Objection:
Why preach the law when no one can be saved by obeying it? Furthermore, man is morally unable to keep the commandments anyway, so it’s a waste of time.
Answer:
This objection is only a variant of objections we already answered. But because the no-law argument is made to appear so plausible under different guises, let us examine this objection.
We agree with the objector that no one can be saved by keeping the law and that man is morally unable to keep it. But we disagree with the conclusion he would have us draw from these facts, namely, that the law was abolished at the cross. What would we say to the man who should argue that mirrors should be abolished as worthless because no one can obtain beauty by looking into them? Why, we would say that it is not the business of a mirror to make people beautiful, that no one ever made such claims for mirrors. The function of the mirror is to provide us with a means of knowing whether we look as we ought. And when we have discovered how we look, we can take appropriate means for remedying the imperfections.
Even so, with the law. The law was never intended to make man holy, pure, or beautiful. Its task is not to save man from his sins and imperfections but to provide him with a means of discovering his condition. When he gazes at the law, with his mind quickened by the convicting Spirit of God, he sees immediately where this or that moral defect mars the beauty of his soul, even as he discovers from gazing into a mirror just where this or that physical defect impairs the beauty of his body.
And when men thus see their spiritual defects and become conscious of their uncleanness, they are in a frame of mind to listen to a message that offers cleansing from their defilement. In other words, only when a man realizes he is a sinner is he ready to listen to the gospel, which is the good news of salvation from sin.
It is by the law that we know sin. (See Romans 3:20). Therefore, it is evident that only as the law is made known to men can they be brought into a frame of mind that will cause them to wish to hear and accept what the gospel offers them.
We would ask: If sinful man cannot keep the law, and when he becomes a Christian, he need not keep it, tell us why the law of God was ever given in the first place? Shall we mock God’s law and charge Heaven with proclaiming a code that was impossible to keep for thousands of years and that the last two thousand years need not be kept?
We are trying to understand why the objection before us should be used to prove that the law was abolished at the cross. Men were no more morally able to keep God’s holy law in the centuries before Christ than in the centuries following. Nor could they in those years before Christ hope to obtain salvation through the law, for, as we have found, God has had only one way of saving men from the days of Adam down: through the sacrifice of Christ. (See objection “You Preach The Law As The Sum And Substance Of True Religion”). So, then, if the criticism before us proves anything against the law today, it proves it against the law in all past days, back to the beginning of man’s sinful history. In other words, there would be no valuable place for God’s law at all in the whole history of the world.
Instead of the law being abolished for Christians, there is no true keeping of the law except by Christians. The divine code would be a dead letter in this world were it not for the Christians who obey it. By faith, Christ comes into our hearts and lives out in us the precepts of heaven. (See Ephesians 3:20; Galatians 2:20; 1 Corinthians 1:23, 24). Thus, instead of God’s law being wholly ignored and scorned in this rebellious world, there are found men and women upholding and establishing it in the only way a law can be supported—by living in obedience to its claims. That is why Paul says, “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.” (Romans 3:31). Our faith in Christ does not abolish the law but rather upholds it.
