CRITICAL NOTES
Romans 7:1.—The law is lord over the man. There is nothing shocking in the assertion that we are no longer under the law. You all know that the power of the law over a man ceases at death; and we are dead.
Romans 7:2.—The soul first married to sin, then to Christ.
Romans 7:3.—Adultery considered infamous among the Romans.
Romans 7:4.—Freed from the power of the law as a covenant, having endured its curse; that the fruit of our union may be sanctified to God (Wordsworth).
Romans 7:5.—The apostle does not disparage the law, and so give countenance to the Manichæan heresy. “Ab sit hoc ab animo qualiscunque Christiani” (Augustine).
Romans 7:6.—The law, indeed, is still our rule, our guide, our governor, but it ceases to be a tyrant over us, a tormentor of us (Dr. Barrow). “The law,” says Calvin, “puts a check upon our external actions, but does not restrain our concupiscence.” “No Christian man whatsoever,” says the Church of England, “is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.” Delivered from the law, not as regards its moral precepts, but its carnal, external performances.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Romans 7:1-6
A sorrowful and a joyful marriage.—Happy the loving wife who is married to the true husband, Jesus Christ, feels devotion to His person, accepts with loyalty His directions, and, leaning upon His arm, walks joyfully through the wilderness of this world to the revealing realm where the spirit of St. Paul will flash the brightness of his intelligence upon the mysterious utterances made in this seventh chapter, as well as in other parts of this epistle. The first six verses of the chapter present us with an allegory. We have two marriages—the one to the law and the other to Christ. The law reigns and has power while it has life; but its authority ceases when death supervenes. The law is dead as a reigning and oppressive power when Christ the liberator appears. All former bonds are destroyed when Christ comes and takes the wife wrongfully married. When this divine union is consummated, there is bliss indeed.
I. The first marriage is:
1. A mere legal connection. No true love enters into the relationship. There are no sweet dalliances between the soul and the law. We are seeking to carry out the allegory, so that it must not be inferred that we intend to advocate the dissolution of the marriage bond through mere incompatibilities of tempers, or the easy method by which the married may be set free in some countries.
2. An irksome restraint. The soul married to the law is bound, but longs for freedom. Notice the expressions “bound by the law” and “sweetly married to another.” Bound we may be, and are, to Christ; but it is by the silver link, the silken tie, the secret sympathy, of love.
3. A monotonous service. During this first marriage state the soul serves in oldness of the letter; the bright spirit of love does not appear upon or in the dreary pathway of the bound wife. She perhaps Pines for love, and weeps in secret; she serves in the oldness of the letter; and all freshness is being extracted from her nature.
4. A repellent relationship. The motions of sin, the passions of sin, work in the wife; and there are many quarrels between the soul and the law. The married life is marked by many bickerings, much disquietude; and the wife has many heart-burnings.
5. The source of an unpleasant family. Sometimes in earthly marriages the wife finds in her children sweet forgetfulness of the sufferings she may have endured at the hands of her husband. No blame can attach to this husband; for the law is holy, just, and good. In this case the wife’s sufferings arise from the incompatibility of the relationship; and there are to her no compensations, for the fruit is unto death. None of the children wear the newness and beauty of youth. The bounding steps of young life are not heard; the joyous laughter and merry peals of healthy childhood do not enliven. Death shadows everywhere appal. A sickly group crawls through the dwelling. Who shall deliver? How long will the bondage last? “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree.” The crucified body of Christ, His whole mission, His complete mediatorial work, secures the law’s death. The wife is set free. Let the joy bells be rung. A second marriage may be consummated.
II. The second marriage is an exact contrast to the first.—
1. It is a love connection. When first the soul hears the voice of Christ, it is as the voice of the beloved speaking in gentlest whispers, that sound as heaven’s own music, richer than any that can strike upon human ears. The Bridegroom loves the bride out of the infinite love of His own gracious nature. That love is creating; for it produces in the bride a love brighter and more enduring than any of the loves of earth. Happy marriage day when the soul is married to Him who has been raised from the dead! The sun of heaven shines through earth’s gloom upon the spiritual espousals.
2. It has joyous constraint. Bound, but free. A slave, but unwilling to be liberated. A wife who has changed her name, merged her individuality, foregone her supposed rights, counted all her precious possessions as loss, and yet rejoices in her losses because she has found an infinite gain in the Husband who is chief among ten thousand, and altogether lovely.
