The Highway Forums General Discussion Devotional Outmoded Law

In Galatians Paul makes it clear that the churches of Galatia were in imminent danger of adding Judaism to Christianity in such a way as to destroy the nature of Christianity itself. Nor was theirs the only age in which liability to do so has existed, and has had to be watched against.

The law is a testing of human nature, to reveal whether or not it can produce righteousness for God, and it must be is a perfect rule of righteousness for that nature in all it owes to God and to a man’s neighbor.
So that it claims subjection, and that man should fulfill its requirements under penalty moreover of judgment. The authority of God, the subjection of man in his present state as a child of Adam are all involved in this legal system.

But man, conscious he ought to fulfill it, his own conscience telling him it is right, and not suspecting his own weakness and the depth of his ruin, and seeing that keeping it would be righteousness to him before God, readily takes it up as the way of having that righteousness, and enjoying divine favor, of being right when judgment comes. When awakened, observance of its outward claims satisfies the natural conscience; if understood spiritually, it leads to the discovery of that law of sin in our members which hinders all success in the endeavor and struggle.

But God having established the law, it was a very difficult and delicate thing to show that, as a system, it was passed away (Heb 8:7;10:9), not because it was not in its right place, and useful for its own intended purpose, but to make way for the principle of grace purposed and promised long before the law was established (Gal 3:17); and that by the discovery that it was death and condemnation to be under it, the mind of the flesh (the nature the law dealt with) was not subject to it, and could not be (Rom 8:7), and that we escape its curse as under it, not by the destruction of its authority, but by dying as so under it, and that by the body of Christ in Whom we then found ourselves in a new life beyond its condemnation.

The Cross makes all things clear. But the credit of the flesh (that is, of himself) is dear to the natural man, until he had discovered that in him (that is, in his flesh) there was no good thing, he was to give up a rule he knew to be right, in the humbling confession that he was such a sinner that it could be only his condemnation, the law of sin so strong in his members, himself so disposed to evil, that the law, weak through the flesh, could only condemn him.

Judaising teachers, proud of their own conceit, zealous of the law as the credit of their nation, could not bear to have a set aside as necessary for the way of righteousness and life with God; And the ministry which judged the flesh in Jew and gentile alike and freed the latter from all subjection to the Jewish system, was intolerable to them. Man always clings to the law, specially alleging God’s claims and holiness, till he experientially finds (in the discovery of the true character of the flesh) his true condition, that “as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse” (Gal 3:10).

—J N Darby





MJS excerpt

“Great will be the day when you come to realize that the sole reason for the existence of your Bible, your soul and your spirit is to glorify—and share—the Lord Jesus Christ.

“The moment we begin to rest our peace on anything in ourselves, we lose it. And this is why so many saints have not settled peace. Nothing can be lasting that is not built on God alone. How can you have settled peace? Only by having it in God’s way. By not resting on anything, even the Spirit’s work within, but on what the Lord Jesus has done entirely outside you. Then you will know peace—conscious unworthiness, but yet peace.

“In the Lord Jesus alone, God finds that in which He can rest concerning us, and so it is with His saints. The more you see the extent and nature of the evil that is within, as well as without, the more you will find that what the Lord Jesus is and did, is the only ground at all on which you can rest.

“Alas! The freedom which the Gospel brings may be used to take things easy, and, more or less, retain or gain in the world; but where this is the case, it is seldom a soul possesses any large measure of spiritual enjoyment, and it is never accompanied by solid peace. The soul becomes thus unsettled and uncertain. These oscillations may go on for a certain time, until God carries on the work more deeply in the heart.”
http://www.abideabove.com/hungry-heart/day/2026/06/15/

-Unknown