Brothers and sisters, would you take your Bibles, please, and turn to the Old Testament. To the book of the Second Law, Deuteronomy, and to chapter 5, as we begin our study tonight of the Ten Commandments. There was something in the Christian historic faith, the Christian religion, known as the Three Formule, that's plural for formula. The Three Formule, and they are the Apostles Creed, the Ten Commandments in the Lord's Prayer. One is our doctrinal summary of what we believe the Creed, the other an exposition of our ethics, how we are to live a righteous life, and the third the Lord's Prayer is an exposition of our piety and our prayer life. They make up all historic Christian catacisms. For example, the Roman Catholic, Catholicism of the Catholic Church, is organized around those three formula, the Creed, the commandments, and the Lord's Prayer. So it was Luther's small catacism when he began to affect his Reformation in Wittenburg. He took a little catacism and he expounded wonderfully, still one of the best catacisms ever written on the Creed, the Apostles Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer. Even our own Westminster Confession of Faith and Catacisms are organized around these three formulae. Now actually, the Three Formulae are really four, because they always had a four section to them on baptism, because the teaching of the church was that as we understand the Creed and we understand the commandment and how we're to live, and we understand the Lord's Prayer and how we're to approach God and worship a prayer, once we understand those three things we're ready to be baptized, to be members of the church, so they always include a four section on baptism in the sacraments. If you looked at our, when Mr. Shorty Catacism, that's exactly how it's organized in a little bit different order. The first 38 questions and answers are about our doctrine, our exposition, our explanation of the faith, the Creed, the next section from Question 39 to 87, the longest section in the Catacism is about the Ten Commandments, and then a short 11-questioned exposition of the Lord's Prayer followed by about 20 or so questions on the sacraments beginning with baptism. And these three formulae have made up the catechetical instruction of the church for literally thousands of years. The staff was talking with me the other day at staff meeting and they were asking me about books and I said, well, if someone said, we're going to put you in prison, we're going to let you take two books with you. One is the Bible and one other book, and that's all the books you can take for the rest of your life. I take the Bible and I would take J.I. Packer's little book called Growing in Christ which is a wonderful exposition of these three formulae and the sacraments. And at the beginning of that little book, Packer says Christianity is not instinctive to anyone nor is it picked up casually without effort. It is a faith that has to be learned and therefore must be taught. And so some sort of systematic instruction, some sort of catechuminate, is an essential part of the church's life. In the first Christian centuries there was a steady stream of adult converts and inquires and catechetical instruction took the form of lectures given at their level. The reformer's strategy for revitalizing a Christendom that was ignorant of Christianity led them, however, to concentrate on systematic instruction for children. Having a century and a half, following Luther's pioneer little catechism in 1529, literally hundreds of catechisms were produced, mostly through, though not exclusively, for the young and some of these were official church documents and others were private expositions of individual clergymen or pastors. The English Prayer Book has a catechism, the Heidelberg catechism for the Dutch and the Westminster Shorter catechism for the English. One great need today is a renewal of the systematic Christian instruction that we call catechism, even for adults. It need not be called that, nor need to take the form of a rigid, drilling in present formula with question and answers, which is how the old time Protestants taught their children. But somehow or another opportunities must be given for people in and just outside of the church to examine the Christian essentials because there are many for whom this is a prime need. In fact, when Packer originally wrote this little book that's now called Growing in Christ, the original title for it was, I want to be a Christian. And so what we're going to do tonight is talk about what it means to be a Christian in terms of the law. You'll notice that there is, we think, a divine order to our preaching. We're going through the Ten Commandments on Sunday night and Jesus Christ's explanation of them on Sunday morning and the sermon on the Mount. But these Ten Commandments formed the basis for our understanding of what is right and wrong and what is the ethical and righteous and holy and loving way for a person to live with God and in the family and in the church and in the community at large with other people. These Ten Commandments called the Decalogue, Greek for two logs or two rules or two tablets are found in two places in the scriptures you know. The original version in Exodus chapter 20, which is usually referred to as the first giving of the law. But you'll remember that in a moment of righteous indignation aimed against the idolatry of Aaron and the people of God Moses shattered those two tablets because they had broken the law. Therefore, he broke the covenant in symbol of their great offense to God and later, just a few days later, God called him up to the mountain again. For another 40 days and 49, he gave him the second law, the Deuteronomy, and so the second version of the Ten Commandments, almost identical to the first, is in Deuteronomy chapter 5, verses 6 through 21, they are