Deuteronomy 4:25-26

THE LAW OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

‘When ye … shall corrupt yourselves.… Ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land.’

Deuteronomy 4:25

Over and over again in Scripture we are taught, and for the most part are taught in vain, that righteousness is the one end of life, that righteousness delivereth from death; that circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but to keep the Commandments of God. If we would enter into life we are told as the one indispensable requisite we must keep the Commandments. Our opinions may be all wrong, our ignorance is certainly limitless; it will matter nothing if our heart be right. Unto man God saith, ‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding.’ One whole book of the Bible centres round the conclusion that this is the end of the whole matter: ‘Fear God,’ which is the lesson of the first table, ‘and keep His Commandments,’ which is the lesson of the second, ‘for this is the whole duty of man.’

I. Now Moses himself, by a most profound symbol, indicated that the entire Levitic system consisted, as St. Paul dared long afterwards to say, of ‘weak and beggarly elements,’ except so far as it served as a hedge of the moral law.—The symbol was this; In the middle of the camp stood the Tabernacle, the witness, the sign of God’s presence in the midst of His people. In the centre of the Tabernacle was its inmost shrine, the Holy of Holies: its one treasure was the Ark of God. The Tabernacle was splendid as those poor exiles in the wilderness could make it; it was hung with purple curtains, it was overlaid with fine gold; its courts were filled with the smoke of incense, and its inner chamber with the fragrancy of the sacrifice. But to teach Israel that to secure moral faithfulness was the one object of God’s revelation, the sacredness of the whole shrine was concentrated round the tables of the moral law. All ceremonial regulations were but insignificant satellites round that great Sun. This Tabernacle was the most sacred thing in the encampment; the Holiest was the most sacred part of the Tabernacle; the Ark was the most sacred object in the Holiest, and yet the Ark itself had no sanctity apart from the sacred thing which it enshrined, and those two tables of the moral law. The awful Ark of the Covenant was just nothing but the box of the law. When on the great day of atonement the High Priest entered as it were the very audience chamber of the Almighty, he stood before no sculptured image, he gazed on no visible manifestation. When, fifteen centuries later, Pompey, the Roman general, burst into the inmost shrine of the Temple after the Ark had been lost in the Captivity, he saw to his amazement nothing—an empty space. There was total silence; no silver lamp shed its radiance there; no ray of sunlight ever penetrated into the holiest place; no whisper save of the incommunicable Name ever thrilled its silence, but by the gleam of its own golden thurible and the smoke of the incense the priest saw the glimmering outline of the golden chest beneath the wings of the cherubim. Within the Ark, as its sole treasure, lay the two rough-hewn tables of venerable stone, shattered, alas, as Moses had indignantly shattered them on the mountain crag when he witnessed the idolatry of the golden calf; and thus those broken tables, that ark, that mercy-seat above on which he sprinkled the atoning blood, that awe-struck priest, those bending cherubim, were an emblem of law, of sin, of redemption, of forgiveness. They represented guilty man before the merciful God, whose law he had not kept. They proclaimed aloud: ‘Thou hast given us a law which shall not be broken. Alas, we have all broken it! We perish, we all perish; but there is forgiveness with Thee, therefore shalt Thou be feared.’ This, then, was to Israel a symbol that the one end of all religion is righteousness, which man forfeits, which God restores. Could there be a profounder emblem of all creation up to its most celestial hierarchies bending over the mystery of God’s most holy law, contemplating as the basis of man’s spiritual existence the Ten Words of God, and as the sole sources of his hope after transgression, the blood of atonement, the voice of prayer?

Here, then, was one most significant and central lesson of the Mosaic system; and, further, what profound conceptions are involved by the designation of the Ten Commandments as the Covenant of Jehovah!

