Devotional 96: The Ceremonial Law: Prefiguring Christ

The Confession Read

This law, after his fall, continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness; and, as such, was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai, in ten commandments, and written in two tables: the first four commandments containing our duty towards God; and the other six, our duty to man.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 19, Section 2

Introduction

Every serious reader of Scripture eventually confronts a question that, depending on how it is answered, will determine the whole shape of his Christian life: what becomes of the moral law once the covenant of works is broken? Adam stood before God in the garden under a covenant that demanded personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience, upon pain of death. He transgressed. The covenant was breached. The curse fell upon him and upon all his posterity in him. And then, what? Did the law itself perish in the wreck of the covenant? Was the Decalogue buried in the ruins of Eden, a relic of a failed arrangement from which the gospel would set us free? Or does the law survive the fall, outlasting the covenant of works and continuing, under a new administration, as the unchanging standard of what pleases God? The Westminster Divines answer that question in a single sentence that carries more theological freight than many a volume of modern ethics. The law "continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness." The verb is everything. The law did not become a rule after the fall, as though it had previously been something else and was repurposed for a humbler office. It continued to be what it had always been: the transcript of the divine character, the eternal reflex of God's own holiness, the abiding definition of right and wrong for every rational creature who bears His image. What changed at the fall was not the law but man's relation to it, and what changed again at Calvary was not the law but the believer's relation to it. The law remains. It remains as the mirror in which the sinner sees his defilement, as the schoolmaster that drives him to Christ, and as the lamp by which the pardoned child of God learns to walk in grateful conformity to the will of his Redeemer. This second section of the nineteenth chapter is the hinge upon which the entire Reformed doctrine of the law turns. Section 1 established the law as a covenant of works for Adam in his innocence. Sections 3 through 7 will unfold the law's continuing uses, its threefold office, and its relation to the gospel. But Section 2 does the indispensable work of the middle term: it insists that the law survived the fall. Sinai did not introduce a new moral code. It republished the old one, delivering in thunder and flame on tablets of stone what had been written on Adam's heart in the cool of the garden. And the form of that republication was not arbitrary: ten words, arranged in two tables, the first governing duty to God and the second governing duty to man. It was a structure of divine wisdom, a pedagogical shape designed to teach every generation of God's people the double direction of all true religion.

