“They do not care a snap of their fingers whether Abraham was
justified by faith or works,” writes a leading American preacher in
a recent article that seeks to interpret the heart-cry of men to-day
for a prophet who can give them “a spiritual interpretation of the
world-rending and home-smashing events that are taking place.”
Yet that very same question which was the all-important thing for
Abraham, to-day, nearly four thousand years later, is still the
question that goes to the root of the world’s spiritual problem.
There is nothing more important for the Christian to understand than
the distinction between law and grace. For to understand that is to
have in one’s heart the Gospel message. It is not too much to say that
the chief cause of powerlessness in the Christian church to-day, a
powerlessness that is made the more acutely evident by the world’s sore
travail, is that so many thousands of Christians are still living under
law.
They have not found the emancipation of grace.
They do not walk at liberty, which was purchased for us by Christ.
They do not stand fast in the freedom wherewith Christ has set us free.
They are not “free indeed” with the freedom which the Son of God won
for us.
This is not an academic question. It is not a discussion of points
of law, nor the making of fine distinctions in the deeper spiritual
mysteries. _It is a question of sin._
When our Lord was telling the Jews that if they believed him and
followed him they would know the truth, and the truth would set them
free, they threw back their shoulders in their pride of ancestry and
boasted that they were Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any
man. The Son of God did not stop to discuss questions of race, or of
political liberty, but went to the heart of the matter with one of his
tremendous verilies: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Every one that
committeth sin is the bondservant of sin” (John 8:34).