J Philip Bible Readings

It is a misunderstanding to suppose that the statement 'Fear God, and keep His commandments' is an expression of a religion of law, even legalism, that falls short of the New Testament doctrine of grace. For one thing, such an attitude seems to suggest that 'grace' is a concept confined to the New Testament. But this is wide of the mark, for the Old Testament itself is full of grace, beginning indeed with grace, with ‘law' entering in as a later, contingent factor. The theologian, Emil Brunner, in the concluding chapter of his book, 'The Mediator', asserts that the whole gospel of Jesus Christ is the exposition of the First Commandment: 'I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have none other gods but Me', and adds 'Whenever anyone really listens to the First Commandment and admits its reality, he already possesses the whole truth that the Scriptures and the gospel of Jesus Christ contain. The whole message of the Church, if it be a true message, simply aims at intensifying the force of this First Commandment. The Church has no other task. This includes all her teaching, both in dogma and in ethics. When this commandment is obeyed, then all is well with her both in her faith and in her active life. But all is not well with the Church when she thinks this is not sufficient; when she says that this commandment is only law, and what matters most is that the Gospel shall be preached. There is no other Gospel than this law itself.' Later in the chapter, Brunner adds: 'It is a terrible misunderstanding, the worst, the most subtle fraud ever perpetrated in the Name of God, if we think that everything does not depend upon this obedience, if we hold that through faith in the Mediator in justification, this obedience has become either superfluous or a secondary matter. Faith is obedience - nothing else - literally nothing else at all.'

This is how we must understand the closing words in Ecclesiastes; and when they are thus understood, they point its message right on to the New Testament gospel. The announcement of a tribunal in 14, the commentator Ellicott remarks, 'at which "every work", "every secret thing", shall be brought into judgment, cannot be reasonably understood of anything but a judgment after this life; so that this book, after all its sceptical debatings, ends by enunciating, more distinctly than is done elsewhere in the Old Testament, the New Testament doctrine of a day when God shall judge the secrets of men (Romans 2:16), shall bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and make manifest the counsels of the heart (1 Corinthians 4:5)'.