We Are Naturally Under the Law

We have thus seen that the Scriptures teach first that all naturally under the law as prescribing the terms of their acceptance with God and secondly, that no obedience which sinners can render is sufficient to satisfy the demands of that law. It follows then that unless we are freed from the law, not as a rule of duty, but as prescribing the conditions of acceptance with God, justification is for us impossible. It is, therefore, the third great point of Scriptural doctrine on this subject, that believers are free from the law in the sense just stated. Ye are not under the law, says the apostle, but under grace. To illustrate this declaration he refers to the case of a woman who is bound to her husband as long as he lives, but when he is dead, she is free from her obligation to him, and is at liberty to marry another man. So we are delivered from the law as a rule of justification, and are at liberty to embrace a different method of obtaining acceptance with God. Paul says of himself, that he has died to the law, i. e. become free from it. And the same is said of all believers.

He insists upon this freedom as essential not only to justification but to sanctification. For while under the law, the motions of sin, which were by the law, brought forth fruit unto death, but now we are delivered from the law that we may serve God in newness of spirit. Before faith came we were kept under the law, which he compares to a schoolmaster, but now we are no longer under a school-master.

He regards the desire to be subject to the law as the greatest infatuation.9 “Tell me,” he says, “you that desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law?” and then shows that those who are under the demands of a legal system are in the condition of slaves and not of sons and heirs. “Stand fast therefore,” he exhorts, “in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if you be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing. For I testify again to every man that is circumcised that he is a debtor to do the whole law. Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; you are fallen from grace” (Gal 4:21-31; 5:1-4).

This infatuation Paul considered madness and exclaims, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you? This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” (Gal 3:1-2). This apostasy was so fatal, the substitution of legal obedience for the work of Christ as the ground of justification was so destructive, that Paul pronounces accursed any man or angel who should preach such a doctrine for the Gospel of the grace of God.

Source: Charles Hodge, The Way of Life. Philadelphia, American Sunday-school Union (1841).