3. It is lively service. The wife serves in newness of spirit. Where love is the spirit is ever new and ever young. The soul will serve in newness of spirit through unending cycles. When we get old, the newness of the spirit abates. But this wife never feels the decrepitude of age. The newness of the spirit is never touched by the hand of time which makes other things grow worse. Earthborn spirits will die. The glories of time will be disfigured. Our realms of beauty will be laid waste. But the Christ spirit abides for evermore. The soul wife married to Christ will joyfully serve for ever.
4. It is the source of happy products. We are married unto Christ that we should bring forth fruit unto God. A beautiful family blesses the divine union. Corner stones polished after the similitude of a palace adorn. Plants grown up in youthful comeliness shed their fragrance, unfold their beauty, and provide their luscious fruit. The garners are full of all Christian graces, and afford all manner of spiritual store. Happy the wife that is in such a case; yea, happy is that soul which is married unto the risen Saviour! Let us then not continue in bondage to the law, for it is dead; let us not try to galvanise the law into the semblance of life. Let us seek for soul union with the immortal Christ; let us strive to serve in newness of spirit which is newness of love; for it has always upon it the dews of heaven’s bright morning.
“What does it teach?”—A book bearing this title professes to have discovered the true interpretation of the chapter, which is said to be a description of the Jew under the Mosaic law. Our thanks must be given to every worker who seeks to throw light on biblical difficulties. Still we cannot feel that the question is settled. The theory, it is said, makes the whole chapter plain, and yet the analysis of the chapter has to us the appearance of special pleading, which is like an admission of weakness, The writer says, “It is believed that learned and pious expositors, under the influence of the strong drift of thought, have taken for granted a view of the passage which is erroneous.” May not this new expositor have been led wrong under the influence of the strong drift of his own thought? Take his statement: “ ‘I delight in the law of God.’ This expression is distinctly Jewish, and not Christian.” Why should not a Christian use συνήδομαι when speaking of the law of God? ἡδονή is evidently connected with the Hebrew עדן, “delight,” “loveliness”; and why should not St. Paul use the expression, “I am pleased together with the law—what pleases the law pleases me”? This delight may not amount to highest spiritual joy, for it produces a conflict. And again the author asks us to notice the “hopeless wail of the wretched slave” in Romans 7, and the sorrows “cheerfully borne” by the Christian as described in 2 Corinthians. We notice and observe that St. Paul says, “We that are in the tabernacle do groan, being burdened.” Is the groaning Christian of the Corinthians any worse than the “wretched man” of the Romans, and who at last triumphs over his wretchedness through the power of Jesus Christ? But our main objection to the writer’s theory is not found in his exegesis, is not contained in his statements, but in his very strange omission. He says St. Paul “brings in to support his assertion an illustration (drawn, doubtless, from the recollection of his own past experience) in which he pictures a conscientious Jew,” etc. Is the experience of Romans 7 drawn from the recollections of St. Paul as a Jew under the Mosaic law? Does the self-reproach of that chapter harmonise with the self-complacency of the Pharisee? The writer’s Jew is carnal, sold under sin. While the Saviour’s Jew is described as feeling himself perfect. He had no remorse. He lifted a complacent brow to heaven. His voice sounded exultingly through the temple, “God, I thank Thee,” etc. The writer’s Jew says, “So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” St. Paul’s Jew—the Jew of his own pre-Christian life—says, “An Hebrew of the Hebrews: as touching the law a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the Church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” When a third edition of the book is issued, we shall be glad to hear how it comes to pass that St. Paul in chap. 7 draws a picture of the Jew so different from his own recorded state. If a heathen became converted to Christianity, we could not suppose him describing a character which had no resemblance to his own, unless indeed he wanted to make himself better than his fellow. Why should St. Paul in Philippians make himself a blameless keeper of the law, and in Romans make the Jew put forth feeble attempts at keeping the law. Does any ancient or modern Jew have the strivings of Romans 7? Jews as a class are self-righteous, and consider themselves blameless. It is only when conviction works that the Jew begins to feel his shortcomings. Saul had no remorse. He persecuted the saints of God, and thought he was doing God service. He was blameless. When he was not blind, his soul was dark; but when darkness was over the visual orbs, his soul was getting a power of vision. In the house of Judas sin revived. In the days of Saul’s blindness he kept crying, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” When the scales fell from his eyes, much of the despairing tone