word.
These are the Ten Commandments, and honestly they deserve a ten sermon series, where we look at each one of them in turn! Someday perhaps we’ll do that. But this morning what I want us to do is look at them as a whole, as the law of God, the Decalogue, the Ten Words. I want us to try to understand not only the content of these laws, but how they fit within the storyline of Scripture, how they fit within the unfolding drama of God’s saving work as it is recorded in the Bible and as it culminates in the person and the work of Jesus Christ.
In order to do that, I want us to look at three things: first, the substance of the law; second, the purpose of the law; and third, the fulfillment of the law.
1. The Substance of the Law
First, the substance of the law. What is the essential content of the law? That’s what we’re after here. What does it require?
I think we can answer that by considering three features or characteristics of the law, and I think this will help us also to see why the law is important and why it’s crucial that there is such a thing as the law. There are three crucial features.
(1) Here’s the first thing: the law is good. I think for a lot of us, our initial reaction to the language of law and commandment is to shrink away from it, to think of the law as a bad thing, as a negative thing. But listen to Paul’s words in Romans 7:12. He says, “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.”
The law is good. The law is a reflection of the character of God, and it shows what God requires of human beings and the good life that he intends for us.
A lot of us feel like the law is restrictive. We live in an age that values the independence of the individual above anything else. Anyone telling me what to do, that’s something I don’t like.
But think for just a minute. What would the world be like if there were no laws? No laws at all. If there were no laws, there were no rules, nothing that governs the way we interact with one another, what would the world be like? It would be anarchy. It would be pure chaos. If you just tried to drive home today without people following basic traffic laws, somebody’s going to get hurt. It’s going to be absolute chaos.
This is true in every realm of our existence. In every aspect of our lives, we are dependent on rules and laws and people playing by a certain rulebook.
Tonight, hundreds of thousands of people are going to watch two teams play a game together, right? The Super Bowl. Some people are going to be rooting for the Chiefs and some people are going to be rooting for the Eagles, and everybody’s going to expect a fair game, where people play by the rules. If one of the teams were to come out and have fifteen players instead of eleven players, that would get flagged. That would get called. That’s not going to be allowed. Or if they’re playing with a different kind of ball than a football—you start doing that kind of stuff and sooner or later what you have is a different game altogether. It’s not football anymore, because people would not be playing by the rules. It wouldn’t be the Super Bowl. There has to be this understanding that there’s common ground, that there’s an agreement that “we’re going to play according to this common set of rules.”
Or think about the domestic realm. Think about how you put furniture. There are basically two kinds of people in the world. There are people who read the directions and people who don’t read the directions. How many of you read the directions? Let me see your hand. How many of you don’t read the directions? Let me see your hand. Okay, that’s why your furniture is rickety! That’s why you still have hardware left over at the end. If you don’t follow the rules, that’s going to leave you with a problem.
We need blueprints, don’t we? We need something that shows us the way things are to be done. That’s true in these seemingly insignificant aspects of our lives, but how much more true is that in the whole moral order of the world.
This was C.S. Lewis’s argument in his book Mere Christianity. There are actually four books in Mere Christianity; the first one is called “Right and Wrong is a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” In that book Lewis discusses natural law, the moral law, or the law of nature. He essentially says two things. He says all human beings have this curious idea that we are to behave in certain kinds of ways. There are ways that we should behave, things that we should do. But we also know that we don’t do those things, so there’s something in us—there’s a voice in our heads, there’s a conscience that is telling us that we are wrong. He says that these two things together are "the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the world we live in."
He illustrates this in a lot of simple ways that are easy to understand. Just take two people who have an argument, they have a quarrel with one another. The reason two people are arguing with one another and have a quarrel is because there is this assumption between them that one of them is right and one of them is wrong. They’re trying to work out that difference, who’s right and who’s wrong, in this argument. But they both agree that there’s a right way of doing things.
Lewis uses the illustration of playing the piano. You play the piano, and when you’re playing with sheet music in front of you (those who read music) and you play the music as it’s before you, you hit the right note, and you are in tune with that song. He says this is sort of what it’s like to live in a moral universe, in a moral world. Let’s say you’re walking by a lake and you see someone who’s drowning in the lake, and you know intuitively that you should risk your own life in order to try to save that person. If you do so, you’re playing in tune with this music. If you don’t do so out of self-preservation, there’s something in you that’s telling you that you’re wrong, that you should be taking a risk in order to try to save this person.
