The Law of God: The Pastor’s Use of the Law, Part 1
The following is a transcript of a sermon delivered on Thursday morning, October 20th, 2011, during the Annual Pastor’s Conference at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, NJ. The preacher is Pastor Albert N. Martin and this is the seventh session in the conference.
If I were to take a text as a launching pad for what I want to convey to you this morning it would be a text such as John 5 and verse 39, where Jesus said,
“You search the Scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life and these are they which bear witness of Me.”
Our grand and glorious calling as ministers of the new covenant is succinctly identified in several places by the apostle Paul. One of them is Ephesians 3 and verse 8 where Paul speaks of his commission to be found preaching to the Gentiles what he calls the unsearchable riches of Christ, or, in the language of Colossians 1, having mentioned the Lord Jesus, he said, “whom we proclaim, teaching and admonishing every man that we may present every man perfect or mature in Christ” and he says, it is to that ministry I give myself, laboring, agonizing, but according to His working which works in me mightily.
And in the light of this calling, to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ, to proclaim Christ to every man, you and I must learn how to use the law, not only in the ways already highlighted during this conference—and I would simply, for what it’s worth, underscore in yellow and orange and red highlighters and under-liners, the various ways you and I have been instructed from the Scriptures that God would have us use His holy law, but in the light of this calling to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ, I want to suggest in these two final sessions that we must learn by God’s grace and through the Scriptures how to make the preaching of the law a means of making Christ more fully known, more implicitly trusted, more passionately loved and more diligently obeyed and if to any degree what I attempt to do behind this desk today leads to those ends, then I will not have labored in vain–
How to preach the law so that Christ Himself will be more fully known, more implicitly trusted, more passionately loved and more diligently obeyed.
In making an attempt to help us all to see precisely how we may preach and use the law to these ends of unfolding more of the unsearchable riches of Christ I propose to speak to you on this theme: using the law to display the fact, the nature and the fruits of the absolute sinlessness of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And I begin my effort to that end, to open up this wonderful theme, by identifying three foundational presuppositions which undergird my entire treatment of the subject.
As surely as everything I say I say standing on this platform supported by—I think there are two-by-sixes or two-by-eights in the major construction in the major construction of this platform, if I remember correctly when it was being built, underneath—underneath and undergirding and supporting everything I say in these two messages as three undergirding suppositions.
Number one: the accountability of all men to God in terms of their obedience or disobedience to the moral law.
I’m presupposing, as we address this subject focusing upon Christ the accountability of all men to God in terms of their obedience or disobedience to the moral law.
I believe Dr. Bob established for us in a manner that is incontrovertible that the text of Romans 1:18 through 3:20 establishes this presupposition. When Paul is done, he said what I hope to accomplish and I hope has been accomplished in your judgment and in the theater of your own conscience that all men regardless of the manner by which God conveys His imperative to them (in creation, in conscience, in the codified expression of the moral law in the Ten Commandments) all men, everywhere at all times and in all circumstances, anyone that can be called a man is accountable to God for his obedience or disobedience to the moral law.
The second presupposition that undergirds every thing I will attempt to establish is this: the penetrating nature of the commandments and the prohibitions of the moral law.
If there’s any truth made abundantly clear in the Sermon on the Mount particularly chapter 5 verse 20 and following, it is the fact that God’s law with its prohibitions and positive injunctions is intended by God to touch every facet of human experience, from the deepest subterranean springs of thought, of motive, of desire, of disposition to the most evident broad rivers of our words and our deeds.
From those deepest springs to the broadest rivers, God is telling us that His law with its commandments and prohibitions touches the totality of all that we are as men in our God given constitution.
It was the great error of the scribes and the Pharisees to think that God’s law applied only to external words and deeds and even to them in ways that were greatly limited by their manmade proscriptions.
That which brought one such proud, self-righteous Pharisee to see the true understanding of the law and therefore his true condition before the God of that law was—the great apostle Paul—and we know from his own language he got hung up by the Holy Ghost on the tenth commandment.
You don’t covet with your fingers. You may steal with your fingers but you don’t covet with your fingers. You don’t covet with your feet. You don’t covet with your ears. You don’t covet with your eyes though the eyes may be the inlet.
You covet exclusively in the heart.
And the apostle acknowledges in Romans chapter 7 verses 7 through 11–this was the great discovery that he made.
