that great mystery, by which it is made Known how truth and mercy have met together, and how righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Let us now proceed to the exposition of this passage. Mark in the 20th verse how this question is treated as one between God and man. It is not that one man may not be justified in the sight of another-may not have fulfilled all that the other has a right to expect; but the question is about justification in the sight of God. It is a judicial proceeding before God. V. 21. A righteousness without the law,' is simply a righteousness which we obtain without having fulfilled that law in our own persons. Paul never loses the advantage of any testimony that is given to the doctrine of Christ out of the Jewish Scriptures; and while he therefore raises against himself the opposition of the great majority of his countrymen, by asserting a righteousness that was arrived at in some other way than through the path of obedience to their law, yet he does not omit the opportunity of trying to disarm this opposition, by avouching that this very righteousness was borne witness to by the law and the prophets. The testimonies not as God;' and they therefore are short of having wherewith to glory of before God. Even Abraham had nothing to glory of before God; and of consequence no claim or title to be glorified by God. V. 24. You understand that the term justify signifies, not to make a man righteous in personal character, but to hold and declare him righteous in point of law. We have already explained that it is to be understood forensically. We here understand that this justification is not wrought for, but given, and given freely. It is not a purchase, but a present. It is given by grace, which is just saying, that it is given gratis. When we say that it is not a purchase, we mean that it is not purchased by ourselves. Still however it was purchased, but by another. To redeem is to recover what is lost, but by rendering an adequate price for it. We had lost righteousness in the sight of God. Jesus Christ redeemed the righteousness that we had lost. He gave the price for it; and we are freely offered that thing which is the fruit of His purchase. V. 25. Set forth.' Exhibited. This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Set forth before the eyes. The term propitiation is the same with what in of the prophets are various and abundant the Old Testament is translated mercyon this topic; for a view of the testimo- seat. On the great day of atonement it nies of the law, we refer you to Paul's was sprinkled with the blood of an apEpistle to the Hebrews. V. 22. The righteousness which is proposed by the apostle, as that which alone is valid to the object of justification, is called by him the righteousness of God. It is that the acceptance of which does not dishonour Him. It is that which He Himself has provided, and which He bestows as a grant to all who will. We cannot speak too plainly about an alternative, on which there hinges the whole eternity of a sinner. Conceive the sinner to draw nigh, in the imagination of his own merits-God says to him, I cannot receive you upon this footing, but here is a righteousness which I hold out to you, wrought not by yourself but by my Son, and I now ask your consent that you be clothed upon therewith. Come to me, consenting to be so clothed upon, and I take you into full reconciliation.'- Unto all.' The offer of this righteousness is upon all who believe. Their belief constitutes their acceptance of the thing offered; and what was formerly theirs in offer, becomes by their faith theirs in possession. No difference.' There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, in respect of all having sinned; and there is as little difference in respect of the way in which all may be justified. V. 23. Come short of glorifying GodWhen they knew God they glorified him pointed sacrifice. "And there I will meet thee," says God to Moses, "and will com. mune with thee from above the mercyseat." It rather, however, signifies the offering itself, than the place in which the offering was sprinkled. You know what it is to make the Being whom you have offended propitious. The propitiation is the offering by which propitiousness is obtained. Jesus Christ in dying, rendered a propitiation for the sins of the world. And you in particular have the benefit of this propitiation; He becomes your propitiation upon your having faith in His blood. There is a general faith which respects the whole testimony of God, that, if true and not counterfeit, will also respect all the particulars of that testimony. Still however there is a danger in connecting our reconciliation with this general faith; for there may be a delusive vagueness, you will observe, in the matter, and the attention may fail to be exercised on that distinct truth with which reconciliation has most expressly and immediately to do. Let it be well remarked then, that in this verse propitiation is said to be through faith in his blood. There is an appropriateness of this kind kept up in God's dealings with us. Through faith in the blood of Christ, we obtain that redemption which is through this blood, even the forgiveness of sin. It is through faith in God's promise of the Holy Spirit that we conferred on all who believe without dis shall upon asking Him receive the Holy Spirit. This latter act of faith brings down upon us the benefit of which it is the object, even the Spirit-as the former act of faith brings down upon us the benefit of which it is the object, even the washing away of our guilt in the blood of the Lamb. As is the faith, so is the fulfil ment. Our Saviour did not ask the blind men-Believe ye that I am able to do all things?