God's blueprint for living. They are called in the Hebrew Torah, which literally means the good instruction, just as the writer of Proverbs says, hear my son, your father's instruction, for sake, not your mother's teaching. They are graceful Garland for your head and pendants for your neck, my son. Keep your father's commandment and for sake, not your mother's teaching. Bind them on your heart always and tie them around your neck when you walk, they will lead you, when you lie down, they will guard you, when you wake, they will talk with you. For the commandment is a lamp and a teaching, a light. The reproofs of discipline are the ways of life that is blessed. So here we have Torah, the law of God, and it's most of the time perceived as something that is repressive, harsh, at the very least, dictatorial and unflinching, but it cannot be stated too much that the Old Testament law is in no way inferior to the gospel. I want you to know that these two great pillars upon which we form our life together in our life with God and our hope for eternity, the law and the gospel, both flow from the character and heart of God. We like to think of God as gracious and indeed he is, completely 100% gracious, and part of his graciousness is the law. And what we want to do tonight is see what the law actually does for us because we live in an anti-nominant and anti-law, a lawless age, in fact Jesus warned us about this. He said towards the end of times because people are lawless, the love of many will grow cold. So we're finding that in our culture, all of our rebellion and resistance against the law of God. And yet the consistent teaching of Christ in the Apostles is that the law of God is just is wonderful and just is gracious and just is good as the gospel. There is a misunderstanding in the Christian faith, even in reformed Presbyterian circles that somehow the gospel came to complete what was lacking in the law. And I'm here to tell you that's absolutely false. And that somehow the gospel trumps the law. And I'm here to tell you that's absolutely not true. So that somehow the law has a secondary place to the gospel that relies and that is fundamentally even logically inconsistent with the Bible, its false. The law of God is a good thing. In fact in Romans chapter 7, when Paul was talking about his struggles as a Christian, he said you know I wouldn't know what it was to covet unless the law said you shall not covet. And so the law came he said and revealed that sin was not just something out there, it was a power within me. It wasn't really I who was doing the things but sin which dwelt in me and therefore the law is wholly enrighteous and good because it drives me to Jesus Christ who will save me from the body of this death thanks be to Jesus Christ who always gives us the victory. Jesus Christ who is both the author and the fulfiller of the gospel and the author and the fulfiller of the law. There are two sides to Jesus Christ, the glory of his gracious goodness and the glory of his gracious holiness and both of these things are reflected in law and gospel. Grace is not a license to break the law. In fact Paul says what shall we say then or we to continue and sin that grace may abound may it never be. How can we have died to sin still live in it or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus are baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him in baptism unto this death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father we might to and walk in newness of life. The old man having been put to death the new man alive to God in Jesus Christ. In fact we really understand grace the way the Bible preaches it. We find that grace is a power to keep the law and a freedom to live above the bondage of sin. That's the message of Galatians. For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm then therefore and do not submit again to Yoke of slavery. For you were called to freedom brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh but do love serve one another. For the whole law is filled in one word you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So Michael Horton is right and his book about the Ten Commandments to refer to these ten laws as the law of perfect freedom. And what I want to do tonight is just introduce you to the Ten Commandments. I know you familiar with them and you could probably recite them in order but I'm going to pretend tonight that you've never heard about the Ten Commandments before. And I want to tell you what they do for you, why they're given and how they will help us in our life. And I want to begin by giving you the tonight three sets of three observations. Three things that the law will do for us in different ways. And the first set of three is that there are three kinds or three types of law that we find in the Bible, only one of which applies to us today. Look if you will and do it tonight, chapter five, beginning in the first five verses. And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them here, O Israel, the statutes and the rules that I speak and you're hearing today. You shall learn them and be careful to do them. The Lord your God made it covenant with us in horib. Not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with us who were all of us here alive today. The Lord spoke with you face to face at the mountain out of the midst of the fire. What I stood between the Lord and you at that time to declare to you the word of the Lord for you were afraid because of the fire and you did not go up to the mountain. Look over in chapter five, if you will, in verses 44 and 45. This is the law that Moses set before the people of Israel. These are the testimonies, the statutes and the rules which Moses spoke to the people. If we had time tonight, we would turn to Exodus chapter 34. And we would find where God actually told Moses to go up and to get these ten commandments, these ten words, decalogue, on these tablets of stone. On stone to indicate that they are permanent and cannot be changed in any way. They are immutable as God is written twice, it says, in Exodus and in Deuteronomy by the finger of God. There is a myth that God dictated the ten commandments to Moses and he carved them out on stone. That is not true. The finger, the hand of Christ, the pre-incarnate Christ came out of the fire and wrote on tablets of stone and carved them out and handed them to Moses so that human hands never touched the law of God until the pre-incarnate Christ gave them to Moses for the people. And in Exodus chapter 34, you may want to read this sometime, God says, this law that I am giving you is a covenant. Now we know that there is a great covenant that over arches all of the Bible called the covenant of grace. And just like children learn mathematics or history or science or their own language in different stages, so the people of God have learned this covenant of grace over different courses, over different ages and it came to them in progressive and developing stages. It began with a covenant of preservation. Where God gave a covenant again to Noah and his family when he came off the ark and each time God reinforces the covenant of grace, he gives it a sign and a seal, a symbol and a guarantee that sign and seal and symbol after the flood was what? Reminding us that every time we see a rainbow, we will be reminded that God will never again destroy the earth, but he will keep life in its patterns, its seasons, its months and days and years so that life goes on because you cannot redeem that which you kill. So God promises a covenant of preservation, hundred and so years later he calls a man Abraham and he calls himself and gives him what we call the covenant of promise, a great promise that in you all the nations of the earth shall be blessed and here is the sign of the covenant for you. On the eighth day of their life every male born to you, whether free born or slave shall be circumcised unto me, this is the sign of my covenant with you to a thousand generations. A mark on the people of God that they belong to God and that God belongs to them and then comes the third phase of the covenant which is the covenant of Moses, the covenant of the law. The reason I'm going through this is because there's still something in our minds, mainly from the apostle Paul, our misunderstanding of him, where law and gospel are always pitted against each other. That is not what Paul was saying. Paul was talking about legalism which is pitted against the gospel or Old Testament laws that no longer apply to the people of the world that were used to keep people from Christ and the grace of the gospel. That is Paul's antithesis but not the moral law, not the Ten Commandments. It is part of God's covenant of grace and in chapter 34 of Exodus God says again this is the sign of the covenant between me and your children to a thousand generations. What is the sign of the covenant of law? Anybody know? That's the Sabbath day. The Sabbath day you shall keep, he said, this is the sign of my covenant, you that we rest in God and we rest in his creation and in his redemption waiting for the law keeper to come and satisfy the just demands of the commandments that we continually break. We could go on and look at the covenant made with David, the covenant of the kingdom. The sign is obvious, you shall never lack a man to sit on the throne. Before the son of David came, the sign in seal of the covenant of grace and finally we come to Jeremiah to the new covenant where God says this, behold the days are coming declares the Lord when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke though I was their husband declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days declares the Lord. Listen carefully, this is the new covenant, I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts and I will be their God, they will be my people, no longer will each one say to his neighbor and to each his brother saying, no the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest declares the Lord, I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sins no more. God says this coming a day when you won't have to look at the 10 commandments, the law of God will be written by the finger of the Holy Ghost. In the tablets of your heart you will become as Paul said living epistles and you will look inward because you no longer keep the law of God out of fear but out of love for Jesus Christ and there is a new presence within you. What is the sign and seal of that covenant? It is the Holy Spirit. I will put a new heart in them, I will take away a heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh and my spirit will dwell within them, says both Jeremiah and Ezekiel and even Isaiah. And so this new covenant is initiated on Pentecost Sunday when the Holy Spirit comes and lives within us and as part of the new creation he brings us into a baptism, into a relationship with the living God and the covenant community where we celebrate the new Passover as we celebrate the new circumcision and we enter into the people of the gospel who are people who have the law of God written in their hearts. At the heart of God's covenant is this moral law. He says look again in chapter 4, verse 44, this is the law that Moses set before the people of God. These are the testimonies, the statutes and the rules which Moses spoke to the people of Israel when they came out of Egypt. Moses mentions three things here, the testimonies, the statutes and literally the laws. There are testimonies of the moral law, the Ten Commandments. There are statutes for spiritual worship, the ceremonial law and there are rules for civil government in life which is the civil law of Israel. These are the three sides, the