Adam's breaking of God's law, and all his fallen children are begotten in his
CHAPTER 2: The Scriptures and God
give increasing heed to that command, "Be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long" (Prov. 23:17). Thus, just so far as we are awed by God's awful majesty, are made conscious that "Thou God seest me" (Gen. 16:13), and work out our salvation with "fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12), are we truly profited from our reading and study of the Bible.
3. A deeper reverence for God's commandments. Sin entered this world by Adam's breaking of God's law, and all his fallen children are begotten in his depraved likeness (Gen. 5:3). "Sin is the transgression of the law" (1 John 3:4). Sin is a species of high treason, spiritual anarchy. It is the repudiation of God's dominion, the setting aside of His authority, rebellion against His will. Sin is having our own way. Now salvation is deliverance from sin, from its guilt, from its power as well as its penalty. The same Spirit who convicts of the need of God's grace also convicts of the need of God's government to rule us. God's promise to His covenant people is, "I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God" (Heb. 8:10).
A spirit of obedience is communicated to every regenerated soul. Said Christ, "If a man love me, he will keep my words" (John 14:23). There is the test: "Hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments" (1 John 2:3). None of us keeps them perfectly, yet every real Christian both desires and strives to do so. He says with Paul, "I delight in the law of God after the inward man" (Rom. 7:22). He says with the Psalmist, "I have chosen the way of truth," "Thy testimonies have I taken as an heritage for ever" (Ps. 119:30,111). And teaching which lowers God's authority, which ignores His commands, which affirms that the Christian is, in no sense, under the Law, is of the Devil, no matter how oily-mouthed his human instrument may be. Christ has redeemed His people from the curse of the Law and not from the command of it; He has saved them from the wrath of God, but not from His government. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart" never has been and never will be repealed.
1 Corinthians 9:21, expressly affirms that we are "under the law to Christ." "He that saith he abideth in him ought himself so to walk, even as he walked" (1 John 2:6). And how did Christ "walk"? In perfect obedience to God; in complete subjection to His law, honouring and obeying it in thought and word and deed. He came not to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17). And our love for Him is expressed, not in pleasing emotions or beautiful words, but in keeping His commandments (John 14:15), and the commandments of Christ are the commandments of God (cf. Ex. 20:6). The earnest prayer of the real Christian is, "Make me to go in the path of thy commandments; for therein do I delight"