departed from his soul, and straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God—the power of God unto salvation, the great deliverer from the curse and the tyranny of the law. However, the theory is not so new as the words seem to imply. Something very similar is found among the fathers of the Pietistic School and the rationalistic critics. They think that the apostle introduces himself as the personification of the legal Jew. Godet appears to follow in the same pathway, though we cannot be quite sure as to his teaching. Certainly he makes light of the theory that the passage applies to the regenerate man; and Godet is perhaps more ingenious in destroying other theories than in establishing one of his own. Happy man who has never been brought into captivity to the law of sin which is in our members! If the Christian life is a fight, a contest, a struggle, then there must be an old man of sin against which the new man in Christ Jesus makes war. Perhaps there may be a combination of experiences in the passage—the experience of the enlightened and conscientious Jew. We obtain from the dark and more desponding parts of the description the experience of the soul under strong conviction, such as that felt by Saul in his days of blindness, to which we have referred; and the experience of the regenerate man who places before himself a lofty ideal, and feels how far short he comes of attaining the ideal. After all, this seventh chapter must be placed among the things of St. Paul which are hard to be understood. We do not see the necessity of straining every point, of attaching a moral meaning to every turn of a letter. Scholarship is good, but it will not enable us to attain the unattainable; and we believe that in the present state we must be willing to confess our inability to understand everything, to solve all difficulties, and to reconcile all apparent discrepancies.
Romans 7:4. Four stages of Paul’s experience.
I. We are to study the personal career of Paul as here sketched by himself.—We see him at four stages.
1. As Paul the self-satisfied (see Romans 7:9). “I was alive, apart from law, once.” This may mean one or both of two things:
(1) it may indicate a state of self-unsuspectingness in distinction from one of conscious transgression; or
(2) a state of self-security as opposed to one of conscious danger. Fuller autobiographic touches, as given elsewhere, throw much light upon this. Few young men are mentioned in Scripture who seem to present a more pleasant picture of the exterior bearing of their early manhood. Paul was doubtless a model of uprightness and of conscientious religiousness. There is every indication that he was as rigid a Churchman and as stern a moralist as could well be found; probably no young man could be found to surpass him as a model of social propriety. Still, as he now looks back on that self-satisfied past, he owns “Apart from law, sin was dead”; it lay undisturbed in the depths of the spirit, still as death. I was so content with my attainments that I actually came to a most charming conclusion about myself—“touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless!” That self-complacency was destined to be disturbed,
2. At a later stage we find Paul becoming Paul the terrified. This transition is described between the latter part of the ninth verse and the close of the thirteenth. “When the commandment came, sin revived”; it started up as a reanimated body from the tomb, and the awful spectre of sin so alarmed me that “I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.” Though it promised life, yet it promised life only to law-keepers. But I was a law-breaker; hence, there I lay, under the death sentence. Nor was this all. “Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me.” If there be any self-will, tell a man he must not do this or that, and he is at once provoked to wish to do it. Thus sin, through the commandment, becomes exceeding sinful. And hence, with the weight of the law which condemns heart sin pressing upon him, Paul sinks down oppressed.
3. Paul the struggler. He is not only convicted of sin, but he sees that the conviction is just, that the commandment is holy, just, and good. But he himself is all wrong; he wants to get right; he struggles to escape from the grasp of law. With what success he shall tell for himself in Romans 7:14-24. And no further than this did he get; no further could he get; no further can any one ever get who has to thread his way by the light of law alone. A rule, however excellent and perfect, will never help a man to keep it. Nor did the pure and holy law help Paul to its fulfilment. So far, and so far only, under law. But oh, happy change!
4. We have now to look at Paul the free! In the first verse of the eighth chapter he shows us how things stand NOW. “There is therefore NOW no condemnation,” etc.—i.e., from all that I have said about Christ, righteousness, grace, life, it follows that whereas I, as a guilty man, could never, under law alone, rise above a despairing struggle, yet NOW, in Christ Jesus, I am a free man! The condemning sentence of the law is no more. The life and power I wanted, which the law cannot give, are given me by Jesus; so that whereas, under law, I was a struggling captive, in Christ Jesus I am gloriously free. The law stirred up sin; Christ conquers. The law condemns; Christ absolves.