-but Believe ye that I am able to do this thing? And upon their replying -Yes, He touched their eyes and said, According to your faith so be it done unto you-and their eyes were opened. The man who has faith that he will get the Spirit of Charity, and prays accordinglythough he should get forgiveness on the back of his prayer, is not getting according to that faith. The man who has the faith that Christ's Spirit can sanctify him, and prays for it-though he should get forgiveness on the back of his prayer, is not getting according to that faith. But the man who has the faith that the blood of Christ can wash away guilt, and prays that in this blood his guilt may be washed away, and on the back of his prayer is accepted in the Beloved and for His sake -he is getting precisely according to his faith. And thus it is that there is an accordancy between the benefits of faith, and the particular truths of revelation which faith has respect unto-when it brings down these benefits upon the believer. Faith has been compared by some theologians to the bunch of hyssop, and the blood of Christ is called the blood of sprinkling. For 'as to the remission of sins that are past. To declare His righteousness, in the having remitted by his forbearance, the sins of the ages that are past. V. 26. It is at this time that God hath set Him forth. He now shows what was before hidden from the prophets. In the fulness of time Christ is now manifested. It was a mystery in former ages, how a holy God could pardon. This is now declared; and it is now made manifest that God might be just, while he justifies those who believe in Jesus. The following is the paraphrase of this passage. Therefore no individual shall work out a righteousness that justifies him by his doing of the law-for the law makes his sin manifest. But now, in lack of this righteousness of man, there is manifested a righteousness of God-not consisting of our obedience to the law, though both the law and the prophets bear witness to it. This is that righteousness of God, which is received by our faith in Christ Jesus, which is offered unto all, and actually tinction. For all have sinned and come short of rendering glory to God; and none are therefore justified in the way of reward, but receive justification as a gift of kindness, out of that which has been purchased for us by Christ Jesus-whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood; and thus to declare the righteousness of God, in His having forborne to punish the sins of those who were forgiven in the former ages of the world-to declare this righteousness to us now, and so make it manifest, that it was not merely a kind and a compassionate, but also a just thing in God, to justify him who believeth in Jesus. The first lesson that we should like to urge upon you from this passage, is the gospel doctrine of our acceptance with God, in all the strict entireness and purity of its terms. There is nothing which so much darkens the mind of an inquirer, and throws such a cloudiness over the simple announcements that God has made to us, as the tendency of a legal spirit, to mix up the doings doings of the creature with the free grace and mercy of the Creator. Take up with it as an absolute truth, that the law has condemned you. Be very sure that this is the sentence which is in force, against even the most virtuous and upright of the species. Do not try to mitigate the evils of your condition, or to blunt the edge and application of the law, as having pronounced a destroying sentence upon your person-by alleging any extenuation of your offences, or any number of actual conformities. You have broken the law in one point, have you not? So only has the assassin done, in respect to the law of his country. His execution is the legal consequence of his guilt; and by that you will carry out your guilt to its legal consequence. It will be better for you that you regard yourself, as under the law to be wholly undone. If you do not you will keep out from your mind the whole clearness and comfort of the gospel. If you admit any merit, or any innocence of your own, among the ingredients of your security before God-then all is thrown back again upon a questionable and precarious and uncertain foundation. The controversy between God and man is wakened up anew, by such a proceeding. You are again consigned, as before, among the old elements of doubt and distrust; and the question, what degree of comparative innocence is enough to admit your own righteousness into the plea of justification before God, will, by its ambiguous and unresolvable nature, remove you as far from any solid ground of dependence, as if there was no righteousness of another In stepping over from the law as a ground of meritorious acceptance, step over from it wholly. Make no reserva- heart in the love and in the habit of holitions. You are aware of the strenuous-ness. in which you might appear, and as if no propitiation had been made for you. If you want peace to your own minds, and a release to yourself from all its perplexities-better that you discard all the items of your own personal merit from the account of your acceptance with God. Go not to obliterate that clear line of demarcation which the apostle has drawn, between salvation by works and salvation by grace, and which he proposes to us as the only two terms of an alternative which cannot be compounded together; but of which, if the one be chosen, the other must be entirely rejected. The foundation of your trust before God, must either be your own righteousness out and out, or the righteousness of Jesus Christ out and out. To attempt a composition of them is to lean on a foundation, of which many of the materials may be solid; but many of them also are brittle, and all of them are frailly cemented together with untempered mortar. If you are to lean upon your own merit, lean upon it wholly-If you are to lean upon Christ, lean upon Him wholly. The two will not amalgamate together; and it is the attempt to do so which keeps many a weary and heavy-laden inquirer at a distance from rest, and at a distance from the truth of the gospel. Maintain a clear and a consistent posture. Stand not before God with one foot upon a rock, and the other upon a treacherous quick-sand. And it is not your humility alone which we want to inspire-it is the stable peace of your hearts that we are consulting, when we tell you that the best use you can make of the law is to shut your mouth when it offers to speak in the language of vindication; and to let its requirements on the one hand, and your rebellion on the other, give you the conviction of sin. ness with which Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, warded off the rite of circumcision from the church. He would admit of no compromise between one basis of acceptance and another. This were inserting a flaw and a false principle into the principle of our justification; and to import the element of falsehood were to import the element