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Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing
be safe. There is not a commandment of the law that is not for the
good and happiness of man, both in this life and in the life to come. In
obedience to God’s law, man is surrounded as with a hedge and kept
from the evil. He who breaks down this divinely erected barrier at one
point has destroyed its power to protect him; for he has opened a way
by which the enemy can enter to waste and ruin.
By venturing to disregard the will of God upon one point, our
first parents opened the floodgates of woe upon the world. And every
individual who follows their example will reap a similar result. The
love of God underlies every precept of His law, and he who departs
from the commandment is working his own unhappiness and ruin.
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“Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the
scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom
of heaven.”—Matthew 5:20.
The scribes and Pharisees had accused not only Christ but His
disciples as sinners because of their disregard of the rabbinical rites and
observances. Often the disciples had been perplexed and troubled by
censure and accusation from those whom they had been accustomed to
revere as religious teachers. Jesus unveiled the deception. He declared
that the righteousness upon which the Pharisees set so great value
was worthless. The Jewish nation had claimed to be the special, loyal
people who were favored of God; but Christ represented their religion
as devoid of saving faith. All their pretensions of piety, their human
inventions and ceremonies, and even their boasted performance of the
outward requirements of the law, could not avail to make them holy.
They were not pure in heart or noble and Christlike in character.
A legal religion is insufficient to bring the soul into harmony with
God. The hard, rigid orthodoxy of the Pharisees, destitute of contrition,
tenderness, or love, was only a stumbling block to sinners. They were
like the salt that had lost its savor; for their influence had no power to
preserve the world from corruption. The only true faith is that which
“worketh by love” (
Galatians 5:6
) to purify the soul. It is as leaven
that transforms the character.
All this the Jews should have learned from the teachings of the
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prophets. Centuries before, the cry of the soul for justification with
God had found voice and answer in the words of the prophet Micah: