Law & Grace

The Old Testament puts an enormous emphasis on God’s Law. The Law actually says “Do this and live,” which involves the idea that we can merit God’s approval by following his Law. Galatians is a complicated book that, properly understood, can help clarify the Law/Grace issue. It is packed with Old Testament quotations and references to Old Testament principles that are foreign to most Christians, much less non-believers.

Paul gives us some truths to hang on to. First, God always accepts people by faith and not by works. God accepted Abraham on this basis. If God accepted Abraham by faith, and He unquestionably did, this paints a very good picture of how he accepts others. God had promised Abraham that he would produce a great nation from his descendents. Abraham and Sarah were 75 and 65 years old when God made this promise. In Genesis Abraham merely places his faith in God’s promise. He does no works at all, God, “counted him as righteous because of his faith.” There is a pattern, promise, faith, and acceptance. What we see in Abraham’s example is unmistakably restated by God through the writings in Habakkuk 2:4. This verse tells us that everyone gets right standing with God by faith.

The second truth for us is that God in no way received anyone by works. The Law taught “Do this and you will live,” but this is only a hypothetical possibility, and not something that anyone could accomplish because the Law itself declared that God required perfect obedience to all of His laws, and that any disobedience brought one under God’s condemnation. It is because of God’s perfect standard the only thing the Law could ever do is put someone under God’s condemnation. This is the reason Jesus came to rescue us from condemnation of the Law by taking condemnation on Himself. The Law explicitly said that those convicted, stoned, and then hung from a tree would be subject to God’s condemnation. Jesus was “hung from a tree,” and in being hung there, proved that he was under God’s condemnation (He took our place). He was not condemned by God for his own sins, but He voluntarily took our (sins) condemnation on himself. In this way, he fulfilled the Old Testament Law that required a blameless substitute to pay for our sins through death.

This shows the consistency of Paul’s message with the Old Testament. Those in the Old Testament were in no way able to merit God’s approval by obeying His Law. They received God’s approval in the same way we do today. We must put our trust in God’s promise (Jesus). The difference in the Old Testament is that they trusted in God’s promise before Jesus’ actually came in human form, but we put our trust in God’s promise after Jesus Christ came in human form, lived a sinless life, and died on the cross in our place to satisfy the law we never could.

All of this raises an obvious question. Why did God give the law at all? There is a great example from Roman law that goes like this, once a person specified who their heirs in a will would be, and made it official, it could not be changed under any circumstance. The same people who wrote the wills could enter into other types of agreements with the heirs named in the will, but no matter those outcomes, the original will remained the same. Mirroring the Roman law, God gave us His assurance that He would accept people by faith a long time before He gave the Law. This means that no matter what God’s purpose is for the Law, it will not change the foundation upon which he accepts people by faith because God’s promises are eternal.

Then why did God give the Law? God gave the Law to use as a mirror that we could hold up and judge our lives to see where we fall short of His glory, and prove to us that we do, in fact, need to put our faith in Jesus Christ as our substitute on the cross, and our advocate with God. The law exposes our sin and guilt.

After we are saved, there has always been the danger of slipping back into the Law or legalistic position by way of taboos and tactics of intimidation, or some form of human manipulation. Returning to the Law puts us under the control of the flesh, it cancels out true spirituality, and defeats the believer. It results in us being dominated by our sin nature. The fact that the Christian is not under the Mosaic Law does not mean that there is lawlessness, or no morality or ethics in the Christian life. The opposite is true. Dealing with the questions of morality or ethics, it must be recognized that the teaching of the New Testament is that the moral life the Christian is accountable for is that no one can be saved based on anything they can do (Tit. 3:5; Eph. 2:8-9).