II. In this personal experience Paul sets forth the peculiarity of the believer’s life in Christ.—We here learn:
1. That for a sinful man no conceivable relation to law alone can be perfectly satisfactory. Law, as such, can give neither absolution for sin nor power against it.
2. These two wants which law reveals are in Christ supplied.
3. If any believers never get beyond Paul’s third stage (or the struggling one), they have their privileges in Christ yet to learn.
4. Some call the fourth stage, that of freedom, the “higher” Christian life. No; it is the Christian life.
5. When we thus receive Christ in all His fulness, then we shall cry, I have found it! I have found it! The secret of life, power, peace, freedom, song, is in Christ, and Christ alone. What law enjoins the Spirit of God creates; and to that holiness, when struggled after in vain when toiling alone, the spirit will soar by its own living power when Christ fills us with His glorious life.—C. Clemance, B.A., D.D.
Romans 7:7. Knowledge of sin by the law.—Although the apostle aimed in this epistle to show that the law by itself was unable and unfitted to secure men’s salvation, it is evident both that he honoured the law as an expression of the divine character and will, and that he considered it from a Christian point of view to fulfil a most important purpose. Especially in this verse does he set forth the law as awakening conscience to sin, and so preparing the way for the introduction of the gospel, both in the order of the divine dispensation and in the course of individual experience. His own spiritual history is represented as typical: “I had not known sin but by the law.”
I. Law is the revelation of the superior will to the subject and inferior will.—There is a sense in which the word “law” is commonly used in the exposition of physical science. It is in such connections equivalent to uniformity of antecedence and sequence. But this, though a queer employment of the term, is secondary and figurative, part of the connotation is intentionally abandoned. The fuller meaning of law is seen when the reference is to requirements of certain modes of action, and when the requirement is made by one who has a just right to make it, a just claim upon the submission and obedience of those to whom the command is addressed. The superiority in the lawgiver does not lie simply in physical power, but in moral character and authority.
II. Being under such law implies the possession of intelligent and voluntary nature.—The inferior animals are not, in the proper sense of the term, under law. Nor are babes, or idiots, or any whose moral nature is undeveloped. Man as an intelligent being can apprehend law, as an active and voluntary being can obey law. Kant has put the matter in a very striking and a very just light in saying that whilst the unintelligent creation acts according to law, an intelligent being has the prerogative of acting according to the representation of law—i.e., he can understand, consciously adopt, and willingly and without constraint obey the law. Freedom is the power to obey or to disobey.
III. In proportion to the definiteness of the law is the measure of responsibility attaching to those who are subject to it.—Confining attention to human beings possessed of thought, reason, and will, we cannot fail to detect degrees of acquaintance with the revelation which in various ways is vouchsafed to the race. There are those, as for example untutored savages and the “waifs and strays” of a civilised community, whose knowledge of the divine will is both very imperfect and very indistinct. Such in former ages was the case of the Gentiles as compared with the highly favoured Jews. Now our Saviour Himself and, following His teaching, the highly inspired apostles have plainly taught that responsibility varies with knowledge and opportunity.
IV. On the other hand, the possession of express and verbal laws involves heightened responsibility.—When the knowledge of duty is clear, defection and rebellion are aggravated in guilt. The sin of transgression is increased as the light sinned against is brighter. Such was the case with the Jews, who were worthy of sorer condemnation than the Gentiles where both were disobedient. Comparatively they only knew sin who knew the law by which sin is prohibited. True there is a general conscience, against which even the unenlightened transgressors are offenders, but they are the worst culprits who having the light walk not in it.
