The light went off a little after one in the morning, and the generator had no fuel. Lanre lay in the dark beside his six-year-old daughter and felt the heat coming off her body like a stove. She had been unwell since the afternoon. Now she was moaning softly in her sleep and her small hands were damp.
He found the digital thermometer in the drawer by torchlight and slipped it under her arm. It beeped. 38.9. He wrote the number in the back of an old exercise book. Twenty minutes later he took it again. 39.2. He wrote that down too. He gave her the paracetamol syrup the pharmacist had recommended, sponged her forehead with a damp towel, and waited. At half past two the reading was 38.4 and he felt a surge of relief. By four it had climbed back to 39.5. He wrote it down.
His wife woke and found him sitting on the edge of the bed with the torch in one hand, the thermometer in the other and the exercise book open on his knee. There was a whole column of numbers in his careful engineer’s handwriting. She looked at the book, then at her husband, and said quietly, “Lanre, the thermometer is not medicine.”
He knew that, of course. Anyone knows that. But at four in the morning, frightened and helpless, he had started to behave as though one more accurate reading might somehow bring the fever down.
At seven they were at the clinic. The doctor read the column of numbers and nodded. “This is very helpful,” she said. “You have shown me exactly how serious it is.” Then she ordered a malaria test, which came back positive, and wrote a prescription. The thermometer had done its work well. It had told the truth about the fever. It had never been able to do anything about it.
I have met many believers who are sitting up at four in the morning with a thermometer in their hand, taking reading after reading of their own spiritual condition, hoping that the next accurate measurement will make them well.
What we keep asking the law to do
Ask most Christians whether a person can become righteous by keeping God’s law, and they will tell you no. They know the right answer. But watch how many of them actually live. They read a command, feel its rightness, and make a resolution. They fail. They read the command again, feel its rightness even more keenly, and make a stronger resolution. They fail again. They conclude that they need more of the same: more knowledge of the standard, more pressure from the pulpit, more vows at the altar. The column of numbers grows longer, and the fever does not break.
This is what happens when we ask the law to do a job it was never given.
Before going further, we should be clear what we mean by “the law.” In Paul’s letters the word usually refers to the law of Moses, the covenant God gave Israel at Sinai, with its commandments, sacrifices, festivals and judgements. Paul is not discussing traffic regulations or the rules of a school. Yet the principle he draws out reaches further than Sinai. Any system that offers righteousness on the basis of performance, whether it is a list of church rules, a code of family honour or a private checklist of spiritual disciplines, works on the same principle. If the God-given law of Moses could not make a man righteous, our home-made versions certainly cannot.
We should be equally clear about what we are not saying. We are not saying the law was bad, or that God made a mistake at Sinai, or that moral instruction has no place in the Christian life. Paul himself refuses all three conclusions, as we shall see. The question is one of purpose. What was the law given to do? When we answer that question from Scripture, a great deal of exhaustion begins to lift.
The knowledge of sin
Paul reaches the climax of his long argument in the opening chapters of Romans with a sentence that ought to settle the matter: “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20).
Notice the two halves of that verse. The first tells us what the law cannot do. No flesh, no human being of any background or achievement, will be declared righteous before God by doing what the law says. The second tells us what the law does instead. “By the law is the knowledge of sin.”
The Greek word Paul uses for knowledge here is epignosis, a strengthened form of the ordinary word. It suggests recognition, clear and personal acknowledgement. The law does not simply inform people that sin exists somewhere in the world. It brings a man to the point where he recognises it in himself. It holds up a reading and says, “This is your temperature.”
That is a real service. A fever you cannot measure is a fever you may ignore until it is too late. Many people go through life assuming they are basically good, because they compare themselves with others who seem worse. The law cuts across that comparison. It measures us against the holiness of God, and every mouth is stopped (Romans 3:19).
A little later Paul adds, “Because the law worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression” (Romans 4:15). The law turns vague wrongdoing into clear transgression, the crossing of a line that has been plainly drawn. It removes every excuse. It does not soften the verdict. That is its job.
Then, immediately after showing that the law cannot justify, Paul turns to the good news: “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets” (Romans 3:21). The righteousness comes from somewhere else entirely. It is given through faith in Jesus Christ. And even then the law has a role, as a witness pointing toward the righteousness it could never supply. The thermometer helps the doctor. It does not replace her.