What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Howbeit it I had not known sin except through the law for I had not known coveting or lusting except the law had said you shall not covet; but sin, finding occasion wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting for apart from the law sin is dead.
In terms of Paul’s conscious awareness of his true condition, he said, “I had no more awareness than a dead man,” but this commandment that touched the inner being and opened, as it were, before him the whole vista that God’s law was concerned with everything from those subterranean springs of the heart all the way to the outer broad rivers of life. That brought him to see how desperately he needed the righteousness of another.
So I am presupposing in everything I say in these two lectures, not only universal accountability, but the deep penetrating reaches of the law of God.
And then thirdly I’m presupposing the abiding validity of what is often called the inspired summary of the demands and prohibitions of the law as given, first of all by Moses, but beautifully identified and summarized by our Lord in Matthew 22:36 and 37.
One comes to him, a lawyer, a man an expert in God’s law and asked a question trying or tempting him:
Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?
And He said unto him, quoting from Deuteronomy 6:5,
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment and the second is like unto it, is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments the whole law hangs and the prophets.
And in this that’s traditionally been called our Lord’s summary of the demands of God’s law, I came across in my good friend, Bill Harrell, PCA pastor in Norfolk, VA in one of his monthly minister’s letter, a number of months ago these words and I said, if I do anything at the conference I must find a place to read these words and now I found a place in addressing my third presupposition. Listen carefully to our bother’s most perceptive insights.
God expressed the moral law in the Ten Commandments. Those commandments list ten specifications of our duty to our redeeming Lord and to our fellow man. When Jesus was asked which of the Ten Commandments should be regarded as the greatest, He answered in terms of man’s duty to love the Lord and to love his neighbor. We can sense a tension between these expressions of the moral law. Are we commanded by God’s authority to fulfill a duty to obey Him according to the ten specifications or are we impelled by love to express our gratitude to God by lovingly devoting ourselves to Him and lovingly serving our neighbors?
If we regard this tension to result from even a small degree of contradiction between what God expressed through Moses at Mount Sinai and through Jesus regarding the great commandment, we will find ourselves either defaulting either duty or love. In fact, what Jesus says about love does not contradict or supersede what Moses published at Sinai, but rather complements and further clarifies the character of God’s moral law. In sum, it is not our duty to obey ten regulations nor is it our calling to love in a vague and unguided fashion. It is our duty to love and to love according to the contours of the holy specifications given to us in the ten commandments. If we try to keep the moral law from solely a duteous determination, we have violated the heart of all its commandments because they are to be kept lovingly in response to the God who first loved us and demonstrated that love toward us as He tells His own old covenant people in the words, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery.” Those words that formed the prelude to the Ten Commandments reveal to us not only what God has done for His people by liberating them from their sin and bondage as typified by the Israelites release from Egypt but they also implicitly indicate to us why God has acted so benevolently toward His people. The Lord was not compelled by some legal duty to redeem His people but rather He was impelled by His own holy love. This is precisely why the heart and essence of the moral law is love. Our formal and outward obedience to ethical regulations does not begin to fathom the true depth and respect, the true character of the moral law of God who is love. It is the heart’s attitude, not the outward movement of the hand that makes us right or wrong in God’s sight.”
One of the Puritan’s quoted in Ernest Kevin’s classic work (and I’m so glad it’s been reprinted), The Grace of Law.
(If you don’t have it, buy it, if you — “steal” your wife’s shoes and turn them in to a consignment place– excellent work.)
And somewhere in that work he quotes one of the Puritans who said, “The law is love’s eyes and without it love is blind.”
I love God, by His grace I want to love Him with all the energy and passion of heart mind and soul and strength. How do I show my love?
If you love Me, keep My commandments.
The law is love’s eyes and without it, love is blind.
And I like to follow it with my own little statement, Love is the Lord’s law’s heart and without it law is dead.
Cut out the heart and the man dies so that we are kept, as Pastor Harrell has reminded us, from seeing any contradiction between the command to love God with all the heart, mind, soul and strength, neighbor as himself and these ten words embodied in the moral law of God.
And I am presupposing the abiding validity of this summary of the demands and prohibitions of the law as given to us by our Lord Jesus and as expounded briefly by my friend Bill Harrell.
So those are my three presuppositions, they undergird everything else that follows.
