Maurice Roberts

'For I through the law am dead to the law,
that I might live unto God' (Galatians 2:19).

Apart from Christ himself, there has never been in New Testament times a greater authority on the law of God than the Apostle Paul. Paul refers to 'law' in one way or another almost one hundred times. Though not all of these references are to the moral law of God (the Ten Commandments), many of them are. This single fact alone should alert us to the importance of the subject of the believer's relationship to the law. It should also check any hasty impression which we may have gleaned that the moral law is something not worth talking about once we are converted to Christ. Indeed, one of the most urgently needed remedies for the ills of modern evan-gelicalism is the study of the place and the use of the moral law. A good starting point for such a study is the text stated above: 'For I through the law am dead to the law that I might live unto God' (Gal. 2:19).

It is worth remarking that this statement by Paul is a masterpiece of neat-ness. The meaning of the apostle could very easily be missed, just because he expresses himself with such an economy of words: 'I am dead to the law - through the law - I live unto God'. These prepositions carry a very high voltage of theological meaning. But it is all too possible to read the words so rapidly that we miss the meaning, and turn a precious portion of Scripture into a jumble of words without sense. That many have missed the sense of these finely chosen words of Paul is easily shown from the fact that few sermons are preached on them. When have we last heard a sermon on Galatians 2:19? The likelihood is that Paul's great statement here is not valued because not properly understood.

The Christian is 'dead to the law'

Paul refers to himself as having died to the law. He has in mind, without any question, his conversion to Christ. He speaks of himself, but the same is true of every Christian. We die to the law as soon as we are born again. It is not that we are in process of dying. We did die to the law at the instant we were united to Christ through faith. No man who is alive to Christ is also alive to the law.

The converse is also true. Every person who is a non-Christian is alive to the law of God. The unbeliever is on a similar footing to Adam at the first: he is obliged, if he wants to enjoy eternal life, to keep the moral law perfectly and entirely. Whether or not we choose to define this relationship of the natural man as a covenant of works does not alter the fact that he must keep the whole law if he means to get to heaven without putting his trust in Christ. (And no natural man really puts his trust in Christ, whatever he may pretend to the contrary.)

It is the tragedy of the non-Christian's position that he is unaware of his duty and obligation to the law of God. He may shrug off his occasional fears and qualms of conscience by saying that he 'is not interested in religion'. But it needs to be said to him that interested or not in religion, he is alive to the demands of God's most holy law. So much is this the case that he must give a most strict account in the end to God for every single occasion on which he failed in his lifetime to measure up to the demands of the law. A perfect record exists with God of all his thoughts, words and deeds. Even one sin is enough to damn him. As our Saviour put it, the man who is not reconciled to God must remain in the prison of eternal punishment 'till he has paid the uttermost farthing' (Matt. 5:26). This is not a popular teaching in our day, but it is clear enough: hell is eternal suffering because the Christless sinner can never pay off his debt to God's justice.

The sinner who is not religious probably gives little thought to this subject. He swims on along the river of life's pleasures all unaware of the precipice over which this river will plunge him after death. He is alive to the law of God - alive to its demands, liable to its penalty, exposed to its curse, un-insured against the eternal loss of his precious soul. But there is another kind of person who is alive to the law. It is the devout and religious sinner who is concerned about life after death. The Apostle Paul, before his conversion, had been just such a person. A large number of his fellow countrymen had been similarly devout and conscientious, just as a fair number of persons are in every country today. They are 'alive to the law' and so they instinctively seek righteousness by endeavouring to keep it.

The hallmark of the person who is devout yet unconverted is that he turns the law into a gospel. He imagines that God gave us the law to be a means of meriting eternal life. Being ignorant of God's righteousness, such persons go about to establish their own righteousness by means of the moral law (Rom. 10:3).

This is the common fault of every Christless man. He wants to earn heaven by being good. Most people's attempts to be good are only faint and do not involve them in much worry or trouble. But there are cases, perhaps especially in monasteries and convents, where unconverted persons go to extraordinary lengths to get peace with God by the performance of 'good deeds' and self-mortification. Their minds, unenlightened to the gospel method of salvation by Christ, drive them on unmercifully to do what every natural man thinks he must do to get God's favour - work, work, work to acquire personal merit.

How do we account for this deep-seated instinct in man? It is because he is born 'alive to the law'. It is the only way he knows of to get right with God. Only the Great Day will reveal how many earnest monks and nuns have, over the centuries, fasted themselves to death in a vain search for life and peace which they sought in the wrong way. The Apostle Paul himself had been of their spirit in his pre-conversion days. Looking back on that time, he writes here with profound relief that he had, at his coming to Christ, become 'dead to the law'.

What a man discovers when he discovers the righteousness of Christ in the gospel is that his relationships are now all changed. His relationship to God is repaired. His relationship to the moral law is radically different. He is not under the lash of its severe demand because he now has another Master.

The false gospels of this world are all just one false gospel: salvation by human effort. They are, says Paul, 'another gospel which is not another' (Gal. 1:6, 7). We who are true Christians must adopt the apostle's outlook towards every preacher who attempts to bring to us a gospel made out of God's law. We are to say that all such men are 'accursed' (Gal. 1:9).

The Christian is 'dead through the law.'