V. Thus the law by revealing a higher standard of duty, and by making sin “exceeding sinful,” prepares the way for the introduction of the divine gospel of salvation and life.—The apostle avers that but for the law he had not known sin—i.e., comparatively. If this had been all, he would have had little reason to thank the law. But in fact the law, proving the holiness and righteousness of God and the powerlessness of man to obey, served to make the introduction of a new dispensation, that of grace, doubly welcome. Men were brought to feel their need of a Saviour, and, when that Saviour came, to receive Him with alacrity and gratitude, and to use the means prescribed by which the penalties of the law may be escaped and the blessings of eternal salvation enjoyed.—Prof. Thompson.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 7:1-6
Christ dissolves the union.—The law is but an imperfect embodiment of the justice of God. To say that the law forbids our rescue from sin is to say that the justice of God forbids it. But the death of Christ made it consistent with the justice of God to pardon the sinner. Therefore by the death of Christ we are released from the bondage to which the justice of God bound us in a way which does not contradict but manifests the justice of God, and in order that we may be united to Christ, and thus live a life devoted to God (comp. Galatians 3:13 f.). It is easy to apply this to the case of those who have broken, not only the law of Moses, but the more solemn law of Christ. As in the history of the world, so in the history of each individual, God speaks first in the form of law. Even the gospel, to those who read it first, is but an embodiment of the eternal principles of right and wrong. But these principles condemn the sinner. And many conscientious men feel that for God to pardon their sins and smile upon them would be to set aside these eternal moral principles. And because they know that God will not do this, they dare not believe His proclamation of pardon. But in this section we are reminded that the death of Christ has satisfied the eternal principles which forbade our pardon, by revealing the evitable connection of sin and death, and that, without infringing them, God may now set us free. Justification through the death of Christ, as explained in Romans 3:26, is plainly implied in this section. For that by Christ’s death we are set free from a union with sin to which the law bound us can only mean that His death made it consistent with God’s justice to set us free from the power of sin, which implies, since bondage to sin is the divinely ordained penalty of committing sin, forgiveness of our past sins. We are also plainly taught that Christ died in our place; for He bowed for a time to the power of death, and became its victim in order to rescue us from its power.—Beet.
Why does Paul use the wife as a figure?—The difficult question in this verse is why Paul takes as an example a wife losing her husband and free to remarry, rather than a husband losing his wife and enjoying the same right; for the two cases equally demonstrate the truth of the maxim of Romans 7:1. The fact that the law bound the woman more strictly than the husband does not suffice to explain this preference. It is the application which Paul proposes to make of his example to the spiritual life which will give us the solution of the question. It shows, in point of fact, that Paul had in view, not only the breaking of the believer’s soul with the law (the first husband), but also its new union to the risen Christ (the second husband). Now in this figure of the second marriage Christ could only represent the husband, and the believer, consequently, the wife. And this is what leads the apostle to take a step further, and to attribute death to the wife herself; for Christ having died, the believing soul cannot espouse Him except as itself dead. The expression “to be in the flesh” is very far from being synonymous with “living in the body” (comp. Galatians 2:20). The term “flesh,” denoting literally the soft parts of the body, which are the usual seat of agreeable or painful sensations, is applied in biblical language to the whole natural man, in so far as he is yet under the dominion of the love of pleasure and the fear of pain—that is to say, of the tendency to self-satisfaction. The natural complacency of the ego with itself—such is the idea of the word “flesh” in the moral sense in which it is so often used in Scripture.—Godet.
Mosaic law is meant.—It has been a question to whom the apostle’s argument is addressed. Many interpreters consider him as addressing himself to Christians generally, and they think that what is here established may apply to the law written on the heart as well as to the law of Moses. But if we consider that what is here established is the releasing of men from the law alluded to, that they may be made subject to another law, we shall see that no other law can be meant but the Mosaic law and the law of the gospel. For as there can be no release from the law written on the heart, the apostle’s remark cannot apply to it. We must therefore admit that this part of the argument is addressed to the Jewish Christians, and that it is intended to convince them that they are now at liberty, without the violation of any duty, to forsake the law of Moses and embrace the gospel. And that the apostle has in view the law of Moses may be inferred from his addressing his argument to men who “know the law,” for it could hardly be said of Gentile converts that they knew the Jewish law. This illustration may seem to us to be drawn from a more familiar subject than would now be thought proper for explaining such a topic. But when we consider that in the Old Testament the relation of God to His chosen people is sometimes represented under the similitude of a marriage solemnised at Mount Sinai, and that in consequence God is represented as calling Himself their husband; and when we look back to that state of ancient manners which rendered this figurative mode of speech forcible and appropriate, we shall admit that, in speaking to the Jews, to whom this portion of the epistle is addressed, it was a very natural illustration, as well as one that explained clearly the point which the apostle meant to press on their attention. Every Jew, therefore, who carefully considered his situation merely as depending on the law must have been sensible of inordinate emotions leading him to actual sin, and he must have been aware also that for actual guilt the law made no allowance and offered no means of pardon. No doubt the Jews under the law lived in the hope of forgiveness, and no doubt those of them whose conduct was suitable to their religious privileges obtained it. But this was not derived from the strict letter of their law. It was derived from that gracious dispensation which their law prefigured, and from which alone sinners can obtain forgiveness. The law could not possibly be a principle of justification, “for when ye were under its authority,” saith the apostle, “your corrupt propensities led you to the commission of actions which the law itself punished with death” (Romans 7:6). “But now,” continues he, “we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.”—Ritchie.
