Collier was clear that believers are not under the law of
Moses. Nevertheless – and here Collier touched on a vital
point, especially today with the recovery of the growing
sense of the liberty of the new covenant – Collier saw that
the believer is not lawless; he certainly is not lawless. In
his A Discourse on the True Gospel Blessedness in the New
Covenant, 1659, Collier stated that although:
...the law [of Moses] is abolished and done away...
believers are dead to it, delivered from it, are not under it...
yet believers ‘are not without law to God but under the law
to Christ’, indeed, and that [means being] under the moral
law – but as given from Mount Zion, ministered forth in
the hand of Christ, not in the hand of Moses; for if we take
it from Moses, we must be Moses’ disciples. But if [we take
it] from Christ, as given forth in the gospel account, then
we are Christ’s disciples indeed, and receive it in power
(from Christ, the minister and Mediator) to live to God
according to it, [but] not for righteousness unto
justification... It is a rule of righteousness, [a rule] of life, to
the honour of him that has done all for us in point of
justification to eternal life. And so it is become a law of
love, a royal law of liberty to all that are by faith in the new
covenant, and a law which every believer is, in bounden
duty to Jesus Christ, to own as his precious rule of life to
honour him by, as it is given forth by him in the gospel and
in no other way. |