Scripture Foundation

The most fundamental text for this section is, of course, the Decalogue itself, recorded in Exodus 20 and repeated in Deuteronomy 5. But the way the Decalogue is introduced is as theologically significant as its content. "And God spake all these words, saying, I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:1-2). The Hebrew term torah, often rendered "law" in English, carries a richer range of meaning than the English word suggests. It is instruction, teaching, direction for the path of life. And the preamble establishes the context in which that instruction is given: Israel is already redeemed. The blood of the Passover lamb has been shed. The waters of the Red Sea have parted and closed. The people stand at the foot of Sinai not as slaves hoping to earn their liberty by obedience but as a free people learning how the free are meant to live. Grace precedes law. Redemption founds obligation. The order is irreversible and theologically decisive. Sinai is not a second covenant of works, a second chance for fallen man to earn eternal life by personal merit. It is God's gracious republication of His eternal moral will to a people He has already bound to Himself by covenant love. The Decalogue itself is introduced with a term that the Greek translation of the Old Testament rendered as deka logoi, the ten words. This is not a legal code in the modern sense, a sprawling statute book covering every conceivable circumstance. It is a summary, an epitome of the whole duty of man expressed in ten comprehensive principles, each the head of a family of duties and sins. The first four words govern the vertical dimension of human existence: the exclusive worship of the true God, the prohibition of images, the reverence due to the divine name, and the sanctification of the Sabbath. The remaining six govern the horizontal dimension: honouring parents, and the prohibitions of murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness. The two tables correspond, with an exactness that only divine authorship could achieve, to the two great commandments upon which, as our Lord Himself would later teach, hang all the law and the prophets. There is no duty God requires of man that is not comprehended, either explicitly or by good and necessary consequence, within one of these ten words. At the other end of redemptive history, our Lord Jesus Christ addresses directly the question that the Confession answers: has the law been abrogated? "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" (Matthew 5:17-18). The Greek verb plerōsai, "to fulfil", is chosen with precision. Christ did not come to dismantle the law but to fill it full, to bring it to its intended completion, to supply the perfect obedience it demanded and to bear the curse it pronounced upon every transgressor. The jot and the tittle, the smallest letters and the finest strokes of the Hebrew script, will outlast the created order. The moral law is more durable than the mountains. It will still be standing when the heavens are rolled up like a scroll, for it is nothing other than the expression of the character of the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The apostle Paul, whose teaching on the law has been more misunderstood than perhaps any other body of doctrine in Scripture, addresses the same question with his characteristic directness. "Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law" (Romans 3:31). The charge of antinomianism had been levelled against Paul from the earliest days of his ministry, and he answers it with an indignant denial. Faith does not nullify the law. Faith establishes the law, by uniting the believer to the One who kept it perfectly and by producing, through the indwelling Spirit, the beginning of that loving obedience that the law itself requires. The same apostle, a few chapters later, speaks of the law in language of the tenderest affection: "Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good" (Romans 7:12). This is the testimony of a man who had been slain by the law. The commandment that promised life had brought death to Paul's self-righteousness, exposing the covetousness that lurked beneath the surface of his Pharisaic scruples. And yet he does not curse the instrument of his death. He blesses it. The law remains what it always was, the perfect expression of the will of the perfect God, and the believer who has been delivered from its curse learns, by the Spirit's inward teaching, to love what it commands. To these texts must be added the apostolic word that demonstrates, with a logic no casuistry can escape, the unity and indivisibility of the moral law. "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law" (James 2:10-11). The Decalogue is not a menu from which one may select the commandments that suit one's temperament and ignore the rest. It is a seamless garment, a single chain whose every link is forged by the same divine authority. To break one commandment is to defy the Lawgiver who gave them all. The unity of the law guarantees its perfection as a rule of righteousness: there is nothing arbitrary in it, nothing superfluous, nothing that may be set aside as culturally conditioned or historically obsolete. Every word proceeds from the same mouth of God, and every word carries the same weight of obligation.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines declared that the law "continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness" after the fall, they were addressing what had become, by the middle years of the seventeenth century, the most pastorally urgent question of the entire antinomian controversy. The errors they confronted were not imaginary. Antinomian preachers were telling their hearers that Christ had abolished the moral law, that believers were no longer bound by the Ten Commandments, that the Spirit's inward leading had replaced the outward letter of Sinai, and that to preach the law as a rule of life was to lead Christians back into bondage. The consequences were as predictable as they were disastrous: congregations taught to despise the law produced lives that bore no resemblance to the holiness without which no man shall see the Lord. Against this error the Divines insist upon three truths with unyielding clarity, and every phrase in the section is chosen to reinforce one or more of them. The first truth is that the moral law is perpetual. It did not begin at Sinai and it did not end at Calvary. The Divines deliberately use the word "continued" to signal that the law's existence as a rule of righteousness predates the fall and survives it. The law was written upon Adam's heart in his original creation, and though that inward inscription has been defaced and largely obliterated by sin, the requirement it expresses has never been withdrawn. The moral law is not a temporary expedient designed to govern human society until the arrival of the gospel. It is the eternal will of the eternal God, and what God requires of His creatures by virtue of their very creaturely relation to Him, He requires at all times and in all places. There is no dispensation, before Sinai or after Pentecost, in which God's creatures are released from the obligation to love Him with all their heart and to love their neighbour as themselves. The ceremonial law, which prefigured Christ in types and shadows, expired when the substance appeared. The judicial law, which governed the theocratic commonwealth of Israel, ceased to bind when that commonwealth dissolved. But the moral law, which is nothing other than the reflection of God's own holiness applied to the creature made in His image, is as permanent as God Himself. The second truth is that the Decalogue is the authoritative summary of the moral law. The Divines say the law was "delivered" at Sinai: not created, not invented, not given for the first time, but delivered, publicly promulgated in a form that could be written on tablets of stone and read by all the people. The content of the Decalogue was not new. The distinction between the one true God and the idols of the nations was known to the patriarchs, who called upon the name of the Lord. The prohibition of murder was given to Noah after the flood. The Sabbath was sanctified from the seventh day of creation. What Sinai added was clarity and form. The law that had been written on the heart, and that had been obscured by the darkness of sin and the corruption of human traditions, was now written on stone by the very finger of God, in words that could not be mistaken and in a context of such awful majesty that no Israelite who stood at the foot of the mountain could doubt for a moment whose law this was. The third truth, implicit in this section but foundational to everything that follows, is that the law is a rule and not a covenant for those who are in Christ. Section 1 described the law as a covenant of works, binding Adam and his posterity to perfect obedience