triangle of law, under the covenant with Moses. But there is only one that remains for us, one that is permanent and that is the moral law known as the Ten Commandments, written on the conscience not only of individuals but written on the conscience of every individual person but on the conscience of every individual in the world. We would have turned to Romans chapter 2, we would find Paul saying this about people who are pagans. For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, there are law to themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts where their conscience is also bear witness and their conflicting thoughts either accuse or excuse them on the day when according to the gospel God will judge the secrets of all men through Christ Jesus our Lord. There is, Paul says, the Ten Commandments written on the heart of every individual. You know, this is an interesting fact, anthropologists have never found a culture as primitive as it may be where in some form or another the Ten Commandments were not reinforced. We've never found a culture where you could just kill anybody. You've never found a culture that says dishonor your parents, no big deal. Even if they're polygamists, you can't just go take somebody else's wife. You can't steal other people's stuff. You can't dishonor authority. And whoever their gods are, their gods are holy and have to be worshipped on a certain way and they always have a holy day for worship. Darkened in their own hearts from the life of God and through their ignorance of the gospel of Jesus Christ, they still have written by the finger of God on the human conscience because that the image of God or reflection of his divine character encased in these ten moral dictates. Every pagan, every atheist, every humanist proclaims in self-righteousness, well, I'm better than most people after all, I keep the Ten Commandments. How is it they know that? Because the moral law binding on all of them because their conscience informs them. This is the way God wants human beings to live. Now there are two other aspects of this law, Moses' ceremonial law, these statues, these sacrificial regulations and festivals and holy days and ceremonial cleansings and certain rituals they had to follow and special diets to protect and preserve Israel. And these were all types or foreshadowing of Jesus Christ. They pointed to what Jesus Christ would be and what he would do. They are foreshadowing of his atonement. They are forecasting of his cleansing for us. And they remind us as they illustrate Christ that we are people set aside as the people who know the true God who should worship the true God in Spirit and truth. That's what Jesus said. The day is coming when they won't worship in this mountain or another mountain before God is spirit. And those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth. As Paul said, he has redeemed a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Now all of these ceremonial laws have been done away with. That's the great theme of the epistle of Hebrews. They have an abrogator to stop. Because they all pointed to Jesus Christ and what he would do on Calvary and Easter Sunday. And once he's accomplished that, they're no longer necessary. We no longer lead these types or these illustrations because the real thing in the flesh has already come in Jesus Christ and brought us into a new day. In fact, our Westminster confession of faith says, besides these laws commonly called the moral law, God is pleased to give the people of Israel a church under age, ceremonial laws containing several types of ordinances, from the worship, prefiguring Christ and others of his gracious and stored them in their cleansings. They were graces and actions and sufferings and benefits and partly holding forth the diverse instructions of moral duties, all of which now have been abrogated under the New Testament. They've stopped. You want to know something? There's a lot of people who won't stop them. In the past three months, I have received half a dozen emails from people in this church and outside the church saying, Pastor, where is all this coming from? A people saying that we need to practice the Old Testament holy days and acts of worship. Where is it coming from? Why would we want to return to the old, the old ceremony, or now living in the new age of the gospel? Why would we want to go back in time to an old revelation when revelation is always progressive? Why do we want to go back to a shadow? Paul calls them a shadow of things to come when the light of Christ is fully dawned. Why would we want to go back to the gate controversy of the book of Acts in the early church against the judaizers who said, first, you've got to be circumcised and practice all these Jewish laws and rituals, and then you can become a Christian. And yet, it's all around us. One lady called Kathy Hargate, who lives here in the Charlotte area, has a ministry called Highway to Zion Ministries, wrote on her blog site. On the homepage, as we continue to celebrate the feasts of the Lord with their fulfillment and our Messiah, we grow deeper in love with Him. To celebrate the feasts of the Lord with their fulfillment and Yeshua of the Messiah is to experience true living in His Word, truly being in His life. Any believer who desires to take the plunge out of mainstream Gentile culture, understanding our identification with our Jewish Messiah and the deeps of how the line of juda has fulfilled the spring feasts and how you will fulfill the fall feast at His second coming will come away profoundly changed. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. First of all, there are no spring feasts that Jesus Christ has already fulfilled and the harvest ones in the fall that He's going to fulfill. We don't need to go back to something old to find the fulfillment of what it is. It's like a man who's happily married deciding he's going to date again. What man is right in mind would do that. Someone happily married man might, but not those who are happily married to Jesus Christ. And that's just unbiblical thinking. In fact, it's contrary to the gospel. In Galatians Paul says, if you go back to circumcision and the keeping of the law, these ceremonial laws of Moses, you have fallen from grace and then cut off from Jesus Christ. Now listen, this is not just a good idea to bring some revitalization into your religion. This is a practice that's contrary to the gospel and will cut you off from Christ. We don't have to call Him Yeshua. The New Testament is inspired and calls Him Jesus. We don't need to say disparagingly that we need to be free from this Gentile foreshadowing. We are the Gentiles. That's the whole plan for crying out loud to go from one little unique people to the Gentile nations of the world. That's the whole great commission. There's nothing inferior to being a Gentile. There's nothing that we lack in the church because we don't have all the elaborate temple rituals and cleansings of the Jews. In fact, it's to be freed from something that was difficult. We're going to do that. Then no more bacon. No more bacon. And no more eating with a Gentile. Very strict rules about when you're intimate with your wife, never in her time of the month. And all of these things that required a great burden for the people of God who were looking forward to Jesus Christ. So the ceremonial law is gone because the ceremony has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the Paschal Lamb who has fulfilled all of these images, all of these foreshadowing. I'm encouraging you. In fact, I'm charging you don't go back. You go forward with Jesus Christ. That's the whole letter of collotions that Christ is sufficient beyond all these other things. Go forward in Christ, fullness of God, in human flesh. We're not waiting for anything. We've got it all right now with Jesus Christ. Thirdly, there's the civil law. That's the third element of the Jewish mosaic dispensation. Civil law and legal statutes and punishments for violating God's law. We stoned homosexuals then, fornicators, or belligerent children who cursed or struck their parents. There were compensation, steep compensations for civil lawsuits, regulations about concubines and slaves and system laws who were widowed and without children and you had to give them a child if you were the brother-in-law. All kinds of civil laws that praise God have ceased to exist because Christ has come and Israel is no longer his instrument in the world. This is not the age of Israel, this is the age of the church. The church that is above and beyond the cultures of all different societies and is a kingdom of God, a city of God, in its own right with a new law. Now why? Why all these harsh things? Well Walter Chantry in his book, God's righteous kingdom says that this law, as Paul said, was like a schoolmaster and it was very strict over this infantile religion that was just learning about one true God and one messing on a cope and one way to be separate from the world. And so the rules were more strident and even harsh for them. They are for our children. I mean, you parents say, look, you put up this big expensive fence, cost thousands, dollars around the backyard and you say to four-year-old, now if you go out and play in the street, you'll never leave this yard until you're 25 years old having paid for your own college education. You try to put the fear of God in this little guy, now you don't say that to a 25-year-old. In fact, when they're 25, you'd like to get him back in the backyard and lock him up for a while. You don't do that, but when the child is infantile, he has no concept of the dangers in the streets. The kidnappers and pedophiles in the community, animals and plants that can make him sick and hurt him. He needs to be protected because he's so helpless and so did Israel. And these things were strident. They were strict, you know why? Because Israel was an incubator. Think of Israel as an incubator, as a little nursery into which one baby boy would be born, do my referring to Jesus Christ, the Son of Israel. And if those people strayed away from one true God, if they continued as they did in the Old Testament to offer their first born male as a sacrifice to the God Molec, if they continued to have as the Gentiles did many wives and sexually promiscuous lives, then I ask you this, how could our Messiah have had a virgin birth, been born into the true people of God, but kept holy as a child, and been a sinless sacrifice for us. How could that be? But once the Savior was born, once He died on the cross and rose from the grave, we don't need the nursery anymore. According to Paul on Pentecost, we stepped out of infancy into the adulthood of gospel living. And no longer we were trying to keep these foul, polygamist, immoral, atheistic, godless Gentiles out of our nursery, we were sending the child of God, Jesus Christ and his brothers and sisters out into the world to bring them to us. We were no longer afraid of them because the Holy Spirit dwelling in us keeps us from being polluted under destruction because of what Jesus Christ has accomplished, and so the nation has ended. The incubator, the nursery is no longer there. We don't want to keep the Gentiles away, but bring them in, and so all of these civil laws have been stopped. There is an error in our church called Theonomy. It used to be strong in the PCA, I thank God that it's weakening. This idea that all of these laws about killing homosexuals, and killing adulterous people, and putting to death young people who fornicate, now be careful here, was somehow good for America. You know what? If that were true, there wouldn't be one of us alive in this room today, not one. In fact, when