Added because of transgressions
The Galatian believers were being told that faith in Christ was a good start, but that full standing with God required them to take on the law of Moses. Paul answers by going back to history. God made a covenant of promise with Abraham. The law came 430 years later, and a later arrangement cannot cancel an earlier promise (Galatians 3:17). That raises an obvious question, which Paul asks himself:
Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made; and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid: for if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law. But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe.
Punchline“Wherefore then serveth the law?” If the inheritance comes by promise, why was the law given at all? Paul’s answer is compact, and every phrase repays attention.
“It was added.” The law was not the foundation of God’s dealings with His people. The promise was. The law came alongside, later, for a specific purpose. It was a supplement to the story, never its starting point.
“Because of transgressions.” Scholars discuss the precise sense of this phrase. Some understand it to mean that the law was given to restrain transgressions, holding back the worst of human sin until Christ came. Others take it to mean that the law was given to expose sin as transgression, to make it visible and measurable. Both readings fit what Paul says elsewhere, and both point the same way. The law was given to deal with sin in a limited, preparatory way. It was never designed to remove it.
“Till the seed should come.” The law had a time limit written into it from the start. Paul has already told us that the seed is Christ (Galatians 3:16). The law was a temporary arrangement for the period between the promise and its fulfilment. Elsewhere in this series we have looked at the schoolmaster of verses 23 to 26. Here the point is simpler: the law was given with an end date in view.
Then comes the decisive sentence: “for if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.”
Paul links righteousness with life. The Greek word translated given life is zoopoieo, to make alive. It is the word Paul uses elsewhere for God raising the dead (Romans 4:17; Romans 8:11). That tells us how serious the human condition is. Sinful man does not need better information. He needs resurrection. A law can tell a living man how to walk. It cannot raise a dead man and make him walk. If any law could have done that, Paul says, God would have used it, and righteousness would have come that way. But there is no such law. Not even the holy law of Sinai could give life.
So “the scripture hath concluded all under sin.” The word means to shut up together, as a fisherman encloses a catch in his net. The law closes every other exit so that only one way out remains: “that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe.”
The law can tell a living man how to walk. It cannot raise a dead man and make him walk. Righteousness required life, and life came only through Christ.
Redemption came before the commandments
It helps to remember how the law was first given. People often picture Sinai as the moment when God told Israel what they had to do in order to become His people. The text says something quite different. Before a single commandment is spoken, God introduces Himself:
And God spake all these words, saying, I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
“I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt.” The Passover lamb had already been slain. The Red Sea had already parted. Pharaoh’s army was already at the bottom of it. Israel did not keep the Ten Commandments in order to be redeemed from Egypt. They were given the commandments because they had already been redeemed. The law was given to a people God had saved, as the terms of life within a covenant relationship He had initiated.
NuggetEven within the old covenant, then, the law was never the way into God’s favour. It was a description of how a redeemed nation should live under His rule.
Look also at Israel’s response. When Moses first set out the covenant, the people answered with complete confidence: “All that the LORD hath spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). They meant it. Yet within weeks, while Moses was still on the mountain receiving the tablets, they had gathered around Aaron and demanded, “Up, make us gods, which shall go before us” (Exodus 32:1). The golden calf was dancing at the foot of the mountain before the stone tablets had reached the bottom.
That sequence is a portrait of every human being who has ever stood before a good command with a sincere promise. The command was holy. The promise was sincere. The heart that made the promise could not keep it. Sinai revealed the problem with terrible clarity. It did not solve it.
The writer to the Hebrews puts it briefly: “For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God.” The law could describe perfection. It could not produce it. A better hope was needed, one that would bring people near to God rather than keeping them at a trembling distance from the mountain.
Holy, just and good
At this point someone usually objects. If the law cannot make anyone righteous, and if it even seems to stir up sin, is the law itself the problem? Paul anticipates the question and answers it in one of the most personal passages he ever wrote:
What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me . Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.
“Is the law sin? God forbid.” Paul will not allow anyone to blame the commandment. Then he tells us how the law worked in his own experience, and he chooses a revealing example: “Thou shalt not covet.”
Before his conversion Paul was a Pharisee of the strictest kind. He tells the Philippians that “touching the righteousness which is in the law,” he was “blameless” (Philippians 3:6). In terms of outward conduct, no one could fault him. He did not steal. He did not commit adultery. He kept the Sabbath and the food laws with care. But the tenth commandment is different from the others. It does not regulate an action. It reaches into desire. You can stop your hand from taking your neighbour’s property. You cannot stop your heart from wanting it simply by deciding to.