Law superseded by the gospel.—The apostle continues the subject of a complete sanctification, or, in other words, of a perfected human being after the model of Jesus. His object in this section is to show that every scrap and fragment of obligation to the law were annihilated. He addresses the Jews who were acquainted with the law, and shows them by a familiar illustration how entirely it had been superseded by the gospel, and how perfectly free they were to become Christians without any longer continuing to be Jews. It was a matter requiring great delicacy and address to maintain the divine legation of Moses and the original binding authority of his institutions, and at the same time to lead the Jews onward who had been thus educated, and every fibre of whose intellectual and moral being was inwoven in the law, and to open to their faith and admiration the greater beauties and glories of Christianity. In truth, the idea of the progressive nature of all religion, as well as of life in general, seems to be one of the hardest lessons for man to learn, whether under the Jewish or the Christian system. He becomes fossilised in ceremonials and creeds, and hears with reluctance the ceaseless command of God’s providence, Go up higher. In regard to the many questions how St. Paul’s rhetoric shall be justified, and how the several limbs of his comparison shall be matched with one another, we have nothing to say while the main drift of his remarks is so apparent. Thus Beza says, “The old man is the wife, sinful desire the husband, sins the children”; and Augustine that “there are three—the soul is the woman, the passions of sin the husband, and the law the law of the husband.” Origen, Chrysostom, Calvin, and others, “Men are the wife, the law the former husband, Christ the new one.” If Paul were a writer who carried out his figures regularly, all such criticism would be very fine and useful; but he is not, and to attempt in every instance to set the different parts in order is not only a work of supererogation but of impossibility. To hunt needles in haymows, or to attach again the strewn leaves of the forest to the identical boughs from which they have fallen, would be as easy and as profitable as to pursue this word-criticism to its niceties, with a view of resting upon it any essential doctrine or precept. The Bible in general, and the writings of Paul in particular, lie, like great nature herself, vast, various, somewhat chaotic and disjointed, a creation in progress, and not a creation finished, but everywhere full of gleams of surpassing beauty, touches of deepest feeling, and electricities and magnetisms and fires of quickest power. The words of Professor Stuart are most true, and it would have been well if he had always “recked his own rede”: “Many a time have I read the Epistle to the Romans without obtaining scarcely a glimpse of it. When I ask the reason of this, I find it in neglect to look after the general object and course of thought in the writer. Special interpretation stood in the way of general views; the explanation of words hindered the discerning of the course of thought.”—Livermore.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 7
Romans 7:6. Newness of spirit.—The economy of the gospel is to put a man in a new condition, and then he will appear in a new character. St. Paul says, “Now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.” This statement of the apostle was strikingly illustrated in the history of Israel. The law was given, not to Israel in Egypt, but to Israel delivered out of the bondage of Egypt. God first puts Israel into a new condition—a state of liberty—before He expects Israel to appear in a new character. The fulfilling of the law was to be the test of gratitude and love for a redemption received: “And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” etc. “If ye love Me, keep My commandments.” Take an illustration of this text from daily life. We go into a mechanic’s shop. The workmen leave at 6 p.m. I enter the room at 5.45. I see one man looking at the clock—sluggishly move his tools—again look up—again work. At last the clock strikes. Down go his tools; he hastens home. I note a striking contrast in another man who seems absorbed in his work. The clock strikes, but still he works; his eye has not noted the flight of time. I linger, but still be works, and sings as he works. I go to him, and ask, “Why do you remain at work when your fellow-workman has left the shop?” He smiles, and says, “Oh, the other man is a hireling; he is paid by the hour. My father owns the shop. Of course I am anxious that his work should turn out well. I have an interest in the business. He is a good father to me,” etc. The hireling serves in the “oldness of the letter”; the son in the “newness of the spirit.” “I will run in the way of Thy commandments,” said David, “when Thou hast enlarged my heart.”—Bardsley’s “Texts Illustrated.”