The Law of God | The Whole Counsel

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Welcome back to the Whole Council podcast. I'm Jon Snider, and Chuck Baggett is with me, and we've been looking at a book called

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Salvation in Full Color. It's a book, a collection of 20 sermons by Great Awakening preachers, and it's been edited and put together by Richard Owen Roberts.

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It really is a unique book, and unlike other podcasts that we've done, this one does present its material in a very specific order.

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So we want to encourage you that if you haven't heard the podcasts that have preceded this, that you go back at least to last week's, where we looked at Timothy Dwight, and he talked about the foundational aspects of the character of God, and how that really lays the right foundation for understanding all the other parts of salvation.

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This week we're going to be looking at the theme of the law of God, and that comes in a sermon by Samuel Hopkins.

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Now, I want to say just a few things before Chuck introduces us to Samuel Hopkins and the sermon.

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I want to say a few things about the law, just as introduction, because I think that as modern evangelicals,

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I think Chuck probably would agree that we, even in seminary, we had very little instruction about how to use the law as believers, or how to use the law particularly in the effort of evangelism.

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But this has not always been the case. The Puritans in the 17th century, and the Great Awakening ministers in the 18th century, made great use of the law to prepare the hearts of their hearers for the gospel.

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So they often used these pictures, they would say that the law is like the needle that punctures the hard leather of the heart, and it draws the thread of the gospel behind it.

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Or the law is a plow, and it plows up the heart and prepares it for the seed of the gospel. Charles Spurgeon's description of his conversion, he says that God raked back and forth across his heart with a plow, with ten blades, the

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Ten Commandments. Of course it's a biblical picture, Paul talks about the law being like a schoolmaster that leads us to Christ.

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Jeremiah, God says to the people that they are not to continue to throw good seed on fallow ground, on unplowed, weedy, hard ground.

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And it was a picture of their hearts. But they were to plow their hearts first, and then the seed would be productive.

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So while the law cannot fix anyone, it can expose what's wrong with us, and that prepares us for a doctor, it's like the

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MRI. It shows us what's wrong, doesn't fix anything, but once we realize what the

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MRI has exposed, then it drives us to contact our doctor. Yeah, and Samuel Hopkins is a fellow who understood that, and of course preached this sermon.

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A quick introduction to Samuel Hopkins. Hopkins was born in Connecticut in 1721, grew up with parents who were believers and serious, but he, early on, was not really interested in education.

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He was much more interested in farming. But by his middle teenage years, he became more serious and decided to pursue an education.

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Went to Yale University, made a profession of faith, and this was around the time of the

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Great Awakening. And so he was able to hear sermons by George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennant, and he was affected by those as well as others.

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David Brainerd was a classmate of his and came to him and really pressed him to search himself, and he was bugged by that and realized that he had not really known

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Christ and was converted in the aftermath of that. Became a pastor for 25 years, left the pastorate for a short time, was called to another church, but it was not a unanimous call.

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It was opposed. And so he asked for time to think about it, pray about it. He came back to accept the call some distance away from home.

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When he got there, the opposition had turned the people who were for him kind of against him, and so they were ready to tell him to go home.

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And he asked, while he's there, could he preach a farewell sermon? And the people were so affected by the sermon that they changed their mind and asked him to stay.

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He evidently preached weighty sermons and was used by God, obviously, and yet the testimony concerning his delivery was that it was bad.

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It was dull. And in spite of that, God used him.

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In the last year of his life, God blessed him and the church there with revival, and he died toward the end of that year,

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I think 1803. So this is an example of a sermon that he preached, and it is on the law of God, as we've said.

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He defines the law and helps us to see why the law is necessary—necessary to the gospel, necessary to have any understanding of what

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God expects, necessary to understand the gospel. And so if we try to diminish the law, we really are diminishing the character of God himself, because they are united.

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So let's take a look at this. He opens with the definition of the law that we were talking about before the podcast, that I really find this fascinating because it's not the way

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I've ever thought about the law. I guess I've always thought of the law as, of course, the thing that shows me that I'm a sinner, and it does show me the path of obedience.

