Outside of Christ the blessed Mediator, a holy God cannot, with safety of His honor, have any dealing with a sinful creature; but in and by Christ He can, consistent with His own infinite honor, and that of His holy law, issue forth His commandments to believers and receive their sincere obedience. Accordingly, the great Mediator, having admitted believers to communion with Himself in His surety-righteousness, writes by His Spirit the law on their hearts, and in His Father’s name makes it the instrument of his government of them and the rule of their duty to Him. And as the same law is called “the law of nature,” because in His creation it was inlaid in the nature of the first man, so it may be called “the law of renewed nature” because in the hand of Christ, and as standing under the covenant of grace, it is interwoven with the new nature of all who are “created again in Him to good works.” Since it is only in Christ, then, that the offended Majesty of heaven can give His holy law to a sinner, and since it is only in Christ that a sinner can with safety receive and obey such a law, it may well be called “the law of Christ.” Considered as the law of Christ’s justified, sanctified, and peculiar people, it is not he law of an absolute God, or of God out of Christ, but the law of God in Christ. Were believers to keep the moral law only as the law of nature, and without any relation to the Mediator, their obedience would be but natural religion; were they to obey it merely as a covenant of works their obedience would be but legal righteousness; but when they obey it in its relation to Christ and the covenant of grace, their conformity of heart and life to it is true holiness, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:5).
A Treatise on the Law and the Gospel, by John Colquhoun
1748-1827
