LECTURE X.

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1 TIMOTHY i. 9.

The law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane.

These words explain the meaning of a great many passages in St. Paul’s Epistles, in which also he speaks of the law, and of not being under the law, and other such expressions.  And it is clear also, that he is not speaking solely, or chiefly, or, in any considerable degree, of the ceremonial law; but much more of the law of moral good, the law which told men how they ought to live, and how they ought not.  This law, he says, is not made for good men, but for evil:  a thing so plain, that we may well wonder how any could ever have misunderstood it.  It is so manifest, that strict rules are required, just exactly in proportion to our inability or want of will to rule ourselves; it is so very plain, that, with regard to those crimes which we are under no temptation to commit, we feel exactly as if there were no law.  Which of us ever thinks, as a matter of personal concern, of the law which sentences to death murderers, or housebreakers, or those who maliciously set fire to their neighbours’ property?  Do we not feel that, as far as our own conduct is concerned, it would be exactly the same thing if no such law were in existence?  We should no more murder, or rob, or set fire to houses and barns, if the law were wholly done away, than we do now that it is in force.

There are, then, some points in which we feel practically that we are not under the law, but dead to it; that the law is not made for us:  but do we think, therefore, that we may murder, and rob, and burn? or do we not rather feel that such a notion would be little short of madness?  We are not under the law, because we do not need it; not because there is in reality no law to punish us if we do need it.  And just of this kind is that general freedom from the law, of which St. Paul speaks, as the high privilege of true Christians.

But yet St. Paul would not at all mean that any Christian is altogether without the law:  that is, that there are no points at all in which his inclination is not to evil, and in which, therefore, he needs the fear of God to restrain him from it.  When he says of himself, that he kept under his body lest that by any means he should become a castaway; just so far as this fear of being a castaway possessed him, that is, just so far as there were any evil tendencies in him, which required him to keep them under by an effort, just so far was he under the law.  And this is so, as we full well know, with us all; for as there is none of us in whom sin is utterly dead, so neither can there be any of us who is altogether dead to the law.