them and entrust them with the divine Spirit, if they would
only trust Him. God is no longer the taskmaster over against men, with
His threats and His terrors. He is the Father who has given His Son,
who has given men a sacrifice whereby He can forgive their sins, and
has given them the Spirit of His Son into their hearts. God is on
their side, and they are on God's side. That is the great change. And
the object of it all is that what formerly seemed so unattainable might
now be the very thing that proved itself practicable--to live according
to God; that the requirement of the law might be no longer an
impossible claim over us, terrorizing us with its perpetual threats,
but that by the power of the new life in which we live, 'the
righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after
the flesh, but after the spirit.'

The following is a paraphrase of the passage we are now to study:--

The result then of all that has been said is that the divine verdict of
guilty, which went forth over men on account of their sins--that
'disclosure of divine wrath' which St. Paul had so profoundly felt and
interpreted--hangs no longer over those who have passed into the new
{275} life in Christ Jesus. In the old life, sin with its attendant
death held sway over us and gave the law to our actions. But we were
freed from that despotism in passing under a new and stronger
authority. It is the divine Spirit, by whom we have been brought into
the life in Christ, who now controls us. Of old the Mosaic law was
powerless to help us. It could inform us of God's will, but it could
not enable our poor weak human nature to keep His requirements. But
God has provided an effective remedy for this state of things. He has
sent His own Son to take our nature upon Him, and come in among our
sinful race without any apparent difference between us and Him. He put
Him simply among us and in our position, to be the sacrifice for sin;
and thereby did for us what we had so failed to do for
ourselves--passed effective sentence of condemnation on sin, and that
in our own nature. [Do we ask how sin was condemned? The answer is,
it stood condemned by the perfect sacrifice of reparation for sin,
which the sinless Man made to the divine character on our behalf, when
at the requirement of obedience He shed His blood. It stood condemned,
still more fully, by the fact that God raised Him from the dead and
exalted {276} Him far beyond the