This is the kind of world we live in. We know that there’s right, we know that there’s wrong; it’s intuitive in our hearts. Our conscience tells us so.
Lewis makes the argument in other places, especially in his book The Abolition of Man, that every culture of the world, every religious system, every philosophical system has some sort of law—virtually every culture in the world. He scours a wide variety of the best philosophical and religious texts in the world, not only Jewish and Christian, but also Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Roman, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, with quotes from people like Cicero and Aristotle and Seneca and Homer and Virgil, to show that there is this common agreement across many different cultures, many different times and many different centuries, of some common, basic laws, basic rules for living, that pretty much everybody agrees with. Why is that? It’s because there is such a thing as natural law. We know that there’s right and there’s wrong, and this is a good thing.
So, the law is good. We would not be able to function in a world where there was no law.
(2) It’s not only good, it’s also loving. Sometimes people want to pit law against love. “If you care about rules, you must not love people.” But actually, when you read Scripture carefully you’ll see that love is actually the fulfillment of the law.
Isn’t this what Jesus himself said in Matthew 22:37-40? He said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
The whole law can be summarized in love—love for God, love for neighbor. In fact, when you look at the Ten Commandments, these two tables of the law, the Ten Words of the law, half of them are concerned with love for God. This is the vertical relationship, the worship of God. “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make a graven image, to bow down to it. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” These are all laws that are about loving God, putting him first, worshiping him and him alone.
The second table of the law is concerned with love of neighbor. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t lie, don’t covet. Honor your father and mother. Why? Because this is how you show neighbor love.
The law is not in contrast to love, it is the way love is expressed.
(3) The third thing to see here about the substance of the law is that it is comprehensive. That means that the law directs every area of our lives. When you really look closely at the Ten Commandments, you can see that the Ten Commandments really reaches to every aspect of our lives. It touches every compartment, every category, every aspect, the private and the public, the religious and the secular. God and neighbor, worship and work, family and society.
In the law of God we learn that he is to be the Lord, and the Lord not only of our worship but also the Lord who reigns over our use of time, our work and rest, our family relationships, our sexuality, our possessions. He is the Lord of our hands, our tongues, and the very desires of our hearts. He is to reign. The law of God expresses how we are to live under that reign.
Commentator Alec Motyer points out that the Ten Commandments reach not only our deeds, our behaviors, but to our very words and even our thoughts. “You shall have no other gods before me." "You shall not covet.” That’s talking about the desires of our hearts. So it’s not simply that the Ten Commandments is giving us outward morality, but it actually reaches to the inner recesses of our hearts.
When Jesus gave his own exposition of the law of God in the Sermon on the Mount, he wasn’t correcting the Old Testament, he was correcting a false understanding of the Old Testament. When he says, "You have heard that it was said to those of old, You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you hate your brother, if you’re angry with him without a cause, you’re in danger of judgment." Or he says, "You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” He’s showing the true spirituality of the law, how the law reaches into our very hearts. It is comprehensive, this law. It reaches every domain of our lives.
Let’s do a thought experiment for a moment. I want you to imagine for a moment a world in which every person in the world, in every nation in the world, kept the Ten Commandments. What would that kind of world be like?
It would mean there would be no idolatry, no cults, no human sacrifice, no degrading worship of any kind, and no religious abuse, whether in the name of the church or in any other religion.
It would mean there would be no blasphemy, no profanity, no corrupting words to ever assault your senses. There would be no overwork, no burnout, no sacrificing the family on the altar of a career; but also no sloth, no laziness, no waste; but instead a perfect balance of work and rest.
There would be no rebellion of children against parents, no breakdown of family harmony.
There would be no adultery, no infidelity, no divorce, no lust, no pornography, no rape, no sexual abuse or assault, no human trafficking.
There would be no stealing, lying, cheating, extortion, or blackmail, no unjust laws, no exploitation of the poor, of minorities, of women or children.
There would be no addiction and no substance abuse, because the desires of people’s hearts would be set on God himself.
There would be no covetousness, no unfettered greed, no out-of-control desires, no envy, no jealousy.
What kind of world would that be? It would be paradise.
Let me ask you this: imagine your own life if you lived that way. Wouldn’t much of the heartache and the brokenness of your own life be gone if that was the way you lived?
The substance of the law—it’s good, it’s loving, it’s comprehensive. If people lived under this law, in obedience to it, the world would be a better place. That’s the substance of the law.
2. The Purpose of the Law
But we also need to understand, secondly, the purpose of the law. Here’s where we have to ask the question, “Why was the law given?”
