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water, even like that bitter water which descended with a curse into the bowels of the guilty woman. As she exposed herself in form to the curse, and said, Amen, to all the terms of it; so did the Jews challenge the curse of heaven, which accordingly took place on them and their posterity.

The civil institution, applied to the person of the Messiah, is that concerning the Hebrew servant, who having served six years, was to go free in the sabbatical year, if he chose to depart; but if he was content with his service, and willing to continue in it, he was to be brought before the Judges, and to be fastened to the door, or the post of the door, by an awl driven through his ear, as a sign of his consent, and he was to serve his master for ever *.

Under an allusion to this example, the obedience of Christ in the flesh is foretold and illustrated in the Psalms; and a wonderful example it is: for here we are to observe, that, upon this occasion, no sacrifice nor offering is appointed; nothing passes but the obedience of a willing servant: therefore in the application of it to Christ, the prophet says, Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire, but mine ears hast thou opened-burnt-offering and sin-offering thou hast not required; then said I, lo I come, in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O God. In the epistle to the Hebrews, the passage as cited by the apostle, and applied to the obedience and death of Christ, stands thus; Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared me. The sense is the same in both, though the words are different. The apostle after the Greek version says, a body hast thou prepared me; that is, a body wherein

* Exod. xxi. 6.

to suffer and be obedient unto death: the psalm says, mine ears hast thou pierced: for the word is the same as in the 22nd psalm, they pierced my hands and feet; and here the piercing of the ear, the symbol of obedience, was a sign of his suffering in that body which should be prepared for him. All this being a reference to the custom observed under the law toward the obedient servant, that custom was a standing testimony in the volume of the book of Moses, that the Messiah, taking the form of a servant, should offer himself freely to do the will of God for our salvation; and in consequence of this determination, should be pierced in the body, as the willing servant was bored through to the post of the door; the place where the blood of the passover was sprinkled with the same signification once every year.

In this and the preceding lecture I have endeavoured to shew, as my plan requires, how the language of the other parts of scripture is borrowed from the language of the law, and is to be interpreted thereby. To what has been said, give me leave to add a few general observations on the nature and design of the law of Moses.

St. Paul asks the question; wherefore then serveth the law? To which he gives this answer; it was added because of transgression, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made*. The expectation of the seed first promised in paradise, and afterwards to Abraham, was the sum and substance of the patriarchal faith; and all the earliest institutions of priesthood and sacrifice were intended to keep up this expectation. But when the perverseness of men had changed and corrupted the primitive institutions for the base pur

Galatians iii, 19.

poses of idolatry and the worship of false Gods, it became necessary on account of these frequent transgressions to add a written law, with a stated form of positive services, never to be altered nor departed from; and all of them descriptive of the salvation which was to be effected by the promised seed; whence you are not to wonder, that in him they all meet and find their interpretation.

They who were bound to the observation of the law, were thereby separated of necessity from the world; and, as St. Paul very strongly expresses it, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed; confined to a set of ceremonies and services, under which it was in a manner impracticable for them to evade the objects of their faith, when they should be revealed in their true form. Not only the substance of what was expected, but all the particulars and circumstantials had been acted over in figure for ages together: and so the law was a schoolmaster unto Christ; preparing those who were under it for the reception of the gospel, and as it were forcing them upon it, if men could on that principle be reconciled to truth.

When the gospel appeared, the Jew should have reasoned thus with himself. Do they say Jesus died for our redemption? So did the paschal lamb die to redeem our whole nation in Egypt. Did he ascend afterwards into heaven? So did our high priest go yearly into the most holy place, carrying thither the blood of a sacrifice slain in the worldly sanctuary. Is there no remission of sin without shedding of blood? -There certainly was none under the law. Has Jesus appointed a baptism with water? So had our law its

• Galatians v. 25.

purifications for the washing away of uncleanness. Is the partition we have so diligently kept up between ourselves and the Heathens to be broken down at last, and is the true religion to be carried out amongst all nations? So was our tabernacle brought from the solitary wilderness under Joshua, whom the Greeks call Jesus, into the possession of the Gentiles. Numberless other questions might be asked, shocking to the prejudices of a Jew, which would bring their own answers with them out of the law of Moses: and such was the use the Jew ought to have made of it.

From the various applications of particular passages from the law, previous to the revelation of the gospel, it appears that the law was in itself a spiritual as well as a figurative system, for the forming of the heart, and the purifying of the mind; yet conveying its precepts in parables and signs which wanted an interpretation and that interpretation is occasionally dropped in so many parts of the scripture, especially in the Psalms, that the prophets and masters of Israel appear to have understood the law in a spiritual sense. If the bulk of the people did not understand it so, we must not impute this to any uncertainty or obscurity in Moses and the prophets, but to that carnal affection which naturally chuses the form of religion without the spirit of it. Their pride, their affectation of false wisdom, their avarice, their adultery, blinded them, and made them as averse, to the sense of a miracle wrought before their eyes, as to the sense of the darkest verse in the Pentateuch. The world always has been, and now is, to those that are shut under its laws, a schoolmaster to turn men away from Christ; and a conceited worldly minded Christian, proud of the powers of reason without grace, is at this hour as blind to the spirit of the gospel as the Jew

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ever was to that of the law. For ignorance of the true spirit of Christianity, and the design of its doctrines, I would match the modern philosophising Socinian with the blindest Jew: for the one has made the gospel as void as the other made the law. Read the writings of some whose books have made a great noise in the present century, and you will know no more of the Christian church and the Christian sacraments, than the wandering Jew, who now travels about to cheat Christians with his wares, knows of the priesthood and sacrifices in the books of Moses.

The law is of use to us Christians for the illustration of the new testament, whose language and mysteries are so founded upon it, that the language of the gospels and epistles is unintelligible without a particular attention to the law; and in proportion as our knowledge of it encreases, our faith will grow stronger.. Thus the law serves for evidence both to the Jew and Gentile; and the same schoolmaster, which should have brought them to Christ, will keep us with him. For, did the apostle in his preaching say nothing but what Moses had said? And did the gospel teach nothing but what the law had signified long before? Then must the gospel be that very salvation, which was known to God from the beginning, and in reserve to be made manifest to the world in the latter days.

This argument, clear and irresistible as it certainly is, will one day appear to the Jews as it does to us, when the scales of blindness shall fall from their eyes and then it may be thought the greatest wonder of all, that they who had the old testament in their hands for eighteen hundred years, should never have seen the use of it before.

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