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But here's how he describes the law. It is the eternal rule of righteousness, which is essential to the being or existence and glory of God's moral government and kingdom, and is, in a sense, the foundation of it, pointing out and declaring the duty of rational creatures or moral agents as to what is fit and proper to be required of them, and obtaining the rule of God's conduct toward them as their moral governor.

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Now that is a classic, really full definition that, you know, you might have zoned out about halfway through that, so let me just give you the heart of it.

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The law is God's eternal rule of righteousness, essential to the being and glory of his moral government.

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So God could not morally govern us without the law. We have to know what he likes and doesn't like, but it is also glorious that it unveils the perfection of our

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God's moral character in a way that we humans, in our very limited understanding, we can understand that in our present, you know, earthly context.

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Yes, and it makes the point that we cannot really understand who

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God is apart from the law. So that's kind of what you're just saying, that we're going to cover this a bit more later, but the speculation, you know, we may think we know, but we're playing with fire when we think that way.

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We kind of assume that we understand what God is like or understand what his law is, what he requires of us, but the law is that which actually informs us.

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Yeah, on that, he gives this statement. He says, a law always supposes a legislator who has the right and authority to make such a law and issue such commands.

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And he talks about the fact that your estimation of the law, your measure of it, not theoretically, you know, not theologically, because we know that we're supposed to say right things about God's law.

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I mean, the Bible says wonderful things about God's law, so you wouldn't want to, you know, to kind of go on record disagreeing with that.

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But in daily practice, how we view the law really is how we view the

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God behind the law, the legislator. One of the things he says is that the law can never be understood distinct from the character of God, and that's different than any kind of law that we have on earth.

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On earth, you know, if you think about an earthly judge, the law on earth is not connected with that judge's personal character.

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So he's supposed to be impartial. So if you break a law and you're before a judge, the judge is supposed to rule based on the law, but not based on his own character.

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You've not personally offended that judge. You've not sinned against him. You've sinned against the law of the land.

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But when it comes to God, since the law is an expression of his moral perfection of his character, then to break any aspect of the law really is an offense against him personally.

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Yeah, a human judge doesn't make the law, and in a sense, he's not personally invested in it, but God has made the law, and as you said, expression of himself.

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So yeah. The law is universal, he says.

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Obviously, that just means there isn't any aspect of our life that's indifferent.

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You know, we can't think that there are—I guess we can't section off areas of life. Like, these are religious areas, and we have to be pretty careful here.

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You know, these are the important areas. But then there are the indifferent areas, areas where maybe we think that it just doesn't matter what we do and our motives.

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But the law of God actually touches every aspect of human existence. Yeah, I was thinking about this earlier, how, you know, there are areas that we think government should not meddle in, and maybe they don't really have authority to go there.

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But we can't say that about God. He's not being meddlesome when he rules over every aspect of our life or demands obedience in every aspect.

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You know, different levels of government perhaps have different levels of reach.

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So if you want to think about it like that, God is the supreme form of government. He's the king.

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And so, yes, he has much further reach. He has infinite reach. And any other form of rule or government would be limited in comparison.

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Yeah, if you think about, you know, think about the authority of a parent over a child, especially when the child's very young, it's pretty complete.

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You know, you don't, as a parent, you don't feel embarrassed to ask the child to pretty much do anything, you know, you want, like, you know, the child doesn't turn to you as a four -year -old and say, well, what right do you have to, you know, decide a bedtime for me?

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Or why would you choose my clothes or whatever? But even as a parent of a little child where our authority has to be so complete for their good, we know that we don't command their attitudes.

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We don't command their desires. We couldn't do that. We command their outward obedience.

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When we think of someone having authority over us, you know, the law of the land, we know that there are external behaviors that are expected and some things we have to avoid.

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But we don't feel like any president or governor or policeman can command my feelings about it, my attitudes.

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But God does. Every aspect of us is being measured by the law.

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That's humbling. You know, again, especially here in America, we tend to have, you know, an anti -authoritarian view of a lot of things.

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And so, you know, you don't get to rule that part of my life, but God does get to rule that part and every other part.