What brings the natural man to see that all his goodness is not good enough? Many, of course, never see it. But great souls who press beyond mediocrity to the point of exhaustion in their search for God and for peace have found it. Paul found it. Augustine found it. Luther, a thousand years later, found it. So did George Whitefield in his own day. The Apostle Paul speaks for them all when he says that he became 'dead to the law through the law'. The moral law brings a man to an end of his own self-righteousness when it comes home to his conscience in the power of the Holy Spirit. The law is a sword in the Spirit's hand to slay our natural instinct as sinners to look for life and peace in the way of personal goodness. An amplification of this experience, which we call conviction and compunction, is given by Paul in Romans 7:7-13. The law, he found during the period of his awakening, de-molished his hopes of salvation by self-effort. When he saw the spirituality, perfection and holiness of the law's demand, he despaired of finding salvation by its means.

Put simply, then, the very law which Paul mistook as the way to ob- tain righteousness became the instrument in God's hand to slay his self-righteousness once and for all. The law is the tool of the Spirit for killing our hopes of salvation by the law. The law is thus here looked at under two distinct aspects: law as covenant and law as evangelistic instrument. By the evangelistic use of the law we are roused from our dream of ever finding peace through the law as a covenant of life. This discovery was made by Paul when he met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). The struggle had evidently begun a while before then, since he was finding it 'hard to kick against the pricks' (Acts 9:5) - surely a reference to the Spirit's inner stirrings in his soul. Once he came to Christ, the struggle was over. Now 'dead to the law' and profoundly convicted of his own deep sinfulness 'through the law', he cast himself wholly upon the mercy of Christ for eternal life. It was this transition that explains the radical and utterly aston-ishing change in his entire life and ministry: 'He which persecuted us in times past now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed' (Gal. 1:23). No wonder Christians who heard of it 'glorified God' in him (Gal. 1:24)!

Though no man can create saving impressions in the soul of his neighbour apart from the Spirit's work, yet every preacher of the gospel ought to pray for more of this awakening gift, to present the claims of God to sinners in such a way that they come to an end of their self-righteousness and com-placency. Awakening preaching is what our society needs very badly. Let the preacher prepare his sermons as the fisherman prepares his nets - with the express intention of catching sinners and leading them to self-despair. The Spirit assists in this great work by becoming a 'Spirit of bondage' (Rom. 8:15) to those whom God calls by grace. The great art of man-fishing lies very much in knowing how best in preaching to bring men to conviction of sin and self-despair.

The Christian 'lives unto God'

The Apostle Paul here declares what the moral and spiritual end is to which the believer is brought when he has passed from law to grace. It is, he informs us, that we might 'live unto God'. The point to which we are brought by religious conversion is this: to please God. The new birth brings about an alteration in the soul of a most profound and wonderful kind. We are transferred from self-centredness to God-centredness. It is a revolution more important in its consequences than the Copernican. The unbeliever's universe revolves around himself, the Christian's around God. Could any moral change be better? It takes nothing less than a moral miracle to make a sinner hate his sin and love the God whom preciously he shunned.

It is tempting to suppose at this point in the apostle's argument that the moral law is now over and done with. Did it not belong to the old, pre-conversion life? Are we not so dead now to the law that it may be safely relegated to the heap of things which are gone for good from the Christian? It is, we admit, tempting to discard the law and to cast it from us like an outworn garment or a pair of shoes which no longer fit. But we do so at our peril. The moral law still has a vital function to perform in the believer's life. It is the believer's rule of life.

Of course, attempts have often been made to try to 'live unto God' with-out reference to the moral law. Perhaps the commonest formula is to say that the Christian is not bound by any law but that of 'love'. Another way to avoid the moral law is to say that we can be so filled with the Spirit that we go far beyond the law. 'The law can be outstripped by the Spirit-filled man.' So, at any rate, some teachers claim.

The problem with taking 'love' and the 'Spirit-filled life' as our rule of behaviour is that neither gives us a clear prescription for daily living. Hollywood, too, believes in 'love' but declines to live as the Christian knows he must. The New Age movement has its own version of what 'love' is. So did the worshippers of Venus in Roman times! 'Love' is a word without meaning and must have a definition.

Thankfully, the New Testament defines what it means by 'love'. The Apostle Paul himself, who must surely have wrestled much in his soul over all these questions, puts the meaning of love beyond all doubt. 'Love is the fulfilling of the law' (Rom. 13:10). If doubt still yet existed as to the precise aspect of 'law' in his mind, he dispels it at once: 'For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other com-mandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' (Rom. 13:9). Nothing could be surer than that 'love', in the only sense which God acknowledges, is obedience to the moral law.

The Ten Commandments fill the word 'love' with biblical meaning. The law is not the gospel, and it cannot save us. But when we are saved, the law points us to the style of worship and of life which God requires of us. In this way we are to 'live unto God'. The Christian who hopes to please God by an obedient life will find the light he needs in the moral law.

The moral law is thus set before us by Paul in this text in these three aspects: as a covenant of life, as a tool of evangelism and as a rule of life. We are poor theologians till we have grasped the difference between these three uses and functions of the law.

And all this Paul puts (in Greek) in nine easy words: 'I through the law am dead to the law'. Shall we not say he was writing by inspiration?