Conscience is a law but in a figurative sense, because God has placed it as a monitor, taking care that, when sin came in, conscience should come in with it. But it is the opposite of true law, serving for those having no law (Rom. 2:1414For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: (Romans 2:14)); and God describes it by man's becoming “as one of us, knowing good and evil” in himself (that is, not imposed by authority to which he had to answer as responsible). To apply such a thought to God is absurd. I could say, God is a law to Himself, just meaning He was under none, but that His own perfection made Him always act as He does. As a fact, fallen man has the knowledge of good and evil, which is not a law, even so in the sense of a rule, for it may be vitiated, as in Saul and millions else, “I thought I ought.” It is the faculty of making the difference, and holding one thing for good and another for evil, making the difference between good and evil in my mind, whatever my rule may be.
But you cannot speak of being “subject and accountable” when speaking of God. Obedience, conscience, and law, or the rule of conscience, are all distinct things. Obedience refers to authority, law to a rule imposed, conscience to my making a difference between good and evil, i.e. right and wrong, in myself, if there was no authority, no obedience, no law. For that is as God does. I have no absolute standard of right and wrong till I get the Second Man. In God I have sovereign love, learned in Christ's sacrifice, and I have a divine purity in a new nature which cannot sin. But to make a creature have the nature of the Deity as his absolute standard falsifies duty, because God, as such, cannot be in the relation man is in, and duty flows from this.
Hence when the Decalogue was given, there is no revelation of God's nature, but simply man's obligation towards God and his neighbor; and evil is already supposed as it was not before the Fall. Christianity says, “Be ye imitators of God as dear children,” when we are such, and gives Christ as the pattern—perfect as your Father,” but He is Father first. “God commendeth his love to us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” In Him were the two poles of perfection: absolute self-sacrifice (not merely loving a neighbor as oneself, which is no divine perfection, and cannot be) “for us” (which is purely divine, no worthy object but divine goodness), and “to God” (which is absolute human perfection, divine indeed but still of Him a man). The law knew nothing of this, but man's duties where he was. But Christ was God manifest in flesh; and this is our pattern.
That the law is the idea of the divine image is mere nonsense; for that image is not thought of in it, but man's duties toward God and his neighbor, which in the nature of things cannot apply to God. Christianity alone has it in principle, because Christ has come, the Second man, not the first. This makes the idea false, as it falsifies the nature of law. The first Adam is the history of responsibility in man, both innocent, and a sinner; the Last Adam, the Second man, is the display of God in man, the perfectly obedient Man. He was born under law; but He was much more than that—God manifest in flesh, which is not law at all. J.N.D.