Saturday, February 23, 2019

Uriah Smith on the Lawyer's Question

"IN Matthew 22:35-40, we have the record of an interview between Christ and a certain lawyer who came to him tempting him, and saying, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
We ask the reader now to consider
--what answer Christ could have given, other than he did, to the lawyer’s question.  
But, says the antinomian,
Q: if the ten commandments are the law of God, why did not Christ quote from the decalogue?
A: For the very obvious reason that it would be entirely wrong to discriminate between laws which come under the same principle; but, as we have seen, there are four which come under the principle of love to God, and six which belong to the principle of love to man.
To quote any one of these alone would be but a partial and imperfect presentation of the subject."
Uriah Smith