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The value of God's gifts largely depends upon the use we make of them. There are powers within our reach which may with equal ease destroy our welfare or increase it. Every reader of the Epistles, every student of Pharisaic teaching, and every one who understands the work of the Judaisers, is aware that even the Mosaic law was grossly abused. The law is good if a man use it lawfully. The apostle next endeavoured to explain more fully the purpose of the law, and his explanation may be summed up under three heads: —

I. THE LAW WAS NOT MEANT AS AN INSPIRATION. "The law is not made for a righteous man." The statement is true, whether you think of a man "righteous" by nature or by grace. Those edicts and prohibitions were not intended for one who was eagerly inclined to obey their spirit. Such a revelation of God's will would not have been needed if Adam had continued in his righteousness, for things forbidden with pains and penalties after his fall were not at first attractive to him. If you walk through a private garden with the children of its owner, as one of themselves, you do not see anywhere the unsightly notice-boards, which are necessary in a place open to the public, asking you to move in this direction or in that, and to avoid trespassing hither or thither. Amongst the children, and as one of them, you are consciously above the need of such laws as those. Restrictions and warnings are always meant for those inclined to break them. Another example might be drawn from society. The laws on our statute books, the police who tramp through our streets, the vast organization represented by prisons and courts, by judges and magistrates, would no longer be necessary, and would never have been called into existence, if every man loved his neighbour even as himself. It is those who are disobedient in nature who make law a necessary institution. Similarly in the home. When your first child comes as a gleam of sunshine into your home, you parents do not begin to make a theoretical code of restrictions; but when the children grow older, and there are conflicts of will between them, and the household is likely to he disorderly by their thoughtlessness and faults, you begin to say, "You must not do this or that; it is to be from this time forward forbidden." But as the years roll on and good habits are formed by the young people, and from the love they bear you they instinctively know what you wish and readily do it, even these wise rules practically fall into desuetude. Because they are ruled by a right spirit they are set free from law. This leads to our second assertion, namely, that the law which was not meant for an inspiration was —

II. INTENDED FOR THE RESTRAINT OF THE DISOBEDIENT. A law less man is everywhere the least free. Carried hither and thither by his ungoverned passions; swayed now this way, now that, by his inexcusable carelessness and neglect, he nevertheless finds himself perpetually clashing against a will mightier than his own. Sometimes it is the law of his country which seizes him by the throat and holds him in restraint. Sometimes it is disease, the direct result of his own sin, which falls like a curse upon himself, and even upon his children. Some times it is conscience which protests and rebukes, until his whole life is made miserable. And these are but premonitions of what is coming when the Judge of all the earth will appear to give every man according to his works, and the thunders of outraged law will supersede the gentle voice of Christ's gospel. Terrible is the list of offences against human relationships which follows; though the first of the phrases in our version is at once too strong and too narrow. "Murderers of fathers" should be "smiters of fathers and smiters of mothers." The allusion may be to such crimes in the literal sense of the word, of which now and again we are horrified to hear, and which are commonest with those who are under the influence of drink — the cause of innumerable crimes! Or it may refer with equal force to those who smite their parents with the tongue, loading them with scorn and reproach, instead of encircling them with considerate love. "Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother, and let all the people say Amen." "Man-slayers" — those who, by their exactions and oppressions, indirectly destroy the lives of men — as well as murderers, who are regarded as the pariahs of society. "Whoremongers and they that defile themselves with mankind," are terms which are meant to include all transgressors of the seventh commandment, a law which our Lord Jesus so broadened out in its application as even to include indulgence in lustful thought. "Liars and perjured persons" are forms of that false witness against one's neighbour which the ninth commandment so strongly condemns; and nothing is clearer as an evidence of the rule of Christ's spirit than the transparent truthfulness of character, which wins the admiration of the world, and suns itself in the favour of God. This list is formidable enough, and the fact that the apostle does not confine himself to the phraseology of the Mosaic decalogue, is a sign that we do not evade the penalties of the law by keeping its letter.

III. THE APOSTLE ASSERTS THAT THE PURPOSE OF THE LAW IS AMONGST THE THINGS REVEALED IN THE GOSPEL OF THE BLESSED GOD, The "sound doctrine" he mentions is the teaching of our Lord and His apostles; which, as the phrase denotes, was thoroughly "sound" or wholesome, especially as opposed to the weak and distempered doctrines propounded by the false teachers whom Timothy had to oppose.

(A. Rowland, LL. B.)

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KJV: But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully;

WEB: But we know that the law is good, if a man uses it lawfully,