Now with these presuppositions undergirding all our thinking consider with me in the next place, three indispensable facts concerning our Lord Jesus and His relationship–three indisputable facts.
We’re going to consider, first of all then, the fact that in the incarnation our Lord took to Himself a real and a complete humanity—a real and complete humanity.
You know the text as well as I, John 1 and verse 14: the One whom John has described as the eternal Word who was forever with God and ever was Himself God, the Word, without relinquishing anything of that which constitutes Him the coeternal member of the Godhead, the Word became flesh without ceasing in any way to be what He has always been, He begins to be something He never was: incarnate Word.
The Word became flesh and John does not qualify at all to give us some indication that it was something less than real flesh, real human flesh, true human flesh and all that constitutes us men of flesh.
And then we have the clear statement of Romans 8:3 that takes us even deeper into the mystery:
For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh…
Flesh of sin—He sends Him not in a fleshly existence that is parallel to Adam’s in Eden, but in some way He puts Him in flesh that has relationship to flesh of sin without Himself being a sinner (I’m simply quoting what the apostle wrote).
And the fact of His true humanity is expanded into very particulars in two places in the book of Hebrews. Hebrews chapter 2–explicit statements that we need to take at face value. Hebrews chapter 2 and verse 14.
Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood (that is whole, real humanity) He also Himself in like manner partook of the same.
Whatever the children are as men of flesh and blood, He partook of the same. No parenthesis saying, but not this, but not that, but not the other—He partook of the same.
That through death He might bring to naught him that had the power of death, the devil, and might deliver them who through fear of death for all their lifetime subject to bondage, for verily (truly) not to angels does He give help but He gives help to the seed of Abraham. Wherefore, it behooved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God.
In all things made like unto His brethren—and this is why the biblical writers are not at all embarrassed to give us passages that do not tell us He was both God and man but that He was truly and really man.
There is one God, one Mediator between God and man, Himself amere —Himself a man, Christ Jesus.
Paul throws it out. If people want to take and use it and say, well, He was nothing but a man and ignore the universal testimony of Scripture to His real, eternal, essential Godhead and deity as the eternal Son, that’s their problem, but it’s not Paul’s. Himself a man, Christ Jesus.
And then, 1st Corinthians 15:47, He is the man from heaven. He is the last Adam, but He is the second man.
And as we begin to think of this whole subject of the fact, the extent and the fruition of the perfect sinlessness of Christ we must start with this indisputable fact: in the incarnation, our Lord took to Himself a real human nature.
As such, from the moment of His conception in the womb of Mary, when the eternal Son of God was joined to Mary’s egg and becomes a zygote to His fully developed manhood in His thirties, everything that is essential to true humanity, in terms of physical, mental, psychological and emotional constitution growth and maturity was true of our Lord.
And it seems that Doctor Luke was particularly concerned to make this truth patent in the brief accounts we have from the conception to the fully developed manhood of our Lord.
Trace it out with me quickly. We are told in Luke 1 and verse 31 of the visit of the angel to this young virgin in Nazareth, and these are the words of Luke 1:31,
Behold, you shall conceive in your womb.
How does Jesus get here?
He gets here by way of being conceived in a womb, not formed supernaturally by the Holy Spirit and eight day old fetus, or a two month old fetus or a three month old fetus, so Mary doesn’t have to experience the whoopsies and the tenderness of breast and all the signs of gestation.
She conceives in her womb.
He begins like you did. There was night. There was a day when your father’s sperm penetrated your mama’s egg and you were conceived and there was a point in Mary’s womb where by the over brooding influence of the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit shall overshadow you and that which is begotten of you shall be called the Son of God, but she began with conception.
She knew what it was down the line to run to Joseph one day and say, Joseph, Joseph, I felt something strange. I think this is what my momma told me about when you, when you begin to feel life. How do you describe it? There was a fluttering.
And throughout everything that is natural to that prenatal development of gestation in the womb, the development of the umbilical cord and then the one in her womb being nourished by the substance of Mary, this was true of your Lord, conceived in the womb.
The next time Luke sets Him before us is chapter 2 and verse 16,
And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.
When her time was fully come, she knew what it was to begin to time her contractions and she informs Joseph the birth time is near and she begins to go into the throes of what the Bible un-embarrassedly talks about as travail and she births a Son bathed in blood and mucus just like you were.
