CHAPTER 5 THE PURPOSE OF THE LAWS OF GOD

The purpose of the Law
Faith in God and the purpose of the Law
Promises and the purpose of the Law
The purpose of the Law
Hagar and Sarah, the slave and the free
Stay Free
Slaves to Righteousness
The power of the Law
The Law and Disobedience

The purpose of the Law
(Paul)
1 TIMOTHY 1:8-11
Those laws are good when used as God intended, but they were not made for us, whom God has saved; they are for sinners who hate God, have rebellious hearts, curse and swear, attack their fathers and mothers, and murder. Yes, these laws are made to identify as sinners all who are immoral and impure: homosexuals, kidnappers, liars, and all others who do things that contradict (speak against) the glorious Good News of our blessed (holy) God, whose messenger I am.

Faith in God and the purpose of the Law
(Paul)
GALATIANS 3:2-14
Let me ask you this one question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit by trying to keep the Jewish laws? Of course not, for the Holy Spirit came upon you only after you heard about Christ and trusted him to save you. Then have you gone completely crazy? For if trying to obey the Jewish laws never gave you spiritual life in the first place, why do you think that trying to obey them now will make you stronger Christians? You have suffered so much for the Gospel. Now are you going just to throw it all overboard? I can hardly believe it!
I ask you again, does God give you the power of the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you as a result of you trying to obey the Jewish laws? No, of course not. It is when you believe in Christ and fully trust him.
Abraham had the same experience – God declared him fit for heaven only because he believed God’s promises. You can see from this that the real children of Abraham are all the men of faith who truly trust in God.
What’s more, the Scriptures looked forward to this time when God would save the Gentiles also, through their faith. God told Abraham about this long ago when he said, “I will bless those in every nation who trust in me as you do.” And so it is: all who trust in Christ share in the same blessing that Abraham received.
Yes, and those who depend on the Jewish laws to save them are under God’s curse, (a cause of harm or misery) for the Scriptures point out very clearly, “Cursed is everyone who at any time breaks a single one of these laws that are written in God’s Book of the Law.”
Consequently, it is clear that no one can ever win God’s favor by trying to keep the Jewish laws, because God has said that the only way we can be right in his sight is by faith. As the prophet Habakkuk puts it, “The man who finds life will find it through trusting God.” How different from this way of faith is the way of law which says that a man is saved by obeying every law of God, without one slip. But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself. For it is written in the Scriptures, “Anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed” [as Jesus was hung upon a wooden cross].
Now God can bless (favor) the Gentiles too, with this same blessing he promised to Abraham; and all of us as Christians can have the promised Holy Spirit through this faith.

Promises and the purpose of the Law
(Paul)
GALATIANS 3:15-20
Dear brothers, even in everyday life a promise made by one man to another, if it is written down and signed, cannot be changed. He cannot decide afterwards to do something else instead.
Now, God gave some promises to Abraham and his Child. And notice that it doesn’t say the promises were to his children, as it would if all his sons – all the Jews – were being spoken of, but to his Child – and that of course means Christ.
Here’s what I am trying to say: God’s promise to save through faith – and God wrote this promise down and signed it – could not be cancelled or changed four hundred and thirty years later when God gave the Ten Commandments. If obeying those laws could save us, then it is obvious that this would be a different way of gaining God’s favor from Abraham’s way, for he simply accepted God’s promise.
Well then, why were the laws given? They were added after the promise was given, to show men how guilty they are of breaking God’s laws. But this system of law was to last only until the coming of Christ, the Child to whom God’s promise was made. (And there is this further difference. God gave his laws to angels to give to Moses, who then gave them to the people. But when God gave his promise to Abraham, he did it by himself alone, without angels or Moses as go-betweens.)

The purpose of the Law
(Paul)
GALATIANS 3:21-29 and 4:1-7
Well then, are God’s laws and God’s promises against each other? Of course not! If we could be saved by his laws, then God would not have had to give us a different way to get out of the grip of sin – for the Scriptures insist we are all its prisoners. The only way out is through faith in Jesus Christ; the way of escape is open to all who believe him.
Until Christ came we were guarded by the law, kept in protective custody, so to speak, until we could believe in the coming Savior.
Let me put it another way. The Jewish laws were our teacher and guide until Christ came to give us right standing with God through our faith. But now that Christ has come, we don’t need those laws any longer to guard us and lead us to him.
For now we are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ, and we who have been baptized into union with Christ are enveloped by him. We are no longer Jews or Greeks or slaves or free men or even merely men or women, but we are all the same – we are Christians; we are one in Christ Jesus. And now that we are Christ’s we are the true descendants of Abraham, and all of God’s promises to him belong to us.
GALATIANS 4:1-7
But remember this, that if a father dies and leaves great wealth for his little son, that child is not much better off than a slave until he grows up, even though he actually owns everything his father had. He has to do what his guardians and trustees tell him to, until he reaches whatever age his father set.
And that is the way it was with us before Christ came. We were slaves to Jewish laws and rituals, for we thought they could save us. But when the right time came, the time God decided on, he sent his Son, born of a woman, born as a Jew, to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law so that he could adopt us as his very own sons.
And because we are his sons God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, so now we can rightly speak of God as our dear Father. Now we are no longer slaves, but God’s own sons. And since we are his sons, everything he has belongs to us, for that is the way God planned.

