Start with Peter’s warning
Paul is the apostle most often quoted to show that the law is finished. Before we read him, it is worth hearing what another apostle said about reading him.
“Regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote to you, as also in all of his letters, speaking in them of these things. In those, there are some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsettled twist, as they also do to the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. You therefore, beloved, knowing these things beforehand, beware, lest being carried away with the error of the wicked, you fall from your own steadfastness.”
2 Peter 3:15-17
Peter says three things. Paul’s letters contain things that are hard to understand. Unsettled people twist them. And the twisting runs toward “the error of the wicked,” where the word translated “wicked” means lawless. Peter is not warning that readers will make Paul too strict; he is warning that they will take Paul as permission to drop God’s law.
One reason Paul is hard is that he uses the word “law” for several different things, among them God’s law (Romans 7:22), the law of sin (Romans 7:23), the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2), and a law of faith (Romans 3:27). Which one he means has to come from the sentences around it.
What Paul said about himself
Paul was accused in his own lifetime of teaching believers to abandon Moses. Here is how the rumor was reported to him in Jerusalem, and what James asked him to do about it.
“They, when they heard it, glorified God. They said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the law. They have been informed about you, that you teach all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children and not to walk after the customs. What then? The assembly must certainly meet, for they will hear that you have come. Therefore do what we tell you. We have four men who have taken a vow. Take them and purify yourself with them, and pay their expenses for them, that they may shave their heads. Then all will know that there is no truth in the things that they have been informed about you, but that you yourself also walk keeping the law.”
Acts 21:20-24
Paul did it (Acts 21:26). James, the elders, and Paul all treated the accusation as false, and when it followed him into court he answered it the same way before the governor Felix, before Festus, and before the Jewish leaders in Rome.
“But this I confess to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, so I serve the God of our fathers, believing all things which are according to the law, and which are written in the prophets;”
Acts 24:14
“while he said in his defense, “Neither against the law of the Jews, nor against the temple, nor against Caesar, have I sinned at all.”
Acts 25:8
“After three days Paul called together those who were the leaders of the Jews. When they had come together, he said to them, “I, brothers, though I had done nothing against the people or the customs of our fathers, still was delivered prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans,”
Acts 28:17
These are statements made in court by a man on trial for his life. If Paul’s letters teach that the law is finished, then Paul misled Felix and Festus. We do not believe he did.
What Paul said about the law
Paul’s letters also contain plain statements about God’s law. They are not hard to understand, and they should set the frame for the ones that are.
“Do we then nullify the law through faith? May it never be! No, we establish the law.”
Romans 3:31
“Therefore the law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy, righteous, and good.”
Romans 7:12
“For I delight in God’s law after the inward person,”
Romans 7:22
“For it isn’t the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law will be justified”
Romans 2:13
“Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but what matters is keeping God’s commandments.”
1 Corinthians 7:19
Faith establishes the law. The law is holy, righteous, and good. Paul delights in it. The doers of the law, not the hearers only, are righteous before God. Keeping God’s commandments is what matters. Any reading of Paul’s harder verses that contradicts these is one Paul himself would reject.
Justification is a different question
Now the hard passages. The best known say that no one is justified by the works of the law.
“yet knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because no flesh will be justified by the works of the law.”
Galatians 2:16
“Because by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified in his sight; for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.”
Romans 3:20
We agree with every word. The law cannot justify anyone; it was never given for that (Galatians 3:21). Through the law comes the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20; 7:7), and a standard that shows you your sin cannot also be the thing that clears you of it. Only the Messiah does that, and only by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8-10).
But notice what these verses are about. They answer the question “how is a person made right with God?” They do not answer “how should a person who has been made right with God live?” Paul answers that too, and not with “however you like.” Shall we continue in sin? “May it never be!” (Romans 6:1-2). Do we nullify the law through faith? “May it never be! No, we establish the law” (Romans 3:31). Saying the law cannot save is not the same as saying it no longer applies.
Not under law
“What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be!”
Romans 6:15
Read the sentence before it: “sin will not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14). To be “under law” in Paul’s sense is to stand before the law condemned, with sin ruling you and the penalty hanging over you. Grace removes the condemnation. It does not remove the standard, which is why Paul’s next words rule out sinning, and sin is lawlessness (1 John 3:4). If “not under law” meant the commandments no longer applied, “shall we sin?” would be a meaningless question.
“For what the law couldn’t do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us who don’t walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.”
Romans 8:3-4
This passage begins, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). That is what we are freed from. The stated purpose of the Son’s coming is “that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us” who walk by the Spirit. The Spirit does not lead away from God’s statutes; the prophets said he would cause us to walk in them (Ezekiel 36:27). So “not under the law” for those led by the Spirit (Galatians 5:18) means what it meant in Romans 6: not under its condemnation.
Tutor, handwriting, and goal
“So that the law has become our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.”
Galatians 3:24
A tutor brings a child to maturity; he does not teach lessons the grown child is meant to forget. The law brought us to the Messiah so that we might be justified by faith, and being justified we are no longer under the tutor’s custody (Galatians 3:23, 25). The tutor’s instruction remains what it always was: holy, righteous, and good.
“Be careful that you don’t let anyone rob you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elemental spirits of the world, and not after Christ.”
Colossians 2:8
“wiping out the handwriting in ordinances which was against us. He has taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross.”
Colossians 2:14
What was nailed to the cross? “The handwriting in ordinances which was against us,” in the same sentence in which God forgives “all our trespasses” (Colossians 2:13). That is the record of our debt, not the commandments. Paul names the real threat in verse 8: human philosophy, the tradition of men, the elemental spirits of the world. Moses is not on that list. A few verses later he tells the Colossians not to let anyone judge them over feast days, new moons, or Sabbaths, “a shadow of the things to come” (Colossians 2:16-17), still pointing forward and still being kept. See Question 11.
“For Christ is the fulfillment of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”
Romans 10:4
The Greek word here is telos, which many Bibles render “end.” It means the goal or aim of a thing, the point it drives toward, which is why the World English Bible reads “fulfillment.” The Messiah is what the law was aiming at all along. Read it with Romans 3:31, seven chapters earlier in the same letter: the man who wrote “we establish the law” did not turn around and write that the Messiah had terminated it.
Reading Paul whole
Paul must agree with Jesus, who said not one stroke of the law would pass away until heaven and earth do (Matthew 5:17-19). He must agree with his own life, which James described as walking “keeping the law” and which Paul defended in court. And he must agree with his own plain statements. Read inside that frame, the hard verses stop contradicting the rest. Paul taught that the law cannot save, that the Messiah alone saves, and that the saved establish the law by walking in it.
That is the whole of our position on Paul. Salvation is by grace through faith; obedience is love’s response (John 14:15; 1 John 5:3). We would rather do the work Peter asked for than be carried away by the error he warned about. Test everything (1 Thessalonians 5:21).
Next: What in Torah can we still follow today, what can we not, and why?