She experienced something no other woman experienced. Her hymen was never broken by intercourse on her wedding night. It was broken in the birth of the Lord Jesus.
True man—do you begin to feel the reality? He was made true man, conceived, birthed and as soon as He was washed and wrapped it was as natural for Him to take the nipple of Mary’s breast and suck like any other baby. He who spoke the worlds into existence by the word of His mouth, who had lived by her umbilical cord now nestles up to her virgin breast and finds nourishment. He who is right then yet upholding all things by the word of His power has His chubby little fingers around his mama’s breast and is being kept alive by a lactating young virgin, lying in the manger.
The next time we see Him according to Luke is chapter 2 and verse 40. Chapter 2 and verse 40. He goes through the various rituals of circumcision presentation in the temple, that’s what’s done to Him, but now we read, in Luke chapter 2:39 and 40,
“When they had accomplished all things that were according to the law of the Lord”
That is the Jewish law, the Mosaic economy, the ceremonies mandated by God in conjunction with a newborn,
“they returned to Galilee to their own city Nazareth, and the child,”
(conceived, born, a babe in a manger, now He’s called by Luke the child)
“grew and waxed strong, filled with wisdom and the grace of God was upon Him”
And at this point I want to digress for a moment, and say, if you’ve never read in volume 3 in John Owen, his marvelous insights concerning the place of the Holy Spirit in the nurture and the development in the human nature of Christ, I urge you to read that section. It’ll open up dimensions of thought that will stretch your mind and ravish your heart and make you fall at the feet not only of your truly incarnate, real man, Christ Jesus, but be filled with gratitude for the inter-trinitarian love and care of the Holy Spirit over the human nature of the Lord Jesus.
But here is true humanity, everything that is true of a child as it grows was true of our Lord and He waxed strong, filled with wisdom.
And Owen relies greatly on Isaiah chapter 11:1-3 where it is the Spirit’s work to impart wisdom to Messiah, that all of that growth—think of it, think of it! There was a day, if Jesus went off to the local Hebrew school in the local synagogue as most Jewish little boys would do, there would’ve been the day when He came home and said, “Momma, Momma, Momma, I think I can say My Hebrew alphabet all the way through” (or maybe, Aramaic) and Jesus would begin to say to Mary, “Aleph, bet, gimmel, dalet—ah, let’s see, what comes—he, waw,”
He grew. He’s true man with a human mind capacitated to absorb information.
There was a day when He was able to strap His own sandals and momma no longer had to bend over and fix His sandals, and Mary could pat His head and say, “good boy, Jesus.”
And then He had to be taught to say please and thank you—but He didn’t have to be badgered. Once He knew His moral duty under the fifth commandment to say please and say thank you, never once, never once did He fail to say please and say thank you.
(I’m anticipating now the expansion of what it means to have a perfect Savior, but I want to at least tweak your thinking.)
The next time we see him according to Luke, Luke 2:51 and 52 is in that whole incident subsequent to the visit to the temple, when at twelve years of age it’s clear it’s evident He’s not only real man, He is real boy, He is real young man, prepubescent, now standing on the threshold of manhood but He is an unusual young man.
But what does He do, even after interacting with His parents concerning their ignorance of what He would be doing and where He could be found.
Verse 51, He went down with them, came to Nazareth and was subject unto them, and His mother, Mary, kept all these sayings in her heart.
She knew she had conceived in her womb. She had felt the flutterings of life. She had seen her belly swell. She had seen her own stretch marks. She could remember her birth pangs. She could remember Him nestled to her breast, but along the way Mary begins to hear things and see things that cause her to realize, this is no ordinary son.
Eventually she had at least three other sons according to the gospel record and at least two daughters for the Scriptures speak of His four brothers and it speaks of sisters, plural, and she could not help but compare the emerging patterns of action and reaction in this Firstborn with the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth born and she ponders these things as Jesus then advances, verse 52, in wisdom. His human mind accumulating knowledge and the ability to take that knowledge and integrate it into wisdom.
And He grew physically. His stature developed normally. There was a day when He said to His dad, Joseph, “What’s this fuzzy stuff showing up on my lip” and Joseph had to explain He was becoming a man and would eventually have a beard like him and telling Him, and when you do, remember, you don’t clip the corners of your beard. You’re an Israelite.
He grew in wisdom and stature and this is amazing, as Dr. Ferguson reminded us, “And in favor with God and with men.”