of feebleness. We call upon you, not to lean so much as the weight of one grain or scruple of your confidence upon your own doings-to leave this ground entirely, and to come over entirely to the ground of a Redeemer's blood and a Redeemer's righteousness. Then you may stand firm and erect on a foundation strong enough and broad enough to bear you. You will feel that your feet are on a sure place; and we know nothing that serves more effectually to clear and disembarrass the mind of an inquirer from all its perplexities, than when the provinces of the law and the gospel, instead of mingling and mutually encroaching the one upon the other, come to be seen in all the distinctness of their character and offices. The law ministers condemnation and nothing else. The gospel, by its own unaided self, ministers that righteousness which finds acceptance with God. God has simply set forth Christ to be a propitiation. You have to look upon Him as such, and He becomes your propitiation. Make no doubt of its being an honest exhibition, which God makes of His Son. It is not an exhibition by which He intends to deceive you. And great will be your peace, when thus drawn away from yourself, and drawn towards the Saviour. It will be the commencement of a trust, that will establish the heart in comfort; and, though a mystery which cannot be demonstrated to the world, will it be the experience of every true believer, that it is the commencement of an affection which will establish the LECTURE XII. "Where is boasting then ? It is excluaea. By what law? of works? nay; but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude, that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. Is he the God of the Jews only ? is he not also of the Gentiles ? Yes, of the Gentiles also: seeing it is one God which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith God forbid: yea, we establish a law of the human mind, thereby deno- justification there would still be room for ting the train or order of certain consecu- boasting-and we must therefore conclude tive facts, which maintain an unvarying since boasting is done away that they dependence among themselves. Both the have no part at all-and that man is juslaw of works, and the law of faith, though tified by faith without the deeds of the the judicial character of God is strongly law. Is He only the God of the Jews? evinced in the establishment of them, may Is He not also the God of the Gentiles ? be understood here in this latter sense Yes, of the Gentiles also seeing that He which we have just now explained. The the same God dispenses justification to both law of works, is that law by which the in the same way, that is, justifying the event of a man's justification follows, circumcision by faith and also the uncirupon the event of his having performed these works. The law of faith is that law, by which the event of a man's justification follows, upon the event of his conceiving faith-just as the law of gravitation is that law upon which every body above the surface of the earth, when its support is taken away, will fall towards its centre. And as the law of refraction is that, upon which every ray of light, when it passes obliquely from air into water, is bent from the direction which it had formerly. the law." THE term law may often be taken in a more general acceptation, than that of an authoritative rule for the observation of those who are subject to it. It may sig nify the method of succession, by which one event follows another-either in the moral or the physical world; and it is thus that we speak of a law of nature, or V. 29. It is good, for the purpose of keeping up in your mind the concatena. tion that obtains between one part of the epistle and the other, to mark every recurrence of similar terms which takes place in the prosecution of its argument. He had in the second chapter, made a pointed address to the Jew-who rested in the law, and made his boast of God. He now excludes his boasting; and in doing so reduces the Jew and the Gentile to the same condition of relationship with God. V. 30. The term 'one' may either be taken numerically, or refers to the unity and unchangeableness of God's purpose. By a preceding verse, the works of the law are set aside in the matter of our justification. And it comes in as an appropriate question-Is the law made void through this? What would have been consequent upon obedience to the law, is now made consequent upon faith; and does this nullify the law? No, it will be found that it serves to establish the law, securing all the honour which is due to the Lawgiver; perpetuating the obligation and authority of the law itself; and introducing into the heart of the believer such new principles of operation, as to work conformity between the law of God and the life of man, a conformity that is ever making progress here and will at length be perfected hereafter. The passage now expounded scarcely requires any paraphrastic elucidation at all-yet agreeable to our practice we shall still offer one. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. In what method? By the method of justification through works? No, it is by the method of justification through faith. But if works had any part in our cumcision by faith. Do we then make the law void through faith? By no means. We rather establish the law.' We now proceed as usual to press upon you, any such lessons as may be extracted from the passage of the day. And first you know it to be a frequent evasion, on the part of those who dislike the utter excluding of works from that righteousness which justifies a sinner before God, that they hold the affirmation of Paul upon the subject to be of the ceremonial and not of the moral law. They are willing enough to discard obedience to the former, but not obedience to the latter, as having any efficacy in justification. And they will further acknowledge, that they have a much higher esteem for the latter than for the former; that they think greatly better of the man who has the rectitudes of morality to signalise his character, than of the man who has only the ritual observations of a punctual and prescribed ceremonial to signalise his character; that all rites, be they Jewish or Christian, have a greatly inferior place in their estimation, to the virtues of social life, or to the affections of an inward