God created man in his own image. “God has depicted his character in the law that if any man carries out in deeds whatever is enjoined there, he will express the image of God, as it were, in his own life” (Pg, 415). The question then is what will the Christian’s life look like? Simply, love. Love is the fulfillment of the law.
Calvin concludes Book II, Chapter 8 by explaining how love is the fulfillment of the law.
1. The summation of the Ten Commandments is explained in a four letter word - love (Rom 13:10; Gal 5:14). “If the love of God is shed abroad in your heart, it pours out and over everyone,” wrote J.H. Gerstner in his Handout Theology.
2. One cannot love Christ without loving his law. That is, loving the very nature and character and excellence of Christ.
3. In the law we find “all the duties of piety and love” (Pg., 415).
4. Calvin gives sound biblical teaching when he writes that a person “keeps the commandments not by loving ourselves but by loving God and neighbour…he lives the best and holiest life who lives and strives for himself as little as he can…and no one lives in a worse or more evil manner than he who lives and strives for himself alone, and thinks about and seeks only his own advantage” (Pg., 417).
5. We are to love our neighbour’s; but who is he or she? “We ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love.....whatever the character of the man, we must yet love him because we love God” (Pg., 419).
6. The whole law is contained in loving your neighbour as yourself (Gal 5:14). But should we not love God more than man? Yes, but when we love man as we should it is because we love God as we should.
7. Loving our friend and our enemy reveals that we fear God. See section 52-57, pgs 416-15 for an excellent dissertation on loving our neighbour.
8. All sins are mortal because they are against God and his law. “Let the children of God hold that all sin is mortal. For it is rebellion against the will of God, which of necessity provokes God’s wrath, and it is a violation of the law, upon which God’s judgment is pronounced without exception” (Pg., 423). [Rom 6:23; Ezek 18:4,20]
9. “The sins of the saints are pardonable, not because of their nature as saints, but because they obtain pardon from God’s mercy” (Pg., 423).
10. Augustine said, “Let Him give what He commands, and command what He wills.” “To be Christians under the law of grace does not mean to wander unbridled outside the law, but to be engrafted in Christ, by whose grace we are free of the curse of the law, and by whose Spirit we have the law engraved upon our hearts [Jer 31:33]” (Pg., 421).
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