Every new expression of His total obedience to the law of His Father, increased the delight of the Father in the Son, so, as I said Sunday night, when His obedience reached its apex in laying down His life upon the cross and bearing His soul to the full fury of the unreached wrath of God, He was never more loved than when He was utterly abandoned.
He grew in favor with God!
Men, it’s in the text. The man Christ Jesus grows in favor with God and also with men. In the incarnation He took to Himself a real and a complete humanity.
Secondly, an indisputable fact concerning our Lord and His relationship to the law of God, in the incarnation, our Lord as the God-Man voluntary placed Himself under the law of God, committing Himself to a life shaped and molded by the law of God as true man.
Galatians chapter 4 is our pivotal text that establishes this fact concerning our Lord Jesus. Galatians 4, verse 4.
When the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son born of a woman.
And Paul uses the preposition, ec, born of a woman, and yet not only born of a woman, but born under the law, made of a woman under the law, ὑπό hupo.
The law is now over Him pressing down upon Him in all of its stringent demands and prohibitions and surely, that does begin with and involve the moral law of God.
Other articles in this series:
The Pastor’s Use of the Law II by Albert N. Martin
At this point, I want to quote a very helpful statement from Gardner Spring in a lesser known book (if you can get it on the used book market, get it) called The Glory of Christ and this is what Gardner Spring says concerning Jesus born under the law:
We speak not now of the mediatorial law (a term, which according to Dr. Ferguson, apparently was introduced by Owen, the peculiar law that was His as the appointed Mediator) we speak not now of the mediatorial law which He obeyed unto the death, nor unto the ceremonial law of the Jews but of the moral law as summarily contained in the Ten Commandments. This is the great and only standard of human character. He is a perfect man who without intermission obeys the law of God with all the strength and ardor he is capable of exercising. We do not know what degrees of holiness the mind of man is capable, but we see it now in the man Christ Jesus in all its richness. The most general and the most same time the most exact description of His character is that He perfectly obeyed the law of God extending as it does to every thought, word, and deed in His inward emotions and His outward conduct He was not disloyal to any one of its precepts or prohibitions. He felt the obligation of governing His conduct by this great and unerring rule of action. It is pleasant to hear Him speak as He does so often of the authority of God as the Great Lawgiver, of the will of the Father, of the commandment that He received from God, always averring that He came not to do His own will but the will of the Father who sent Him. There was infinite disparity between Himself as the Son of Mary and Himself as the Great Lawgiver of the universe. A disparity as great as between the Creator and the creature, nor did He ever allow Himself to call in question God’s right to command and His own obligation to obey. In His divine nature He claimed equality with God and in His human nature, there were no such equal terms with His Maker. “My Father,” said He, “is greater than I.” God’s supremacy to Jesus was absolute. Would not set aside even the least requisition of His law, but received with thankfulness and obeyed with promptitude all the intimations of His Father’s will. He stopped not to inquire into the reasons of any particular command. God’s will was reasoned. It was enough for Him that God had spoken. His whole intelligence and heart united in this voluntary homage to the supreme and indestructible authority of the all wise and all perfect Lawgiver. God’s will, with Him was above everything else. He felt the obligations and fulfilled it. He fulfilled it spiritually and He fulfilled it to the letter. He filled it affirmatively, doing what the law required and He fulfilled it negatively, abstaining from what the law forbids. In the incarnation, the Lawgiver places Himself under the very law that He gave and says, I have come, not to do My will, but the will of Him that sent Me.
But I want to suggest that Paul’s words take us further than His being, hupo law (that is the moral law) but that He also voluntarily subjected himself to the ceremonial law, to the Mosaic code.
This was evidenced from the beginning when His parents took Him to the temple the eighth day and had Him circumcised. Later on, He was presented as the Firstborn. As we read through the gospel records we find Him—He attended synagogue regularly. Luke says, “as his custom was,” He appears in the synagogue on the Sabbath.
We find Him attending the various Jewish feasts and this position that He placed Himself not only under the moral law of God but the ceremonial law of God given by Moses is not some unique or novel idea that I have invented.