and enlightened piety-insomuch that should there stand before them an individual of fidelity incorruptible, and of honour fearless and unspotted, and of humanity ever breathing the desires of kindness and ever busying itself with deeds of kindness in behalf of our species, and of patriotism linking all its energies with the good of his native land, and of gentleness shedding its mild and pleasing lustre over the walks of private companionship, and of affection kindling its still more intense and exquisite charm in the bosom of his home-why there would not be one moment's hesitation with them, whether the homage of their reverential and regardful feelings, were more due to such an individual, even though a stranger to the puritanical regions of the sabbath and of the sacrament; or to him, who, trenched in the outward regularities of worship and of ordinance, had less of the graces and less of the honesties of character to adorn him-and you can well anticipate their reply to the question, Which of the two had the more to boast of the man of social worth or the man of a saintly exterior? We are far from disputing the justness | greater tendency to boast of ceremonial of their preference for the former of these observations, then was the righteousness two men-but we would direct them to the use that they should make of this preference, when turning to its rightful and consistent application the statement of our apostle, that from the affair of our justification all boasting is excluded. We ask them upon a reference to their own principles and feelings, whether this assertion of the inspired teacher points more to the exclusion of the moral or of the ceremonial law? Is it not the fair and direct answer that it points the more, to that of which men are inclined to boast the more? To set aside the law of works in the matter of our justification is not to exclude boasting at all-if it be only those works that are beget no reverence excluded, which be when done by others, and no complacency when done by themselves. The exclusion of boasting might appear to the mind of an old Pharisee, as that which went to sweep away the whole ceremonial in which he gloried. But for the very same reason should it appear to the mind of him who is a tasteful admirer of virtue, to sweep away the moral accomplishments in which he glories. To him, in fact, the ceremonial law, in which he has no disposition to boast whatever, is not so touched by the affirmation of the apostle, as the moral law on which alone he would ground a boastful superiority of himself over others. The thing which is shut out here from the office of justification, is that thing which excites boasting in man. Carry this verse to the Jew who vaunted himself that he gave tithes and fasted twice in the week; and these are the observances, which, as to any power of justifying, are here done away. Carry this verse to the man who stands exalted over his fellows, either by the integrities which direct or by the kind humanities which adorn him; and these are the virtues, which, as to their power of justifying, are just as conclusively done away. Whatever you are most disposed to boast of, it is that upon which the sentence of expulsion most pointedly and most decisively falls; and the ground of a Pharisee's dependence on his conformities to the ceremonial law, is not more expressly cast away by this passage-than is the ground of his dependence, who, in our own more refined and cultivated age, would place his dependence before God on those moralities, which to him are the objects of a far more enlightened admiration, and of a far juster and truer complacency. It is thus, that the towering pretensions, even of the most moral and enlightened of our sages in modern days, may be utterly overthrown. If there was then a of the ceremonial law most severely struck at by the apostle, as having no place in our justification. But if there be now a greater tendency to boast of moral observations, now is the righteousness of the moral law most pointedly the object of his attack, as out of propriety and of place in the matter of our justification. In a word, this verse has the same power and force of conclusion still, that it had then. It then reduced the boastful Jew to the same ground of nothingness before God, with the Gentile whom he despised. And it now reduces the eloquent expounder of human virtue to the same ground, with that drivelling slave of rites and pu punctualities whom he SO tastefully, and from the throne of his mental superiority, so thoroughly despises-shutting in fact every mouth, and making the righteousness of all before God, not a claim to be challenged, but a gift to be humbly and thankfully accepted of from His hands. This is far from the only passuge, however, which excludes the moral as well as the ceremonial law from any standing in the province of our justification. In many places it is said, that our justification is not of works in the general, and without any addition of the term law at all, to raise the question whether it be the moral or ceremonial law that is intended. And in the preceeding part of the epistle, they are moral violations which are chiefly instanced, for the purpose of making it out, that by the deeds of the law no flesh shall be justified. In the theft and adultury and sacrilege of the second chapter, and in the impiety and deceit and slander and cruelty of the third, we see that it was the moral law, and the offence of a guilty world against it, which the apostle chiefly had in his eye; and when, as the end of all this demonstration, he comes to the conclusion of the world's guiltwhy should we restrict the apostle, as if he only meant to exclude the ceremonial from the office of justifying? When he says that by the law is the knowledge of sin, is it the ceremonial law only that is intended-when in fact they were moral sins that he had all along been specifying? Or is it the sole purpose of the apostle, to humble those who made their boast of the ceremonial law-when he instances how the law administered to himself the conviction of his sinfulness, by fastening upon the tenth commandment, and telling us that he had not been criminal, except the law had said, thou shalt not covet! What do you make of the passage where it is said, that we are saved-not by works of righteousness, which we have done ! |