Paul was writing to the Corinthians, listen to what he said, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral or idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, or drunkards, or revilers, or swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God, but such were some of you. You were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. You go kill in everybody who does bad things, and evangelism becomes real easy. It's issue in Jesus left. We don't kill people who do bad things. We love them and bring them to Christ so they start doing good things. Therefore, this idea that the ceremonial laws and the civil laws could somehow help us, as you can see, is ridiculous. Is there any benefit to them? We'll listen to our confession of faith. To them is a body politic. He gave sundry Judas laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any other now further than the general equity of the principle may require. There was a general principle. Things that were illegal in the Old Testament ought to be illegal now, adultery ought to be illegal, homosexual ought to be illegal, fornication ought to be illegal. But how we enforce that is no governed and gardened by the gospel and not by some civil magistrate. We are bound by the moral law. We are freed from the ceremonial law, and we are somewhat guided by the civil law, but we are on a new age now. The law is no longer the concern of someone else, some priest in a temple, some king in a palace, some holy man with tablets of stone. No, it's our concern because the law of God under the new covenant is written in our hearts. So that brings us to the moral law, and the second set of three uses of the law of God. Look if you will in verse 22. These words the Lord spoke to all your assembly, at the mountain out of the midst of the fire, the cloud and the thick darkness with a loud voice, and he added no more, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone and gave them to me. And as soon as you heard the voice of the midst of the darkness while on the mountains was burning with fire, you came near to me all the heads of your tribes and your elders, and you said behold the Lord our God has shown us his glory and greatness, that we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire. This day we have seen God speak with man and man is still alive. Now therefore, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us. If we hear the voice of the Lord our God anymore, we shall die. For who is there in all flesh that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of the fires we have and has still lived? Go near and hear all that the Lord our God will say and speak to us all that the Lord our God will speak to you, and we will hear it and do it. The Lord heard your words, and you spoke to me and the Lord said to me, I have heard the words of this people which they have spoken to you. They are right in all that they have spoken. All that they had such a mind as this always, to fear me and keep my commandments that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever. Go and say to them, return to your tents, but you stand here by me and I will tell you the whole commandment and the statutes and the rules that you shall teach them. They may do them in the land which I am giving them to possess. You shall be careful therefore to do as the Lord your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right or to the left. You shall walk in all the ways that the Lord our God has commanded you that you may live and they may go well with you and that you may live long in the land that you shall possess. Here God shows us that there are three purposes to the moral law, three different purposes. The first use of the law, all the Presbyterian boys learn this in seminary when they study the law of God. Three purposes are three uses of the first one is the tutor to lead us to Christ. You see this in this passage, when they hear the Lord God speaking and they are afraid and convicted of their sin and they say, oh please Moses, you stand between us and an angry God, less he destroy us. Moses becomes a type of Christ who stands between a holy God and a sinful people and mediates for God and them brings them together under grace. And the first thing that happens when they hear this law of God is they are convicted of their sins and they feel that they are unable to approach God without Moses being the intercessor, the mediator for them, a type of Christ, for that is what Christ is for us. This is laid out clearly by the way by John Calvin in his institutes of the Christian religion. He's the one who gave to the Protestant faith the formulation of these three purposes of the law. He says, let us survey briefly the function and use of what is called the moral law. Now so far as I understand it, he consists in three parts, the first part is this, while it shows God's righteousness, that is the righteousness alone acceptable to God, it warns, informs, convicts, and lastly condemns every man of his own unrighteousness and drives him to Jesus Christ for salvation. It's just what Paul said in Galatians chapter 3 that the law is our tutor to Christ, literally our child instructor, our pedagogue. So we call this the pedagogical or the tutorial or the lengthink, the teaching, the mentoring purpose of the law. It's to take us and drive us to Christ and this is how it works. Paul describes it in Romans chapter 7. The law comes into our life and it begins to convict us of sin. And we naturally say, well you know, I'll do better, I'll try harder. And then we try a little bit harder and the law says not good enough. You did this but you didn't do this and we say, boy, all right, I'll try a little bit harder. I'll pray a little bit more and I'll go to church and I'll lift myself by the bootstraps and on and on this goes into finally in frustration we say to