The Purpose Of The Law
THE PURPOSE OF THE LAW
ROMANS 7:5-10
What was the function of the Law?
Paul was vividly aware that this line of argument contained a peril. He was a “Hebrew of the Hebrews,” as he told the Philippians and he was not ready to deny the whole heritage of his race. Moreover, the Old Testament, the authority of which he would not have questioned for a moment, represented the Law as a gift of God, as a part of a covenant. And he had the authority of the Lord himself for such an attitude. The Sermon on the Mount goes beyond the Law, and Jesus in Matthew chapter 23, in his denunciation of Pharisaic legalism, speaks with scorn of human elaboration of the divine code, but neither in the Sermon on the Mount, nor in any contest with the scribes, did Christ sweep the Law aside as irrelevant, faulty, manmade or contemptible.
It was essential that Paul should integrate the Testaments, that he should assert the Christian’s freedom in Christ and yet show a true and valuable function for the Law. It was a brilliant stroke of theological insight to bring about this combination and, for the evangelism he had before him, it was a first essential. It was to be Paul’s greatest contribution to biblical theology.
What then was the function of the Law? It defined sin. The very prohibition revealed the nature of sin. A terrible phenomenon of our present affluent age is the permissive society and situation ethics, conditions marked by the discrediting, abandonment and denigration of absolute standards. The result is a wide failure to apprehend, appreciate and feel the gravity of sin. There must be Law. Without absolute demands there can be no definition of sin, no challenge to it. In this sense, as Paul says, the Law brought sin into being. It located and named it.
But Law can do no more. It can convict and condemn. It cannot save. It can quicken conscience, but cannot lessen its pangs. It is only the trusted servant, as Paul told the Galatians, who cannot educate the child but can bring him to the one who can. The Law is divinely given, essential—but stops short and provokes despair, unless it is fulfilled in Christ, unless it hands over its slain victim to his resurrecting strength.