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Third: Either from afflictions, suffering, disappointments, or from voluntarily hearkening to the truth, a man begins to feel a desire to change his life, and looking to the Lord he repents and resolves to obey the Divine Commandments by shunning evils as sins against God.
There is a great deal about buying and selling in them, and the lawful way of conducting different kinds of business; but they are wholly different from those wonderful Commandments which God gave to the Children of Israel three hundred years later.
"How daredst thou to transgress the laws?" "Zeus made not such laws, nor Justice that dwelleth with the gods below. I judged not that thy decrees had such authority that a man should transgress for them the unwritten sure commandments of the gods. For these, indeed, are not of today or yesterday, but they live forever, and their beginning no man knoweth.
The individual, following that retreating horizon which we name the West, found an escape from convention and from social law. Beyond the Mississippi or beyond the Rockies meant to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where the Ten Commandments are no longer to be found, where the individual has free rein. But by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the return to reality.
Also in Titus 1, 14 he openly forbids traditions: Not giving heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men that turn from the truth. And Christ, Matt. 15, 14. 13, says of those who require traditions: Let them alone; they be blind leaders of the blind; and He rejects such services: Every plant which My heavenly Father hath not planted shall be plucked up.
Ten commandments constitute the brief compend of human duty. Two of these brand slavery as sin. The giving of the law at Sinai, immediately preceded the promulgation of that body of laws called the "Mosaic system."
But, Love is counted a most infallible sign that a man is in a state of salvation. Love to God is, that we keep his sayings, his commandments, his laws. A man cannot love God that loves not holiness; he loves not holiness that loves not God's word; he loves not God's word that doth not do it.
For if so be they whom God hath placed in greatest dignity did see and perceive these men's practices, how Christ's commandments be despised by them, how the light of the Gospel is darkened and quenched out by them, and how themselves also be subtly beguiled and mocked, and unawares be deluded by them, and the way to the kingdom of heaven stopped up before them: no doubt they would never so quietly suffer themselves neither to be disdained after such a proud sort, nor so despitefully to be scorned and abused by them.
II. One can easily picture the scene while the reader's voice went steadily through the commandments, threatenings, and promises, the deepening eagerness of the king, the gradual shaping out before his conscience of God's ideal for him and his people, and the gradual waking of the sense of sin in him, like a dormant serpent beginning to stir in the first spring sunshine.
There are some things that are best done gradually and slowly, but obedience to Christ's call is not one of them. Prompt obedience is the only safety. The psalmist knew the danger of delay when he said: 'I made haste and delayed not, but made haste to keep Thy commandments. Matthew does not tell us that he made the feast, but Luke does.
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