the law, hey, aren't you ever satisfied? And the law says, no, I'm not, not until you sin no more. And we say to the law, that is impossible. And the law says, it is, you'll never be anything but guilty. Well then we say, that's a fine how do you do? How in the world do we get to heaven? And the law says, I suggest you flee to Christ who will keep the law for you. Now you know, we don't like brother law. He's big and he's a bully and he's absolutely no fun. If you're going to Christmas party don't take brother law with you is don't do it. No we like sister Grace. She's younger, she's softer and she's just cutly. And so we go to Grace and say, well, that big bully brother you said that you could help me and she said indeed I can. And she introduces us to Jesus Christ. We fall in love with him. We're no longer afraid anymore of God of his law because we know that Jesus like Moses stands between us and God and makes us righteous in himself. But it's not very long in this new found family where brother Jesus and sister Grace finally convinced us that brother law all the time was our friend. He was the first one to step up and be worried about our souls and become unpopular with us that we might go to his brother Christ, his sister Grace and be saved. And an amazing thing happens. We as Christians no longer hate the law. We no longer see him as a harsh, austere, strident bully. We said no as Paul does, I now see that the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. And law becomes our friend as he's always been, now that our hearts are changed. That is the first and Calvin says the primary, the fundamental purpose of the law, it's not just to make people feel bad, it's to bring people under conviction so that they go for help to Jesus Christ and are saved. Here's the second use of the law called the Restrainer of Evil. Sometimes referred to as the judicial or the civil or the political power of the law, it's that the law works on the human conscience and makes people afraid, naturally afraid of two things, of doing the wrong thing and getting caught and getting punished. Listen to Calvin. The second function of the law is this, at least by fear of punishment to restrain certain men who are untouched by any care for what is just and right, unless compelled by the hearing of dire threats in the law. They are restrained not because of their inner mind is stirred or affected, but because being bridal so to speak, they keep their hands from outward activity and hold inside to the property that otherwise they would want to have indulged. The law serves here as an authority. In fact, I had a great, Lord gave me an illustration of this on the way to church tonight, I turned the corner, I was coming down John Street 25 miles an hour, I'm going 35 and all of a sudden in between two buildings, I see the front end of this car and the first words on it begin with P-O-L, Matthew's P-O-L, I said to him, shame on you as I drove by, I went like this to him, he went like this to me. That policeman there, his mere presence calls me to slow down, why? Because I didn't want to get caught, I didn't want to get a ticket. The policeman parked by the road, his sheer presence makes all these rebellious sinners slow down. You notice this when the principal just decides to walk the hallways, all the kids decide to behave themselves. It's like a pastor that goes to a party, he poops it as soon as he walks in the room. Who wants to tell a joke that's a little bit off when pastor Ross is there? It's the presence of a holy authority in our life that often restrains evil, and you know what? That's a marvelous gift from God, because the vast majority of the world are never going to believe in Jesus Christ, and they're not going to be filled with the Holy Spirit. They don't know and don't care who sister Grace is and they certainly won't love God in his law, but one thing that they will have and that they'll never be able to get rid of is this conscience that is afraid of punishment. And so the moral law written on the hearts of men and usually encased in the statutes of every community in the world somehow restrains evil. Imagine what the world would be like if that moral compass were not inside each one of us. Maybe the third use of the law, which Calvin said is the most important, and that is that is a guide for Christian living. It is to show us how to love God and to love others and be holy. The third and principle use Calvin says which pertains more closely to the proper purpose of the law, find this place among believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already lives in reigns. Through the directing of the Spirit, they long to obey God, and they still profit by the law in two ways. Here, the best instrument for them is to learn more thoroughly each day the nature of the Lord's will to which they aspire and to confirm them in the understanding of his character. Again, because we need not only teaching but also exhortation, the servant of God will also lay himself to the benefits of the law by frequent meditation upon it, to be aroused to obedience, to be strengthened in it, and to be drawn back from the slippery path of transgression into the arms of Jesus Christ. The law here serves as a roadmap for the Christian's life. If you listen to Jesus talk about the law of God, and you listen to the apostles, it's all about loving God and loving other people. Vack Paul gives a great summary of this in Romans 13, oh nothing to anyone except to love them for the one who loves others has fulfilled the law. For the commandments you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this one word. You shall love your neighbors yourself. Love does no wrong to any neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. How do I learn to love God more? That's probably what every person in this room really wants deep