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And when we see that, it's humbling. And perhaps out of order here, but, you know, if we fail to see that, it may be because we don't really see what

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God is like. Yeah, he gives a great quote on page 18, and he says that the law of God is therefore, since it's connected with God, it is clothed with infinite authority.

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So it doesn't just touch every area. It has an infinite authority over every area.

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Even all the authority that God has over his creation to dictate and command,

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God cannot make a law which will be attended with less authority than the authority that God possesses.

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So that's, I mean, the logic is clear, but I haven't thought of it that way before. There is no way for God to make any law, no matter how small an area it touches, that has any less authority than the infinite authority that God himself possesses.

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And because of that, because God himself is perfect, we see that the law is perfect. There are no areas in which it's too strict or too lax.

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You can think of court rulings that you might look at and think are very strict, and others that you think, how did they get away with that?

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But that's never the case with God. And his final point under the nature of the law is that it's impossible for God to actually adjust the law or to release us from the demands of the law.

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And we'll talk about this later, that there is one way for the law not to demand perfect righteousness of us, you know, for justification through the work of Christ, of course.

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But listen to what he says. We find this on page 22. We may be sure God will not release any moral agent from his obligations to this law, as it is most certain he cannot do it consistent with his character as moral governor of the world.

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So even though the Christian is not under the law as a way of earning justification, it's not a ladder that we're climbing,

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God, even though that law has been satisfied in the Lord Jesus Christ's perfect obedience, still that law cannot be adjusted.

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God cannot be okay with adultery now, even though he was against it before the cross.

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So the role of the law, and we'll talk about this in a minute, the role of the law has shifted for the believer, and yet the moral strictness and perfection of the law cannot be dimmed at all.

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It must remain as it always has been, a perfect reflection of God's perfect moral expectations.

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Ernie Reisinger has written that God and his perfect law are so united that you cannot be at enmity with one without being at enmity with the other.

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So if you're at war with his law, you're at war with the lawgiver, God himself, and contrary to the other is true also.

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I think that's a really good point, and that does bring us a little bit to the issue of people who hold to a new covenant theology that would say that the law has nothing to do at all, no use in the

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Christian life. I don't think that what Reisinger pointed out there necessarily condemns them.

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For example, a man may, and I would disagree with this, I think we would disagree with that view of the new covenant.

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We don't believe that the law has no part in the Christian life. But if a man through studying the

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Bible comes to that view, and he's a true believer, I think what we find is though his official theology says, well now the law really, because it's satisfied, it doesn't actually have anything to do with your life now.

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But if you press that man, he loves the law. If you say to that man, do you love to be faithful to your wife, or do you love adultery?

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And if he's a Christian man, he says, no, I love to love my wife the way Christ loved the church. That's what

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I want to do. You know, do you love integrity, or do you love dishonesty? You know, at every point that the law would lay a path of obedience,

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I think good men who might define the role of the law in the Christian life differently than what we feel the

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Bible does, I think that in their heart, their life is better than their theology. That doesn't make their theology right.

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You know, where we are wrong, that tends to lead to some wrong thoughts, wrong behaviors.

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But ultimately, even if you have a different theology, every believer loves the law. Yes, and I don't remember the context of this quote, but I'm assuming it is for the lost person.

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You're at enmity with God, you're at enmity with His law, or if you're breaking His law, you're at enmity with Him.

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Hopkins says it something like this on the top of page 23, regarding believers in Christ.

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He says, they're as much under the law as a rule as they ever were. Everything in them which is short of perfect holiness or perfect obedience to this law, considered in its utmost strictness, is wholly inexcusable and is criminal in them as if they were not believers in Christ.

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So again, not condemning the person who views the law differently, but who in action still loves the law.

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But Hopkins is pointing out that we have an obligation to the law, not again as a ladder to climb our way to God, but as an expression of obedience to Him.

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God's law is still in a reflection of His character, and so obedience to that is pleasing to Him.

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I heard you use an example one time about obedience and spelling it out.

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Yeah, I do remember that. You're talking about going to your grandparents' house as a child, and your parents would tell you to be good.

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And you were like, okay, but good in your mind was I get all the food I want and whatever, you know.

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But then they laid out, okay, here's what this looks like, you know. So that means don't ask for this, and it means don't do this.

