We have come to see this week how God gave his law to identify and set apart a people. This law is fulfilled by love, a love that can only come by faith. In other words in calling his people to love, God is calling his people to faith. Thus, obedience to God’s commands is marked by the obedience of faith. You may wonder how did God expect the people of Israel in the OT to obey his law by fulfilling it through love and faith. This is where seeing our two Testaments as starkly divided between an age of works and an age of grace is problematic. Paul addresses this at the end of Romans 9:
What shall we say, then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, a righteousness that is by faith; but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, (vv30-32)
Those two words “as if” are critical; God never intended his law to be fulfilled by works. God has never asked his people to earn his favour. This is Paul’s argument in the second half of Romans 3: God’s law demonstrates God’s righteousness (“bears witness to it” v21) but does not, in itself, manifest righteousness (v21). The righteousness of God is not earned, but granted to us through faith in Christ (v22). He concludes saying, “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law. (v31)”
Something to Apply:
The tendency to work for God’s favour afflicts all of us. We started this week noting David’s delight in God’s law (Ps. 19:7-11). If we are to see God’s law as a delight rather than a duty, we need to grow in fully trusting the one whose works were entirely sufficient to please God – the works of Christ.
“For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Rom. 8:3-4)”