down inside. That's why you're here tonight. When I love God more, it's a noble sentiment of the good and noble way that God is placed in your life. And you want to be a better husband, a better wife, a better child, a better parent, a better friend, a better student, a better citizen. How do we learn that? We let the ten commandments unfold the richness of a life with God in us, and we benefit from its instruction. We're not worried that it's going to condemn us. There is no condemnation because we're in Christ Jesus. Remember, our Moses stands between us and God on the fiery mountain. But Moses is also called in the Bible, the great teacher. And so is Jesus Christ through the law, teaching us this new covenant, remember the new covenant. I will make a new covenant with a half-sister after those days, not like the covenant I made with them before, for I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be a God to them, and they shall be a people to me. And they will all know me. And that's what the law is attempting to do. Bring us into a deeper, richer fellowship with God and one another. So very quickly in closing, you say, Pastor, you've only got two minutes and you have another set of three to go, ah, but Brother Law is lenient tonight. These are easy to see. And that is that each law, each one of the commandments tells us three things. First thing it tells us is the character of God. What is God like? If someone came to you and said, what is God like? You know, the best thing you could do is give them the 10 commands and say, this is what he's like. Because each one of these commandments has one seminal truth about God that causes us to love him and need him more. Now we mention them this morning. We mention that we only have, we don't worship any other gods because God is the only true God. We don't have idols because God is spirit. We don't take His name and name because God is sacred. We don't work on the Sabbath day and rest because God is to be enjoyed. There's something enjoyable and pleasant about him that's worth celebrating. We don't kill because he's the author of life. We don't commit adulterer because he is faithful. He's only had one bride, his church, for all of his eternal existence, and we'll never have another. We don't steal because God is generous and good and he gives. We don't lie because God is truth. We don't bear false witness against our neighbor because God is always fostering the good of other people and we're not covetous just because God is content and he gives us what we need. Every day one of these commandments drives us to the character of God which should be reflected in the character of us as the image of God that leads us to the second thing that each commandment will tell us, it will tell us about Jesus Christ. How He fulfills the law of God. How He is our righteousness and He is our life and He is our light and He is the truth. In fact, it's interesting when Jesus Christ says He's great statements about I am. I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. I am the vine on the ship. Each one of them reflects upon something that commandments tell us about who God the sun is having the character of God in human flesh and how He fulfills this law for you and me so that we are blessed in Him. And the last thing, obviously, is that each law has something to tell us as human beings about how the image of God should live with God and other people. They carry each one of them prohibitions against doing certain things and prescriptions to do other things. So that they are a reflection of God's character, a revelation of the fulfillment of Jesus Christ, of a holy and happy life, and how you and I, with the power of the Holy Spirit, can avoid some things and do other things and be blessed with Christ and in our life with God. The commandments are a good thing, not a bad thing. And the only reason we made out that, my friends, is because we live in such a lawless age, but you know what, lawlessness always leads to lovelessness. If you think that America is getting rougher all the time than it is, it's because they no longer want to concern themselves at all with the law of God, one problem, one blessing. They don't want anything to do with the law of God, but the law of God wants to do something with each one of them. Their conscience will never find rest until the finds its rest in Jesus Christ. Brother Law will continue to work, it's never bothered him that he's unpopular. You know why? He loves God, and he loves people, and he wants to bring people to God in Christ so that God is glorified and men are good, and this life is blessed. May the Lord bless us now as we enter into a study of the law of God. Amen? Father, we want to thank you for the law. Thank you for our big brother who's been around as long as the Old Testament has been around. In fact, he was conceived with Adam and Eve in the garden, written on their hearts, and has served us and them in all their descendants, all these thousands of years, all these millennia, as a faithful witness to the character of God, a promise of the fulfillment and glory of Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, and as a govern and guard and a guide to us who would live a noble life as men and a life of honoring glory to Jesus Christ as believers. Open our hearts and minds to receive the law, to enjoy his witness and testimony to us and to see that he and his sister of the gospel have the same end in mind that men might enter into this blessed life, be happy with Jesus Christ in their life together with God, and be fulfilled in all of the things that God has planned for them in his gracious covenant of grace. Ask you to meet us in this study, and to convince us and convert us to the ways of the law we ask for our good and for your pleasure as we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.