For they were a covenant. There have been but two main covenants between God and man, the Mosaic and the Christian, the Law and the Gospel. We talk habitually of the Old and New Testaments. The Hebrew word Berith, the Greek word διαθήκη, rendered ‘testament,’ did not mean a testament but a covenant, a compact or agreement. Among the Jews the use of wills or testaments was wholly unknown till they came in contact with the Romans, not long before the era of Christ. We only borrow the word ‘testament’ from testamentum, which is the Vulgate rendering, a mistaken rendering, and the Greek word διαθήκη. Neither the Law nor the Gospel can with any real meaning be called a will. The grandeur of early testaments lies in the fact that they are an agreement; they imply a conception full of blessedness, and alien to every form of false religion, the conception of reciprocity between God and man. God the Infinite, the Eternal, the Compassionate, deigns to enter into relationship with men; He delights in their services, He heals their backslidings, He seeks their love. The very name ‘covenant’ repudiates the notion of tyranny in God. If man is clay, he is not clay to be dashed about by the potter, for he is sentient clay. If a man be but as a reed by the river he may not yet, as in the poem, be slashed and hewn and trampled down anyhow by the great god Pan. As Pascal says, if he be a reed, he is a thinking reed. The more God is revealed by God Himself, the more do we see the strange condescension, infinite love, of the Covenant of Reciprocity, the Covenant of Fatherhood on the part of God, and of duty on the part of men.

II. But next, this fruitful and blessed lesson and revelation of reciprocity between God and man, as set forth in the Ten Commandments, is deepened by the revelation of God’s new name.—It is the Covenant of Jehovah. Up till the days of Moses God had been called El—the powerful; Elohe, and Elohim—He that is feared; El-Shaddai—the omnipotent; Adonai—the Lord. To Moses He revealed Himself by the new name of four letters—J-H-V-H. We do not even know, and for more than a thousand years the Jews have forgotten, how it is pronounced. It was certainly not pronounced as we pronounce it—Jehovah. The Jews regarded it with such trembling superstition that they did not dare to pronounce it except with the vowels of the other name of God—Elohe. The true pronunciation was probably Jahveh. More important by far is its meaning than the mere sound of the articulated breath and air. It is almost certainly derived from the Hebrew verb haya; in this respect it may be compared with inspiration; i.e. Thou art—the truly sublime monosyllable engraved over the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. It implied the eternity and invisibility of God. The text of Malachi, ‘I am Jehovah and change not,’ the text of the Revelation, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, which is, and which was, and which is to come,’ probably express its inmost significance. The names of the gods of the heathen indicated arbitrary power and man’s abject dependence; but in this covenant the Eternal revealed Himself as the God of Help and the God of Love; not as a despot over slaves, but as the Father of dear sons. The name Jehovah meant to set forth the awfulness of God as enhancing the Covenant of Reciprocity, that God had stooped to reveal His will to man, and that that will is the moral law.

III. The Ten Commandments were carved in the briefest possible form, without the appendices with which we now read them, in two ‘pentads’ on two tables of stone.—‘God spake these words and said.’ What words? Very few! Men multiplied indefinitely the necessaries which God had not made many. The first table said, ‘Worship one God’; the second table said, ‘Love your fellow-man.’ The whole duty of the first table is piety; of the second, probity.

Dean Farrar.

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‘There is an important question as to how far it is now true that obedience brings material blessings. It was true for Israel, as many a sad experience was to show in the future, that it was a bitter as well as an evil thing to forsake Jehovah. But though the connection between well doing and material gain is not so clear now, it is by no means abrogated, either for nations or for individuals. Moral and religious law has social and economic consequences, and though the perplexed distribution of earthly good and ill often bewilders faith and emboldens scepticism, there still is visible in human affairs a drift towards recompensing in the world the righteous and the wicked.

But with our Christian consciousness, “life” means more than living, and “He is our life” in a deeper and more blessed sense than that our physical existence is sustained by His continual energy. The love of God and consequent union with Him give us the only true life. Jesus is “our Life,” and He enters the spirit which opens to Him by faith, and communicates to it a spark of His own immortal life. He that is joined to Jesus lives; he that is separated from Him “is dead while he liveth.” ’