as the condition of life. Section 2 describes the same law as a rule of righteousness, the unchanging standard of what is pleasing to God, but no longer a covenant by which the sinner must earn his acceptance. The difference is not in the law itself but in the sinner's relation to it. The believer is not under the law as a covenant. Christ has satisfied its demand, exhausted its curse, and fulfilled its righteousness in the believer's place. The law can no more condemn the believer than it can condemn Christ, for the believer is in Christ and Christ's satisfaction is reckoned as his own. But the believer is under the law as a rule. The same Ten Commandments that would have thundered their curse upon him if he stood before God in his own righteousness now guide him as a beloved son who already possesses the whole inheritance. The law no longer speaks the language of demand but the language of privilege: you are My child, and this is the path upon which My children walk. The division of the Decalogue into two tables is not, for the Divines, a matter of mere convenience or pedagogical arrangement. It is a structure of theological, not merely pedagogical, significance. The first table comes first because duty to God is prior to duty to man, both in dignity and in order of being. A man cannot love his neighbour rightly unless he first loves the God who made his neighbour and whose image his neighbour bears. To reverse the order, to begin with the second table and neglect the first, is to produce the kind of morality that the world admires and the Scripture calls dead works: outwardly decent, inwardly godless, conforming to the letter of a few commandments while ignoring the God who gave them all. The first table is the root; the second table is the fruit. And the fruit cannot survive long when the root is severed.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in his treatment of the Decalogue in the Institutes, makes an observation that illuminates the Confession's insistence on the two-table structure. The law was given in ten words, Calvin argues, because God accommodates Himself to the weakness of our understanding. A single abstract principle, "love God and your neighbour", is easily remembered but not easily applied to the thousand concrete decisions of daily life. Ten words, each addressing a distinct sphere of human conduct, are easier to grasp, to memorise, and to teach to children. The two tables further organise these ten words into a structure that corresponds to the double direction of all true religion: upward toward God, and outward toward man. And Calvin is careful to insist that each commandment is not a narrow prohibition but a comprehensive principle, the head of a whole family of duties and sins. The sixth forbids murder; it also forbids anger, hatred, and every inward disposition that tends toward the harm of one's neighbour. The seventh forbids adultery; it also forbids lust, immodesty, and every desire that defiles the marriage bed. The commandments are like stones dropped into still water: the visible point of impact is small, but the ripples extend outward to the farthest shore of human conduct. Watson, expounding the Ten Commandments with the warmth that marks all his practical divinity, brings out the consolatory character of the two-table structure. The first table is the foundation of the second. A man who honours God will honour his parents, for parental authority is a shadow of the divine Fatherhood from which every family in heaven and earth is named. A man who keeps the Sabbath holy will not steal, for the Sabbath teaches him that his time belongs to God, and if his time belongs to God, so does his neighbour's property. The two tables are not separate codes that can be detached from each other. They are the two beams of a single cross, joined at the centre, and the centre is the love of God from which all true love of neighbour flows. To attempt to keep the second table while neglecting the first is to build a house without a foundation. To keep the first while trampling the second is to claim a piety the apostle John calls worthless, for "if a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar" (1 John 4:20). Watson's insight is that the Decalogue is more than a code to be obeyed: it is a mirror in which the soul sees its own distortions. A man who claims to love God but habitually neglects the duties of the second table is a man who has never seen his own face in the glass of the first. The question of why the law was republished at Sinai, when it had already been written on the heart and known in substance to the patriarchs, occupied the Reformed scholastics with good reason. The answer they gave, which underlies the Confession's careful use of the word "delivered," turns upon the noetic effects of the fall. After Adam's transgression, the law written on the heart was no longer legible. What remained of the natural knowledge of God and of the distinction between good and evil was sufficient to leave every man without excuse on the day of judgment (Paul's argument in the opening chapters of Romans turns upon precisely this point), but it was not sufficient to guide him into the path of righteousness. The human conscience, darkened by sin and corrupted by habit, had become an unreliable guide, capable of approving what God condemns and condemning what God approves. The republication of the law at Sinai was therefore an act of mercy, a gracious condescension by which God restored to His people, in clear and unmistakable form, the knowledge of His will that sin had obscured. The law written on stone was not a new law but the old law made new, the same commandment that Adam had received in the garden now delivered afresh to a redeemed people who knew themselves to be the objects of God's electing love. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, anchors this discussion in the threefold division of the Old Testament law that the Reformed tradition has always maintained: moral, ceremonial, and judicial. The moral law, summarised in the Decalogue, is the eternal rule of righteousness and binds all men in all ages. The ceremonial law, comprising the ordinances of sacrifice, priesthood, and purification, was typological and temporary, pointing forward to Christ and passing away when the substance replaced the shadow. The judicial law, which governed the civil life of Israel as a theocratic commonwealth, expired when that commonwealth ceased to be the peculiar polity of God's people, though its general equity, the principles of justice that underlay its specific provisions, remains instructive for all nations. Hodge notes that the threefold division is not an arbitrary scheme imposed upon the Old Testament by Reformed theologians. It is a distinction that the Old Testament itself makes, treating the Decalogue as unique in its mode of delivery (spoken by the immediate voice of God and written by His finger), its physical form (written on both sides of the stone tablets), and its placement within the tabernacle (deposited in the ark of the covenant, beneath the mercy seat). The ceremonial and judicial laws were mediated through Moses. The Decalogue alone was given directly by God, heard by the whole congregation, and its singular status in the economy of redemption is established by this singular mode of delivery. Turretin, addressing the perpetuity of the moral law with his characteristic precision, draws a crucial distinction between the substance and the form of the law's administration. The substance of the moral law, the obligation to love God and neighbour, is rooted in the Creator-creature relationship and is therefore natural, universal, and perpetual. No change in man's condition, whether from innocence to sin or from sin to grace, can alter the creature's fundamental obligation to reverence, obey, and love his Creator. The form of the law's administration, however, has changed across the history of redemption. Under the covenant of works, the law was administered as a covenant, with life promised upon condition of perfect obedience and death threatened upon its breach. Under the covenant of grace, the law is administered as a rule, directing the justified sinner in the path of grateful obedience without either promising life upon his performance or threatening death upon his failure, for both life and death have already been determined by his union with Christ. Turretin's distinction is the theological equivalent of a surgeon's scalpel: it cuts cleanly between the legalist, who collapses the rule back into the covenant and makes his standing depend upon his obedience, and the antinomian, who abolishes the rule along with the covenant and makes obedience optional. The law binds; it does not condemn. It directs; it does not threaten. It guides the justified sinner in the way he should go, not as a tyrant whose lash he fears but as a friend whose counsel he treasures.