Why was it given? God had a purpose in giving the Ten Commandments to Israel. I want to suggest four answers to this question, “Why was the law given?” and these four answers are to help us understand the law in relationship to different groups of people and in relationship to redemptive history itself.
(1) First of all, let’s think about the law as a summary of God’s moral will for human beings. I do think that while the Ten Commandments were given specifically to Israel, there is within the Ten Commandments a summary of God’s basic moral will.
The substance of at least nine of the Ten Commandments are repeated in the New Testament. Christopher Wright and many other scholars have pointed out that the substance of these commandments can be seen even in the book of Genesis, where transgressions against them are understood to be sin. So, Christopher Wright in his commentary on Exodus says this:
“The Ten Commandments do not introduce new moral requirements, but memorably codify memorable truths that according to Genesis may have been a governing factor of human life with God’s creation from the beginning. Genesis shows that they were known and understood among people who stood outside the ancestral families of Israel, and indeed, even before Abraham. This element of universality can be seen in the fact that laws against murder, theft, adultery, and false witness are embedded in legal texts of the cultures surrounding Israel. What God required in Israel is a paradigm and microcosm of what God requires ultimately of all humanity.”
A similar argument is made by Douglas Moo, a New Testament scholar; also by John Bunyan and John Owen, two Puritans from the 17th century.
So, the Ten Commandments show us essentially God’s moral will for all mankind. We might think of the Ten Commandments as the light of God’s moral will as it is then refracted through a prism that shows us God’s very specific will for the nation of Israel.
(2) That leads to the second way of considering this law, and that is as a constitution for the nation of Israel. In fact, Chris Wright calls it Israel’s “Bill of Rights.” In other words, the Ten Commandments were meant to regulate the life of the people of God in Israel. In Exodus 19 God is constituting a people for himself; he has called them, he has redeemed them, and they are now given a new identity as God’s holy people, as a kingdom of priests, this chosen nation. They are meant to be God’s light to the world, and the way that they are to do that is to live in covenant with God, under this constitution of the Ten Commandments.
In fact, the rest of the law of God—there are over 600 specific commandments of God in the Torah—they are all essentially expansions of or expositions of or applications of these ten words. This was God’s will for Israel.
So it is a summary of God’s moral will for human beings, it is a constitution for the nation of Israel.
(3) But then, when we think about the law in its place in the unfolding drama of Scripture, we see that the law was a guardian for God’s people when they were in a particular point in history.
This is Paul’s argument in Galatians 3:23-24. Paul here is talking about the difference between the promise and the law, the promise given to Abraham and the law given through Moses on Mount Sinai. He says the law was added because of transgressions. There was a specific purpose of the law, and Paul compares the law to a prison warden and to a guardian, literally a pedagogue, someone who would be entrusted with the raising of a child, the education of a child, before that child reached adulthood and reached maturity.
You see this in Galatians 3:23-24. He says, “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.”
When you keep reading Paul, not only in Galatians but also in Romans, Paul also characterizes the law as something of a provocateur, who’s there to arouse sin, incite sin, aggravate sin, in order to expose it and show it for what it really is. He says, “Through the law comes the knowledge of sin,” in Romans 3:20. He says, “The law came in to increase the trespass,” in Romans 5:20. He says that our sinful passions were aroused by the law in Romans 7:5. Then look at these verses in Romans 7:7-11, where he describes his own experience under the law.
“What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.”
What’s Paul saying? He’s saying that he began to understand himself as a sinner only when he saw the true application of the law of God to his heart and his life. The law that promised life actually became a means of death.
The law was this guardian with a specific purpose, and that purpose was to expose sin, to show the need of God’s people for the Savior.
(4) Finally, we might consider the law also as a prosecuting attorney against the whole world, as the law of God shows that the whole world is guilty before the divine judge of all the earth. This is the argument of Romans 1-3, and you have the summary, the conclusion, in Romans 3:19-20. Paul says, “Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”
Paul here is telling us that the law does not work for our justification but for our condemnation.
We could also go to 2 Corinthians 3, where he talks about the letter of the old covenant, and he describes it as a ministry of death, a ministry of condemnation. It means that the law beats us down! The law cannot give life; the law, rather, exposes us for what we are.