John Brown, the great Scottish commentator, commenting on the Galatians 4 passage says, “We’ve already seen that the state called adoption of sons, the state of the New Testament privileges in liberty, could not exist along with the state of legal bondage, and we have seen also that the only honorable termination to the legal economy was to be found in its precepts being perfectly obeyed and its curse fully endured by the substitute of those belonging to the spiritual Israel who lived under it. For this purpose it was obviously necessary that the Divine Substitute, the man, Christ Jesus, it was necessary that He should be both a man and a Jew and in human nature and subject to the Mosaic law and as all His people under that law were bound to do and suffer all they had deserved to suffer and thus lay a foundation for the honorable termination of a system which had served its purpose and the continuation of which was inconsistent with the higher and better order of things that were now to take place.”
And John Stott, in his excellent commentary on Galatians, takes the same position.
He was God’s Son, He was also born of a human mother so that He was human as well as divine, the only God-Man. He was born under the law, that is, of a Jewish mother into the Jewish nation, subject to the Jewish law. Throughout His life He submitted to all the requirements of the law. He succeeded where others before and since have failed. He perfectly fulfilled the righteousness of the law so the divinity of Christ, the humanity of Christ, and the righteousness of Christ uniquely qualified Him to be man’s Redeemer. If He had not been a righteous man He could not have Redeemed unrighteous men and if He had not been God’s Son, He could not have redeemed men for God and made them the sons of God.
One of the most persuasive things to me, as I’ve wrestled with this in my preparation, you’ll remember that Jesus dared to look His inveterate enemies straight in the eyes and say, “Which of you can convict me of sin?” and if they could have brought forward some blatant violation of that divinely opposed [appointed?] system, not the manmade rules and regulations which our Lord challenged and violated with impunity, He stuck it under their nose.
John Calvin said, “It never bothers me to offend Pharisees.”
Well, it didn’t bother our Lord.
Don’t you know what you’ve said has offended them?
And the Lord said, doesn’t trouble Me one bit.
But with respect to God’s requirements–listen carefully now—it is said of Elizabeth in Zachariah, in Luke chapter 1 and verse 6, these very descriptive words and we must not bleed them of their obvious import,
Luke chapter 1.
There were in the days of Herod king of Judea a certain priest named Zachariah of the course of Abijah. He had a wife of the daughters of Aaron and her name was Elizabeth and they were both righteous before God,”
with an imputation of righteousness that was theirs as in the daily sacrifices they saw beyond the bloody animal that God would provide.
Again, as Dr. Fergeson set before us so clearly, but with respect to their walk as Jews they were walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord, blameless.
Isn’t that what the apostle Paul claimed for himself in Philippians 3? “Touching the law, blameless.”
There was One who was truly blameless, for even to the pious Jew there were no doubt elements that caused Peter to say of that whole economy: “It was a yoke which neither we nor our fathers could bear” but because the Lord Jesus saw that He was the fulfillment and would bring to and by fulfillment everything to which all the details of that law pointed, He like none other, could pray Psalm 119 with a vigor that makes all of us seem backslidden.
Every part of that Psalm, and I’ve just finished in my own devotions, praying through one or two of the eight verse sections a day in recent weeks and I’ve thought, Lord Jesus, You could say this like I can never say it.
Oh how love I Thy law, yea, it is within my heart.
He didn’t have to pray, incline me not to covetousness. He didn’t have to express those petitions that assume the sinful nature of the psalmist who wrote those words, but everything that is expressive of a passionate love of all of God’s statutes, all of God’s rules, all of His ordinances, the eight or nine words that are used to express that full semantic range of God’s revealed will, Jesus found joy in being a Jew!
Because the essence of the demand of the law was love with all the heart, mind, soul, and strength and all the energy of His human soul.
And so, we find when we turn to the Scriptures the fact of our Lord’s true humanity set before us.
We find, secondly, the fact that He was placed under law, the Mosaic law of God and even the Mosaic code, He was the perfect Lawgiver.
And then, thirdly, and here I just give you the head and hopefully we’ll flush it out in the next hour, He was true man, He was truly under law, but thirdly, in His incarnate life, He was absolutely without sin—sin as defined by our presupposition concerning the law, that it touches the deepest subterranean springs of the human constitution, where thought and motive and desire and attitude and impulse begin out to the broadest visible streams of where we go, what we say, what we do with our hands and our ears and our relationships.
In His incarnate life, He was absolutely without sin.
And God willing, in the next hour I will try to demonstrate the fact of His sinlessness established, the nature of that sinlessness expanded and then the fruits and the results of that sinlessness identified.
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