Hagar and Sarah, the slave and the free
(Paul)
GALATIANS 4:21-31
Listen to me, you friends who think you have to obey the Jewish laws to be saved: Why don’t you find out what those laws really mean? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one from his slave-wife and one from his freeborn wife. There was nothing unusual about the birth of the slave-wife’s baby. But the baby of the freeborn wife was born only after God had especially promised he would come.
Now this true story is an illustration of God’s two ways of helping people. One way was by giving them his laws to obey. He did this on Mount Sinai, when he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. Mount Sinai, by the way, is called “Mount Hagar” by the Arabs – and in my illustration Abraham’s slave-wife Hagar represents Jerusalem, the mother-city of the Jews, the centre of that system of trying to please God by trying to obey the Commandments; and the Jews, who try to follow that system, are her slave children. But our mother-city is the heavenly Jerusalem, and she is not a slave to Jewish laws.
That is what Isaiah meant when he prophesied, “Now you can rejoice, O childless woman: you can shout with joy though you never before had a child. For I am going to give you many children – more children than the slave-wife has.”
You and I, dear brothers, are the children that God promised, just as Isaac was. And so we who are born of the Holy Spirit are persecuted now by those who want us to keep the Jewish laws, just as Isaac the child of promise was persecuted by Ishmael the slave-wife’s son. But the Scriptures say that God told Abraham to send away the slave-wife and her son, for the slave-wife’s son could not inherit Abraham’s home and lands along with the free woman’s son. Dear brothers, we are not slave children, under obligation to the Jewish laws, but children of the free woman, acceptable to God because of our faith.

Stay Free
(Paul)
GALATIANS 5:1-6 and 5:13-15
So Christ has made us free. Now make sure that you stay free and don’t get tied up again in the chains of slavery to Jewish laws and ceremonies. Listen to me for this is serious: if you are counting on circumcision and keeping the Jewish laws to make you right with God, then Christ cannot save you. I’ll say it again. Anyone trying to find favor with God by being circumcised must always obey every other Jewish law, or perish. Christ is useless to you if you are counting on clearing your debt to God by keeping those laws; you are lost from God’s grace.
But we by the help of the Holy Spirit are counting on Christ’s death to clear away our sins and make us right with God. And we to whom Christ has given eternal life don’t need to worry about whether we have been circumcised or not, or whether we are obeying the Jewish ceremonies or not; for all we need is faith working through love.
GALATIANS 5:13-15
For, dear brothers, you have been given freedom: not freedom to do wrong, but freedom to love and serve each other. For the whole Law can be summed up in this one command: “Love others as you love yourself.” But if instead of showing love among yourselves you are always critical (fault-finding) and catty (hurtful), watch out! Beware of ruining (of bringing down) each other.

Slaves to Righteousness
(Paul)
ROMANS 6: 15-23
Does this mean that we can go ahead and sin (that is, disobey God’s laws) and not worry about it? (For our salvation does not depend on keeping the law, but on receiving God’s grace (and favor).) Of course not!
Don’t you realize that you can choose your own master? You can choose sin (with death) or else obedience (with acquittal). The one to whom you offer yourself –he will take you and be your master and you will be his slave. Thank God that though you once chose to be slaves of sin (while disobeying God’s laws) now you have obeyed with all your heart the teaching to which God has committed you. And now you are free from your old master, sin; and you have become slaves to your new master, righteousness.
I speak this way, using the illustration of slaves and masters, because it is easy to understand: just as you used to be slaves to all kinds of sin, so now you must let yourselves be slaves to all that is right and holy.
In those days when you were slaves of sin you didn’t bother much with goodness. And what was the result? Evidently not good, since you are ashamed now even to think about those things you used to do, for all of them end in eternal (everlasting) doom (the Last Judgment, destruction and death). But now you are free from the power of sin and are slaves of God, and his benefits to you include holiness and everlasting life. For the wages (the regular payments) of sin (for disobeying God’s laws) is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The power of the Law
(Paul)
ROMANS 7:1-6
Don’t you understand yet, dear Jewish brothers in Christ, that when a person dies the law no longer holds him in its power? Let me illustrate: when a woman marries, the law binds her to her husband as long as he is alive. But if he dies, she is no longer bound to him; the laws of marriage no longer apply to her. Then she can marry someone else if she wants to. That would be wrong while he was alive, but it is perfectly all right after he dies.
Your “husband,” your master, used to be the Jewish law; but you “died,” as it were, with Christ on the cross; and since you are “dead,” you are no longer “married to the law,” and it has no more control over you. Then you came back to life again when Christ did, and are a new person. And now you are “married,” so to speak, to the one who rose from the dead, so that you can produce good fruit, that is, good deeds for God.
When your old nature was still active, sinful desires were at work within you, making you want to do whatever God had forbidden, and producing sinful deeds, the rotting fruit of death. But now you need no longer worry about the Jewish laws and customs because you “died” while in their captivity, and now you can really serve God; not in the old way, mechanically obeying a set of rules, but in the new way, [with all of your hearts and minds].

The Law and Disobedience
(Paul)
ROMANS 7:7-14
Well then, am I suggesting that these laws of God are evil? Of course not! No, the law is not sinful but it was the law that showed me my sin. I would never have known the sin in my heart – the evil desires that are hidden there – if the law had not said, “You must not have evil desires in your heart.” But sin used this law against evil desires by reminding me that such desires are wrong and arousing all kinds of forbidden desires within me! Only if there were no laws to break would there be no sinning.
That is why I felt fine so long as I did not understand what the law really demanded. But when I learned the truth, I realized that I had broken the law and was a sinner, doomed to die. So as far as I was concerned, the good law which was supposed to show me the way of life resulted instead in my being given the death penalty. Sin fooled me by taking the good laws of God and using them to make me guilty of death. But still, you see, the law itself was wholly right and good.
But how can that be? Didn’t the law cause my downfall? How then can it be good? No, it was sin, devilish stuff that it is, that used what was good to bring about my condemnation. So you can see how cunning and deadly and damnable it is. For it uses God’s good laws for its own evil purposes. The law is good, then, and the trouble is not there but with me, because I am sold into slavery with sin as my owner.