There’s a great illustration of this in John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. There’s a place where Christian is having a conversation with a man named Faithful, and Faithful is recounting his experience, and he talks about how there was this man who came and kept beating him down to the ground. He would beat him down to the ground; he’d try to stand up and the man would beat him down to the ground again. He asks why, and the man tells him it’s because of his “inclination to Adam the First.” That’s Adam in the garden. It’s because of his heart that inclines towards that original sin in Adam.
Faithful says he asked for mercy, but this man knew nothing about mercy. He couldn’t help him. Finally someone else came and made him stop, "bid him forbear." Christian tells him, “This man who was beating you down was Moses.” It was Moses! He was beating you down because Moses is the one who is God’s instrument for delivering the law to Israel. He doesn’t know mercy, doesn’t know grace, but rather gives commands.
This is important for us to understand. It’s important for us to understand so that we can read our Bibles accurately, so you can know how the Bible fits together. It’s important also for us to understand ourselves, because the law searches us. It searches our hearts. It diagnoses our sin, it shows us our need. We never really embrace the gospel until we see our need for a Savior.
But it is crucial that we know what the law can do and what the law can’t do. Know this: the law can teach, it can expose, it can diagnose, but it cannot save. It can wound, but it cannot heal. It can condemn, but it cannot justify.
Should we then do away with the law? Of course not! Without the law we wouldn’t know the difference between right and wrong, between righteousness and wickedness. But don’t expect more from the law than it can give. The law can never save you.
How then can you be saved? Well, in that story from The Pilgrim’s Progress, Faithful says Moses kept beating him down, this man keeps beating him down, but there came a man who bid him forebear, who made him stop. Christian asks him, “Who was that that bid him forebear?” Who was this man that made him stop?
This is what Faithful says. He says, “I did not know him at first, but as he went by I perceived the holes in his hands and in his side, and I knew that it was our Lord.”
3. The Fulfillment of the Law
That leads us to the third point, the fulfillment of the law.
Having seen its substance, now understanding something of its purpose, how is the law fulfilled? I want to give you two ways.
(1) First of all, the law was fulfilled for us by Christ. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). Paul tells us in Romans 10, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” He’s the goal that the law was pointing to all along: Christ.
I want you to see verses in Romans 8:1-4. Romans 8 is maybe the greatest chapter in the Bible. This is how Paul begins it, Romans 8, beginning in verse 1. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Amen! Praise God! Why? Verse 2: “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” How? Verse 3: “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
What Paul here is telling us, in part, is that it is through Christ’s doing and his dying, through his living and his suffering, that the law is fulfilled for us.
There’s a great story told by James Montgomery Boice, who was that preacher at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in the 20th century. He told a story about Charles Moorhouse, who was a Christian man who worked in the slums. One day he was walking down the street and he ran into this little girl and knocked a pitcher of water out of her hands, and the pitcher broke and cracked. She was immediately distraught. She was upset about this broken pitcher. As he talked to her, he discovered that she was afraid that if she took that home she would be severely punished. So he tried to help her piece it together, glue it back together, but all to no avail. Once they had it together she dropped it and it shattered into a thousand pieces, and she was crying, she was distraught; so upset, so worried. What was going to happen to her with this broken pitcher?
So Moorhouse said, “Come with me,” and he took her into a little story and he brought her a brand new one and gave it to her. He said, “Here, take this home and use this.” She settled down. “Are you still worried?” he asked. She said, “No, I’m not worried, because this pitcher is even better than the one before.”
Boice used that story to illustrate how, though we have broken the law, Christ has come and he has so completed it, so obeyed it, so fulfilled it, that it’s better than anything we could have done before. He’s fulfilled that law; he has lived in our place.
We sing this, don’t we?
Come, behold the wondrous mystery,
He the perfect Son of Man;
In his living, in his suffering,
Never trace nor stain of sin.
See the true and better Adam,
Come to save the hellbound man;
Christ, the sure and great fulfillment
Of the law; in him we stand.
The law was fulfilled for us by Christ.
I read a book this week by Peter Leithart on The Ten Commandments. It was so good; it’s the best thing I’ve ever read on the Ten Commandments, and this is what Leithart said. He said,
“The Ten Words are a character portrait of Jesus, the Son of God. The Ten Words lay out the path of imitatio Dei [that means the imitation of God] because they lay the path of the imitatio Christi [the imitation of Christ]. As Israel kept the commandments, Augustine wrote, ‘The life of that people foretold and foreshadowed Christ.’ As Irenaeus said, ‘Christ fulfills the law that he spoke from Sinai.’ The law exposes our sin, restrains the unruly, provides a guide to life, but Jesus is the heart and soul of the decalogue. The first use of the law is christological.”