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And, you know, they were putting expression to be good, and we wouldn't necessarily say, again, we're not saying be good to earn

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God's favor. But as believers, we want to be good. We want to express love to God.

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What does it look like? Well, we have a law that tells us. Yeah, Chuck, you have two young boys right now, and, you know, when like Father's Day comes along, when your birthday comes along, when

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Elizabeth's birthday is there, they want to do something for you. And, you know, you can remember being a kid and being really excited to get your parents something maybe for Christmas.

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I remember getting my mom this one thing in particular, and it was just so bad, you know.

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It was so cheesy and cheap, and my mom made, you know, like she always did, she made a big deal about it.

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She thanked me for it, and I felt so satisfied. But as I grew older, I looked at it, and I thought, wow, that was really a piece of junk

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I got my mom, you know. And, like, she should have taken it right back and, you know, just done something else with the $5 or whatever.

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But, you know, it's kind of funny when our kids, you know, we understand that they're doing the best they can, but it would not be funny to live our entire life as believers yearning to express love to God, to say, thank you, to say,

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I am yours. Or as Paul says in Romans, now unto

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Him. You know, I want to wake up, and that's my yearning before my feet hit the floor.

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And you really want to live that way now because of the work of the Spirit in you and because of the wonderful mercy you've received.

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But what if there were no path laid before our feet, and we were just wandering in a fog, hoping that today my wanderings were in the general right direction, that they pleased the

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King? So it is really a very sweet gift that the law comes to us still as believers, not through the hands of Moses to condemn us and drive us to a

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Savior, but through the hands of Jesus Christ, satisfied, kept, and as a friend to say to us, here is the way to walk in harmony with Him.

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Here's a way to show love to Him. And so we don't ever have to fear, with all the fears that we do have, with all the inadequacies that we feel, we don't have to fear that we don't know what path pleases the

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Lord. Hopkins points out to us that there are several ways that we can know the law, and not all of them are equally valuable.

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One of those ways is a speculative kind of knowledge. So we can have some understanding of it.

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We know it's there. We might even agree with it in very general terms, but it's all external to us, and it doesn't really bother us.

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It doesn't keep us up at night. It's just this vague notion that it's there. But there's another knowledge, still really the knowledge of an unbeliever, but a fuller knowledge, in which perhaps your eyes have been opened to some degree, and you know there is a lawgiver, and there's a law, and it says this, and it thunders against me.

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And so it bothers you. Maybe it does keep you up at night, but it is a law that you hate because you don't love

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God, and it is still external to you. You don't see it as beautiful. You don't see holiness as beautiful.

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It's just this thing that condemns me. But it is the work of Christ to open our eyes and to change our hearts to see the law as something that is beautiful, though we have broken it, and then to look to Him as the one who has fulfilled it, kept it for us, and makes us righteous with God.

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Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's really such a simple test, isn't it? What do you really, deep down, what do you think about the law?

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When the law is exposing you at that moment, as painful as it is, is it still a thing that is perfectly lovely, balanced, desirable to you?

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Is it a path? Do you feel like you're a person who, like, I'm spiritually lame, but the path is a perfect path, and I wish, by the grace of God, that I could walk that.

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And I think that as God is bringing us through that period of conviction, and He's opening our eyes, that we do see the holiness of God, particularly reflected in the law, as something that is terrifying, but at the same moment, something within us longs that, if only

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I could be clean before that God and walk with Him. Yeah. And that desperation then drives us to Christ.

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Yeah. He gives a series of really penetrating, self -examining questions.

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So let me just run through those really quickly. This is under his fourth remark, and so for the 17th, 18th century guys, that means his fourth application.

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He says this, does your religion have its foundation in the knowledge of God's law?

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Second, has the law come, and in light of this, have you seen your own character and been convicted of your sin?

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We've been talking about that, so let's go to the third question. Has the law of God slain you, like Paul says, so that you have found it to be unto you death?

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Have you found yourself justly or rightly under the curse of this law deserving eternal damnation?

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Has it killed all your hopes of recommending yourself to God in the least degree by any virtue in you or anything you could do to cure yourself?