That was where the law found Paul out. The command “Thou shalt not covet” exposed a whole world of desire that his outward righteousness had never touched. “Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence.”
The word translated occasion is aphorme. It was used of a military base of operations, a bridgehead from which an army launches its attack. Sin used the commandment as a launching point. Tell a child not to open a particular cupboard, and you may find that the cupboard has suddenly become the most interesting thing in the house. The instruction was right. The child’s heart did something with it that the instruction never intended. That is what Paul describes. The fault lies in sin, which exploits even a holy command.
“And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.” God had said of His statutes, “which if a man do, he shall live in them” (Leviticus 18:5). The law held out life to the one who kept it perfectly. But no one did. So the same commandment that promised life became, for Paul, a sentence of death.
Then Paul gives his verdict: “Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.” And he explains what God was doing through the whole painful process: “that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.” The law dragged sin out of hiding and showed it for what it really is. Sin is far worse than a few mistakes or a weakness of character. It is a power that can take God’s own good word and turn it into an instrument of death. Only when we see that clearly do we stop looking for a cure in more commandments.
This guards us against two errors. One is contempt for the law, as though grace had shown it to be a cruel or foolish thing. The psalmist could sing, “The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul” (Psalm 19:7), and he was right to. The other error is confidence in the law, as though knowing the commandment more thoroughly could finally produce the obedience it describes. Paul honours the law and refuses to trust it. We should do the same.
The law entered that the offence might abound
Romans 5 contains a sentence that startles many readers when they first notice it:
Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.
“The law entered, that the offence might abound.” Paul says that one purpose of the law was to make the offence increase. That sounds strange until we remember what he has just been explaining. Sin entered the world through Adam, and death through sin (Romans 5:12). Sin was already present and already reigning before Moses. What the law did was bring it into the open, so that it could be seen in its full extent.
Think of the contrast dye a radiographer injects before certain kinds of scan. Before the dye goes in, the blockage is there but invisible. Once the dye flows through the vessels, the narrowing shows up clearly on the screen. The dye has not caused the blockage. It has revealed it, so that the patient finally understands why he is short of breath and agrees to treatment. The law worked something like that. It made sin abound in the sense of making it plain, measurable and undeniable.
But Paul does not leave us staring at the screen. “But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The Greek here is hyperperisseuo: grace overflowed beyond all measure. However far sin had spread, grace went further. Whatever the law revealed, grace covered and exceeded.
Then the two reigns: “That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.” Sin was a king, and its reign ended in death. Grace is now a king, and its reign brings righteousness and eternal life. Notice what grace reigns through. It reigns through righteousness. Grace is no lax monarch who ignores sin. It reigns through a righteousness God provided in Christ, who bore sin’s penalty in full. The law exposed the disease. Grace brought the cure.
Using the law lawfully
None of this means the church should stop teaching moral instruction. Paul makes that plain in a passage written to Timothy, his son in the faith, who was leading the church in Ephesus. Some there wanted to be “teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm” (1 Timothy 1:7). They were using the law as a source of endless speculation and as a ladder to spiritual status. Paul corrects them:
But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.
“The law is good, if a man use it lawfully.” There is a lawful use of the law and an unlawful one. The unlawful use treats it as a way of producing righteousness or of proving one’s spiritual superiority. The lawful use treats it according to the purpose God gave it.
What is that purpose? “The law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient.” The law addresses wrongdoing. It is aimed at the murderer, the abuser, the liar, the sexually immoral and, in a word that should catch Nigerian ears, the menstealers: kidnappers and traffickers who seize human beings and sell them. The law names these things and declares them contrary to God. It restrains evil in society. It protects the vulnerable. It tells the truth about harm.
That is why a church established in grace must never become vague about sin. A congregation that cannot clearly say that violence in the home is wrong, that defrauding a business partner is wrong, that exploiting a house-help is wrong, has not become mature in grace. It has neglected the plain teaching of Scripture. Grace never asks a wife to stay silent while she is beaten, or asks the victims of fraud to pretend nothing happened. Where people are in danger, the church must act to protect them and, where appropriate, involve the proper authorities. The law’s description of wrong remains true.
But notice how Paul finishes the sentence. These things are contrary to sound doctrine “according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God.” Paul measures sin by the gospel, and the gospel is glorious. It does not stop at naming wrong. And Paul immediately shows what that means by telling his own story: “Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy” (1 Timothy 1:13). The man who could list the lawless so precisely knew himself to be one of them. “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief” (1 Timothy 1:15).