Puritan Application

First, learn to love the law as David loved it, not as a ladder by which to climb to acceptance but as a lamp by which to walk the path of grateful obedience. The one hundred and nineteenth psalm is the longest chapter in the Bible, and nearly every one of its one hundred and seventy-six verses mentions the law, the commandments, the statutes, or the judgments of God, and every mention is suffused with affection. "O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day" (Psalm 119:97). David was not a legalist. He was a man who had tasted the grace of God, who knew that his acceptance rested upon mercy and not upon merit, and who had discovered that the law, once it ceases to be the condition of life, becomes the object of delight. The believer who has understood his relation to the law through the Mediator will find in the Decalogue what David found: a fountain of wisdom for the simple, a well of joy for the sorrowful, a lamp of light for the darkened understanding. Read the Ten Commandments not with the dread of a slave who fears the lash but with the eagerness of a son who wants to know what pleases his Father. And when the reading exposes sin, as it always will while you remain in the body of this death, let the exposure drive you not to despair but to the cross, where the blood that cleanses from all sin is ever fresh and the righteousness that covers every defect is ever complete. Second, keep the two tables in their proper order, and let the first govern the second. Much of the moral confusion of our age arises from the attempt to practice the duties of the second table while ignoring, or openly repudiating, the duties of the first. Men speak endlessly of justice, of equity, of compassion, of the dignity of every human being, and all of these are genuine duties that the second table enjoins. But they speak of them as though they were self-evident truths requiring no foundation beyond the shifting consensus of enlightened opinion. Remove the first table, and the second table collapses into sentiment. Why ought a man to love his neighbour? Because his neighbour bears the image of the God who made him and whom he is commanded to worship. Why ought a man to be truthful? Because the God who forbids false witness is the God of truth, and to bear His name is to bear the obligation of truthfulness. Begin your day with the first table: hallow the Lord's name in prayer, treasure His Word in meditation, sanctify His day in worship. The duties of the second table will flow from a heart that is right with God as surely as a stream flows from its spring: the kindness to neighbour, the honesty in business, the purity in thought and speech. Third, let the Decalogue be the instrument of your daily self-examination. A mirror that is never consulted serves no purpose, and the law is the clearest mirror the soul possesses. The Larger Catechism, which the same Divines produced alongside the Confession, teaches that each commandment requires the outward performance of what it enjoins, and no less the inward disposition of the heart from which that performance ought to spring. The sixth commandment requires that you preserve your own life and the life of your neighbour, that you put away anger and envy and every desire for revenge, that you cultivate a peaceable and forgiving spirit. The seventh requires that you maintain chastity in thought, word, and deed, that you guard your eyes and your imagination, that you honour the marriage bed. A superficial reading of the commandments will leave a man complacent, supposing himself innocent because he has never stood before a human judge. A spiritual reading, which traces each commandment to its root in the hidden man of the heart, will humble him daily and send him daily to the throne of grace for pardon and for power. Make no truce with any known sin, and let no day end without bringing the day's failures to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel. Fourth, teach the Decalogue to your children. God commanded Israel to teach His words diligently to their children, to talk of them when they sat in their houses and when they walked by the way, when they lay down and when they rose up. The Ten Commandments are the most teachable summary of the moral law ever composed, and the child who memorises them in infancy will find, if God grants him faith in later years, that the Spirit can use what the memory has stored to instruct the conscience and guide the will. Teach them not as a code of abstract rules but as the words of the God who brought His people out of Egypt, the God who loved them and redeemed them and claimed them for His own. Teach them that the first commandment forbids every idol of the heart (the love of money, of pleasure, of reputation, of self) and that the tenth commandment exposes the root from which every other transgression grows. And teach them above all that the law is a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ, that every commandment they have broken has been kept perfectly by Another, and that the righteousness they cannot produce by their own obedience is offered to them freely in the gospel. Fifth, let the perpetuity of the moral law be the anchor of your confidence in an age of moral drift. Every generation faces the temptation to revise the law of God to suit the spirit of the age, and every generation that has yielded to that temptation has discovered, sooner or later, that it has cut itself adrift from the only fixed point in the moral universe. The nomos of God did not begin with Moses, and it does not end with modern man. It is not the product of a particular culture, the expression of a particular stage of human development, or the code of a particular tribe in the ancient Near East. It is the eternal will of the eternal God, and what it forbids no human legislature can make lawful, and what it commands no human consensus can make optional. The man who anchors his conscience in the Decalogue will not be swept away by every wind of doctrine. He will have a standard by which to judge the shifting opinions of his age, and he will be able to say what the Reformers said before emperors and councils: my conscience is captive to the Word of God. The law is perfect, converting the soul. It is sure, making wise the simple. It endures forever, and the believer who builds his life upon it builds upon a rock that no storm can shake.