Christ is the fulfillment of the law.
Think for a minute about how he fulfilled it. [Note: the following meditations are largely based on and a paraphrase of Leithart]. He was the perfect embodiment of the law of God in every way. Jesus had no other gods before him, but he loved his Father with heart, soul, mind, and strength. He never made a graven image, but rather was himself the living icon of God, the one who imaged God for us. He did not bear God’s name in vain, but honored him with every utterance of his mouth. Jesus didn’t break the Sabbath, but instead showed the true meaning of the Sabbath. He said human beings weren’t made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath was made for human beings. Jesus, through his complete fulfillment of the work of the law, entered into his eternal Sabbath rest, and now he welcomes us who are weary and heavy laden to find our rest in him. Jesus is our Sabbath. Jesus not only honored his heavenly Father, but he honored and cared for his earthly mother. Even as he hung on the cross, he made arrangements to be sure that Mary, his mother, would be taken care of after he died. He did not kill, but rather was killed so that we through his death might live. Jesus did not commit adultery, but he was pure in every word, in every thought, in every deed. He demonstrated the greatest possible care, kindness, and respect for women, and as the heavenly Bridegroom he faithfully loved his Bride all the way to the end, laying down his life for the church. He did not steal, but rather gave up the riches of heaven so that we through his poverty might be made rich. He did not lie or bear false witness against his neighbor, but was himself truth incarnate. He was the faithful and the truth witness. He did not covet, for his one singular desire was to do the will of his Father.
Christ is the fulfillment of the law. To begin to understand that is the first step to your own heart being transformed. William Cowper said,
To see the law by Christ fulfilled,
To hear his pardoning voice,
Changes a slave into a child,
And duty into choice.
The law is fulfilled for us through Christ the Son.
(2) Secondly and lastly—I’m almost done—the law is also fulfilled in us through the Holy Spirit. Look at what Paul says in Romans 8, this time in Romans 8:4. He tells us that God, by sending Christ, has done what the law could never do. He condemned sin in the flesh, verse 4, “in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
What does Paul mean? He means that in the giving of the gift of the Spirit, through the new covenant work of Jesus Christ, our very hearts are transformed so that we begin to fulfill what the law was after all along! In fact, the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 does include—and in Ezekiel 36—the writing of God’s law in our hearts, as the Spirit indwells us and we are changed. We are transformed from the inside out, so that we begin to desire what God desires, to love what he loves, to hate what he hates. We begin to bring our lives under the lordship and the reign of Jesus Christ himself, who embodied perfection in every way, and we do that through the indwelling ministry and power of the Holy Spirit.
The new covenant is not a ministry of death and condemnation (2 Corinthians 3), it is the ministry of life, as the Spirit himself writes on our hearts, and inscribes our hearts with God’s law.
Another poet put it like this:
“Run, John, run!” the law demands,
But gives us neither feet nor hands.
Far better news the gospel brings,
That bids us fly and gives us wings.
Brothers and sisters, friends, as you think about God’s law this morning, what’s the appropriate response? It’s first humility, as every mouth is stopped as we recognize how the law exposes our sin. Secondly, trust, as we look to the doing and the dying, the suffering and the obedience of Jesus Christ, who fulfilled the law in our place. Finally, it is dependence on the Spirit of God, who lives within us to fulfill the law in and through our lives. Look to Christ this morning; trust in him. Let’s pray together.
Gracious and merciful God, we thank you for your holy word, your word that comes to us as both law and gospel. We thank you for both the commandment and the promise; the commandment that shows us our need, and the promise that shows us our Savior. We pray this morning that you would help us to earnestly give attention to the teaching of your word, to humble ourselves before you as we acknowledge our sin and our need, and then to freely embrace your promise given to us through Jesus Christ, as he is clothed in the promises of the gospel. May we embrace him with everything that we are. May we trust in what he has done for us in his life, his death, and his resurrection; and may we know the powerful, indwelling work of your Holy Spirit, transforming us, remaking us, renewing us, so that we begin to live the way that you designed for us to live, with a supreme love for you and love for our neighbors.
Lord, work in us what is pleasing in your sight this morning. As we come to the Lord’s table, may we come with both humility and faith—humility, recognizing that we don’t deserve what Christ has done, but faith as we embrace the free gift of the gospel. Feed our hearts and our souls this morning with Christ, the living bread. Help us, Lord, to worship you in these moments. We pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