PunchlineThe law named Paul’s sin. Christ saved him from it. That is the lawful use of the law in a single life.
Christ is the end of the law for righteousness
Why do sincere people keep trying to obtain righteousness through the law when God never offered it that way? Paul answers with sorrow, speaking of his own countrymen:
For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.
“Going about to establish their own righteousness.” The phrase describes tireless, earnest effort. These were not lazy people. They were zealous for God (Romans 10:2). Their problem was that they were building their own righteousness, and in the process they “have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.” There is a strange kind of pride in self-effort. It prefers to keep working than to receive a gift, because receiving a gift means admitting that you could not do it yourself.
“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.” The word end is telos. It can mean termination, and it can mean goal or completion. Both senses apply here. Christ is the goal toward which the law was always pointing, and He is the termination of the law as a way of seeking righteousness. Notice the precise phrase: the end of the law for righteousness. Paul does not say that every moral truth expressed in the law has been abolished. He says that the law’s role as a route to righteousness has come to an end in Christ, for everyone who believes.
This is what frees a believer from the four o’clock vigil with the thermometer. You do not have to keep measuring yourself against the law in the hope that the next reading will finally declare you well. The verdict has been given. Christ has become your righteousness. Paul tells the Corinthians that Christ “is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).
What happens then to the commandments? Paul asks that question too: “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law” (Romans 3:31). Faith establishes the law by letting it do exactly what it was given to do. It confirms the law’s verdict on sin. It honours the law’s witness to Christ. And it receives in Christ the righteousness the law always required but could never provide. The other articles in this series have shown how the Spirit then produces in believers the very life the law described. Here our concern has been the earlier question: what the law was for. It was given to reveal sin, to restrain it, to stop every mouth and to lead us to the Saviour. It was never given to make us righteous.
Consider a man I will call Brother Felix, a deacon who had read through the Bible every year for eleven years. He told me once that each January he felt a fresh weight of condemnation as he went through Exodus and Leviticus, and a deeper weight by the time he reached Deuteronomy. “I know the commandments better than anyone in my church,” he said, “and I have never felt further from God.” He had been reading the law faithfully. He had been using it unlawfully, as though careful knowledge of the standard could carry him across the distance it revealed. When he began to read those same chapters as the instrument that diagnosed his need and pointed to Christ, he found he could read them with gratitude. The commandments had not changed. He had stopped asking them to save him.
Lanre’s daughter recovered. The antimalarial did its work, and by the third day she was sitting up in bed demanding jollof rice and arguing with her brother about the television remote. That evening, out of habit, Lanre took her temperature one last time. 36.8. He showed her the number, and she clapped.
Then he did something that made his wife laugh. He washed the thermometer, put it back in its little case, and placed it in the drawer. “We will keep it,” he said. “It is a good thermometer. It told us the truth.” It would be needed again, no doubt, the next time someone in the house fell ill. But nobody in that house would ever again mistake it for medicine.
That is where the believer can stand with the law. It is a good law. It told you the truth. It showed you a fever you could not cure, and it sent you to the One who could. You do not need to throw it away, and you do not need to sit up all night with it in your hand. The law was given to make sin known. Christ was given to make you righteous. Put the thermometer back in the drawer, and take the medicine God has provided in His Son.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Where have you been asking a command, a rule or a spiritual discipline to make you righteous, when it can only show you your need?
- Paul says “if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.” What does that sentence teach you about the depth of the human problem?
- How does Exodus 20:2 change the way you understand the purpose of God’s commandments?
- In what ways might you have used the law “unlawfully”, either to condemn yourself or to feel superior to others?
- Brother Felix knew the commandments well and felt far from God. What would it look like for you to read the law as a witness pointing to Christ?
This Week
This week, read Romans 7:7-13 on Monday, Galatians 3:15-22 on Tuesday and 1 Timothy 1:5-17 on Wednesday. Each day, write two short columns in a notebook: “What the law can do” and “What only Christ can do.” On the remaining days, when you notice yourself measuring your spiritual condition and resolving to try harder, stop and pray one sentence: “Lord, the law has shown me my need; You are my righteousness.” Then take one step of obedience leaning on Him, rather than on the strength of your resolution.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for Your holy law, which told me the truth about my sin when I would rather not have known it. I confess that I have often asked it to do what it was never given to do. I have taken reading after reading of my own condition, hoping that more effort would make me well. Today I stop going about to establish my own righteousness, and I submit to the righteousness You have given in Jesus Christ. Thank You that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. Let grace reign in my life through righteousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.