Prayer

O most holy and eternal God, whose law is perfect, converting the soul, and whose commandments are holy, and just, and good, we bow before Thee in gratitude for the clarity of Thy revealed will. Thou didst not leave us to the flickering light of a fallen conscience, to grope in the darkness of our own imaginings after the shape of righteousness. Thou didst condescend to write Thy law upon tables of stone and to deliver it to Thy people with Thine own voice from the summit of the holy mountain. We bless Thee that the law which would have condemned us under the covenant of works Thou hast preserved as a perfect rule of righteousness, a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. Teach us to love what Thou hast commanded and to desire what Thou hast promised, that among the many changes and chances of this mortal life our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found. Grant us grace to keep the two tables of Thy law in their proper order, loving Thee with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and loving our neighbour as ourselves for Thy sake. Let the first table govern the second, and let the worship we render Thee on the Lord's Day shape the service we render our fellow men on every other day. Preserve us from a piety that neglects mercy and from a humanitarianism that neglects Thee. May our religion be whole and undivided, directed upward to Thy throne in adoration and outward to our neighbour in love. Write Thy law upon our hearts by the finger of Thy Spirit, for the letter written on stone cannot change the heart of stone. What Sinai could not accomplish, Calvary has accomplished, and what the law could not produce, grace has provided. Let the righteousness of the law be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit, and let the obedience of the Son in whom Thou art well pleased be reproduced in the sons whom Thou hast adopted. We confess that we have broken every commandment of Thy holy law in thought, in word, and in deed. We have loved other gods and fashioned idols in the workshop of our hearts. We have taken Thy name lightly and profaned Thy day. We have dishonoured our parents, harboured anger, cherished lust, taken what is not ours, spoken falsehood, and coveted what Thou hast wisely withheld. Our only refuge is the righteousness of Christ, who kept the law in our place and bore its curse in our stead. Hide us in His wounds. Cover us with His righteousness. And present us faultless before the presence of Thy glory with exceeding joy. And when the shadows of this present age have fled away, bring us to the city where there is no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it, and where the law shall no longer be a rule external to our wills but the glad and spontaneous motion of hearts made perfectly free to love Thee and to love one another, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.