Law in the New Testament
But in what sense are we freed from the law, if we are still to keep the law? The New Testament takes hold of the law of God as revealed in the Old, and makes it infinitely higher in its requirements.
Some men say that their Gospel is the Sermon on the Mount.
It is the most hopeless Gospel a sinner ever struggled with.
For in this sermon our Lord pours the spiritual meanings into the law of God. It may have been possible for a man to abstain from the outward act of murder, but our Lord takes that command and shows that the inward fact of murder is in a man’s heart if he is angry with his brother. So does the Master lift the command against impurity into a place where the strong moral man, who does not have the secret of victory, is convicted of impurity.
Not only is there this spiritual interpretation of the law, which makes it the more impossible to keep it, but there is the new commandment the Lord gave his disciples, to love one another as he loved them. And as though this were not enough, the New Testament epistles, after the death and resurrection, when the dispensation of law was fully over, show us that to break the law of God at one point makes us guilty of all: “Howbeit if ye fulfil the royal law, according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well: but if ye have respect of persons, ye commit sin, being convicted by the law as transgressors. For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all. For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou dost not commit adultery, but killest, thou art become a transgressor of the law” (James 2:8-11).
This startling passage says that if Christians have respect of persons—and has not the Spirit here put his finger upon one of the most pathetic and abominable sins of Christian churches of our day?—these Christians are convicted as transgressors of the law, and are guilty of all. Then the Apostle goes on to speak of the sins of murder and adultery as samples of the kind of thing that a Christian is guilty of when he shows respect of persons,—the awful sin of unlove.