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Fourth question, are you disposed and ready to justify

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God in making such a law and maintaining it in the manner which he does?

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Now that's a great point. One evidence of true repentance is a man quits justifying himself, and he finds himself justifying

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God. I remember before I was a Christian, someone recommended I would read Spurgeon, and I did this just because I was precocious.

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You know, I thought, well, I'll read Spurgeon. So all the older people in the church would be really impressed, like, wow, John's 11 years old, and he's reading

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Spurgeon. So I kind of, you know, I slogged through Spurgeon. It was way above me.

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But I found in the middle of that sermon, it was like Spurgeon was over there pointing to me and preaching to me.

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And in the middle of the sermon, like part of me got up and joined Spurgeon and pointed fingers at me and said, he's right, you know.

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And you stop arguing and justifying yourself before the Lord, and you join the

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Lord in condemning you. You know, God's right. You're wrong. And so you justify

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God in his actions. God is right in the way he's treated me, and instead of yourself.

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Number five, he says, do you long for, seek, and strive after conformity to this law?

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So now he's talking to the believer. You've been emptied of yourself. You've looked to Christ. Now, are you longing to be conformed, to walk in harmony with the law?

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Number six, do you place all your religious attainments in conformity and obedience to the law?

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So he says, do the exercises of your religion consist in love to God and your neighbor and in those things which are implied in this and result from it?

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So, in other words, you say you're loving God, but is that being guided by what he said he delights in?

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And number seven, do you grow in a sense of your own sinfulness? Because he says, even though we are justified, the

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Christian does grow painfully, what one old writer called the pain of love, that as we love

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God and we see more and more the truth about ourselves as we mature as believers, that sight grieves us, but it does drive us more and more to the cross and to realize the magnitude of what

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Christ has provided for us. Yeah. And that's a wonderful thing that the law doesn't just empty us and leave us groveling, you know, but it does point us to the work of Christ.

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And really, a right view of the law helps us to understand what

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Christ has accomplished, what he had to do to make helpless sinners whole.

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Flavel said, the highest honor that ever the law of God received was to have such a person as the man

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Christ Jesus is to stand before its bar and make reparation to it.

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This is more than if it had poured out all our blood and built up its honor upon the ruins of the whole creation.

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We have the perfect man, Christ Jesus, perfectly righteous, perfectly keeping the law.

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So that's better than condemnation upon everyone else. Yeah, yeah.

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Much more glorifying to the law than even to condemn every sinner. I think that, you know, with a growing, with an increasingly biblical view of the law, it ought to give us an increasingly accurate view of the sweetness of the gospel.

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If you could just think of it in a very simple way. With a right understanding of the law, we understand the work of Christ in those two ways.

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Christ made the law our friend at the cross. Spurgeon said that the sword of God's justice coming to him for him to pay what we owed at the cross, when it pierced

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Christ, that sword was then hammered into a shield for us. So no condemnation ever reaches us.

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The law was made our friend because the law is satisfied in our representative.

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But then Christ made us the friend of the law by writing it on our hearts.

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No longer a straitjacket that says, don't reach that, you know, like a kid, don't touch that. No, I said, don't touch that.

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But within every believer is this new delight in the law.

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We're not perfectly obedient, and that's why it grieves us when we sin. But I want to obey

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God from within, not because someone has put a prison around me, you know.

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So there is, like you said, there is that path now, and it's written in my own heart. And I open the scriptures and I see it there.

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And I'm happy to see that God has laid out a way for us.

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And the law is now my friend, and I'm a friend of the law. Well, we hope that you'll be able to get your hands on the book or go on and find

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Samuel Hopkins' sermon, which you can find that, a link to that in the notes. And through really wrestling with the sermon itself, not just our kind of cliff notes of it, really before the

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Lord, ask God that the law might do in you all the good that God has designed for it to do, and that you would love it as much as your

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Lord loves, at least that he would teach you. Next week, we're going to actually look at total depravity, and that follows on this theme.

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If the law shows us to be what we are, well, what are we? And Gilbert Tennant, a man who preached a lot on the law, explains the biblical picture of the depth of the stain of our sin, or what we call total depravity.