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Free from the Curses but not the Commands

Samuel Bolton (a Westminster divine) is my favorite writer on how the moral law relates to the gospel. He makes some brilliant turns here to explain what’s been traditionally called the third use of the moral law:

We look next at the case of those who are called Antinomians. Just as the Papists set up the law for justification, so the Antinomians decry the law for sanctification. We claim to be free from the curses of the law; they would have us free from the guidance, from the commands of the law. We say we are free from the penalties, but they would abolish the precepts of the law. They tell us that we make a false mixture together of Christ and Moses, and that we mingle law and Gospel together. How unjustly they lay this charge against us, let men of understanding judge. We cry down the law in respect of justification, but we set it up as a rule of sanctification. The law sends us to the Gospel that we may be justified; and the Gospel sends us to the law again to inquire what is our duty as those who are justified.

-from Samuel Bolton, The Moral Law a Rule of Obedience

Note these juxtapositions:

  • We are free from the curses, but not the commands
  • We are free from the penalties, but not the precepts
  • We do not use the law as a means of justification, but we do use it as a means of sanctification

Heart-Attacks

John Flavel Keeping the Heart Recognizing Christ

I’m reading John Flavel’s book, Keeping the Heart. The book is a collection of sermons on Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life” (NIV).

Flavel pictures the heart as a fort under attack from without and within. It is therefore in need of constant attention and defense:

Lavater on the text will have the word taken from a besieged garrison, beset by many enemies without, and in danger of being betrayed and destroyed by treacherous citizens within, in which danger the soldiers, upon pain of death, are commanded to watch… (p. 2).

We don’t think about our hearts and souls as often as we think about our physical body. But Proverbs 4:23 calls us to constant attention. Guard your heart both from external and internal attacks. Or, as M’Cheyne put it, don’t neglect the “culture of the inner man.”

Christ’s Heart Surely and Speedily

Goodwin writes of the Holy Spirit’s continual work of shedding God’s love abroad in our hearts through Christ:

Him [i.e. the Holy Spirit], therefore, I shall send on purpose to be in my room, and to execute my place to you, my bride, spouse, and he shall tell you, if you will listen to him, and not grieve him, nothing but stories of my love…All his speech in your hearts will be to advance me, and to greaten my worth and love unto you, and it will be his delight to do it. And he can come from heaven in an instant when he will, and bring you fresh tidings of my mind, and tell you the thoughts I last had of you, even at the very minute when I am thinking of them, what they are at the very time wherein he tell you them…We are said to ‘have the mind of Christ’…for he [the Spirit] dwelleth in Christ’s heart, and also ours, and lifts up from one hand to the other what Christ’s thoughts are to us, and what our prayers and faith are to Christ. So that you shall have my heart as surely and as speedily as if I were with you; and he will continually be breaking your hearts, either with my love to you, or yours to me, or both…

-Thomas Goodwin, The Heart of Christ, pp. 19-20

The fact that the Spirit can come in an instant and declare Christ’s love gives us hope in the midst of emptiness and spiritual dryness. The imperatives are, Listen to Him and Don’t grieve Him.

The Holy Spirit as Editor

I have left my Spirit to be your secretary and the inditer [i.e. composer] of all your petitions.

-Thomas Goodwin, The Heart of Christ, p. 21

Goodwin expounds Christ’s promise of the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete of his people. This ties into an idea I’ve written about before HERE: The Spirit ‘fixing our prayers on the way up.’ When you have an editor in the Holy Spirit, you should not fear boldness in prayer.

The Ten Predicaments

Therefore Peter Martyr did well resemble the Decalogue to the ten Predicaments, that, as there is nothing that has a being in nature, but what may be reduced to one of those ten; so neither is there any Christian duty, but what is comprehended in one of these, that is, consequentially, or reductively.

-Anthony Burges, A Vindication of the Moral Law, Kindle Loc. 161.

Everything boils down to the 10. This idea lines up nicely with Samuel Bolton’s contention that all of the Levitical laws serve as appendices to the 10 Commandments.

Praying by Faith and Not by Sight

My father was a Christian who believed in prayer but I knew and understood little of his praying until after my own conversion at the age of seventeen. From that time as I listened to my father’s petitions I concurred with them all – all, that is, except one, and this one had to do with a subject which was so much a part of his praying that I could not miss the divergence in our thought. Our difference concerned the extent to which the success of the kingdom of Christ is to be expected in the earth. My father would pray for its universal spread and global triumph, for the day when ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’, and when great multitudes in all lands will be found numbered among the travail of Christ’s soul…

-Iain Murray, The Puritan Hope, p. xv

I was deeply convicted by this paragraph. My prayer life, public and private, has already changed as a result of it.

The fact of the matter is that we too often pray by sight, basing all petitions on what we see, rather than laying ahold of the promises of God. Our pessimism leads us to forget the promises of Christ that his kingdom will not only endure, but flourish. Can you imagine that  Americans, to whom the gospel traveled so far to reach, are pessimistic about God’s ability to lengthen its arm?

In the context of the latest headlines, I remember Abraham, who pleaded with God for Sodom, for the sake of ten righteous men who might be there. There weren’t ten righteous to be found. But today we surely know that there is one righteous Man for whose sake we can plead. We can plead the name of Jesus, and plead the cause of Jesus, and plead the love of Jesus, and plead the death and resurrection of Jesus. Should we not be more optimistic than Abraham, who had only seen the shadow of Christ’s righteousness?

Plead with God that his kingdom would increase – not that he would crush his enemies, but that he would win his enemies; that he would spare them for the sake of his righteous Son, and for the sake of his kingdom. That he would see the travail of his soul and be satisfied to increase the number of his kingdom and family.

Matthew Henry once wrote, based on Zechariah 12:10, that when God wants to move in this world, he sets his people to praying. Surely this is the sort of prayer he inspires – the type of prayer Calvin had in mind when he wrote in the Institutes, that “we dig up by prayer the treasures that were pointed out by the Lord’s Gospel, and which our faith has gazed upon.”