(δ) But though the law acts in this paradoxical way, and does so in pursuance of God's purpose, God is not to blame for the sin which is multiplied, nor is the character of the law itself in the least degree compromised. The law is spiritual and holy. Both πνευματικός and ἅγιος are words which indicate the connexion of the law with God. The commandment, the prohibition or precept in which the law expresses itself, is holy (=divine), just (=answering to the relations which subsist be- tween God and man, or between men themselves), and good (=morally beneficent). ‘The explanation of the disastrous working of the law (disastrous, though God’s grace makes it an indirect ea gey tion for the gospel) is to be found in man himself, and especially in his nature as flesh: am
80 LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT)
σάρκινος, a creature of flesh, sold under sin,’ Ro εὐ
The law, perhaps, ought to be able to do for us something quite different from what it actually does; but it cannot do that other thing; it 1s weak ‘through the flesh,’ Ro 83, St. Paul nowhere explains how the flesh has come to have this peculiar, native, invincible antipathy to the law, and this is not the place to inquire; it is enough to notice that it is on his conception (which like all his other conceptions is not an abstract but an experimental one) of what the flesh is, that the most characteristic part of his doctrine of the law depends. It is because the flesh is what it is that the law stimulates sin, plunges man into despair, and so prepares him for the gospel, i.e. for a divine righteousness to which ‘ works of law’ contribute nothing, though witness is borne to it ‘by the law and the prophets.’ The flesh and the law together explain the universal need and the universal craving for redemption.
(3) It is necessary, however, to define the relation of law and gospel more closely. It is true that the law contributes nothing tothe gospel: no statutory obedience whatsoever enters into the δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ preached by St. Paul to sinners whom the law has brought to despair. But the law is not ignored by the gospel. It is God’s law. It is enforced by the most terrible sanctions: its sen- tence of condemnation, its curse, its doom of death, are awful realities, and cannot simply be passed by. Nor in St. Paul’s gospel are they passed by. The very heart of that gospel is Christ's relation to the law—His relation to the law, not merely as a law which issues commandments, but as a law which has pronounced sentence upon man. When Christ is said to be made under law, to redeem them that are under law, it is this which is in view: St. Paul has a gospel to preach to men under the condemnation of the law, because that condemnation has been taken on Himself by Christ. This is the idea which explains all the formule the apostle uses in describing the redeeming work of Christ, and which explains above all the fact that the redeeming work of Christ is so constantly identified with His death. Death is the doom of sin, the sanction, the curse, the sentence of the law ; and in dying for us Christ recognized without abatement the utmost claims of the law as ex- pressive of the holy will of God. It is in this sense that He is said to have become a curse for us, and to have been made sin for us by God; it is in this sense also that God is said in Him to have condemned sin in the flesh. All these passages (Gal 318 4#, 2 Co 5", Ro 85) describe the same thing: the absolute honour paid to the law by Christ in freely submitting to that death in which the law’s con- demnation of humanity is expressed.
We do not discredit this connexion of ideas by saying that death is merely physical, and that the conception of it as the doom of sin is fantastic or mythological. Nothing that happens to man is merely physical. All that happens to a spiritual being has in the last resort a spiritual meaning ; and when death is interpreted (not through its physiological antecedents or conditions, but as it must be by the philosopher, the moralist, and the theologian) through the conscience, it will be hard to find for it any other significance than that which St. Paul accepts. It is the dreadful experience in which conscience sees not the debt of nature, but the wages of sin; and it isassuch that Christ is conceived as submitting to it.
The same holds of the more elaborate passage to 34-°8. Christ is there represented as set forth ‘asa propitiation, . . . in his blood, with a view
to demonstrate God’s righteousness, owing to the passing by of foregone sins in the forbearance of
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LAW (LN NEW TESTAMENT) God.’ The idea is that God’s treatment of sin hitherto—His suspense of judgment—cast a shadow on His righteousness: it might be questioned whether God was really concerned about the difference between right and wrong. But at the cross His righteousness has been cleared from this shadow. How? Because there the doom of sin has fallen upon His own Son. Nothing could show more conclusively that God was inexorable, irreconcilable to sin—that God’s law was an in- violable law. There is nothing in the argument of Weiss (Comm. on Ro 3”) that punishment and pro- pitiation are alternatives between which God had to choose, but which had nothing to do with each other. God chose to make propitiation for the sin of the world, and He did it, according to St. Paul,— not in this passage only, but in all the others cited above,—in the following way: He sent His Son to take the sin of the world upon Him in all those consequences of it in which His condemnation and the sanctity of His law are expressed, and especi- ally, therefore, in death. Death in Christ’s case has ropitiatory significance,—in other words, it is the ee of gospel,—because it is the bearing of sin, the full recognition, in their full extent, of the Law’s claims upon man. To dissolve the relation between the Death of Christ and the sentence of the Law—to take the curse and condemnation out of the Cross—is to annihilate the gospel as St. Paul understood it. It is essential to a doctrine of atonement that it should in this sense at least ‘establish the law.’