The Law is a signpost, not a Savior

In Romans 3:9-22, Paul makes a compelling biblical argument that no one is without sin.  In fact, not only does he assert that everyone is a sinner, but he also strongly argues that no one can be made right with God through the Mosaic law. Those piercing statements would not have landed well with his contemporary religious elites. Those elites would have been repulsed by both the tip and the edge of that spearhead. Their pride would have been punctured and sliced in ways that would have forced them to recognize the man they helped murder as the Messiah. Even more profoundly, it would have stripped them of the self-importance they had wrongly assumed was a natural product  of their cultural, religious, and genetic heritage, along with the self-righteousness they had acquired through their robotic adherence to the Mosaic law. 

Much of Paul’s argument rests in Romans 3:10-11, which is a direct quote from Psalm 14:1-4, and Psalm 53:1-4.  Those verses are an excellent starting place for Paul because they outline for us part of the reason “why” everyone is a sinner. Those verses imply that no one is righteous precisely because no one is seeking after God.  In other words, the orientation of every human being is not toward the highest possible good, which is God.  If our orientation isn’t toward God as the highest possible good, then our orientation necessarily will be toward a lower good, and that lower good is actually often an evil.  That evil is almost always an orientation toward what a person believes to be good for them but is actually a path toward death (Proverbs 14:12). These evils are selfish ambition, comfort, status, greed, pleasure, and all manner of things that ultimately become barriers between people and God, as well as barriers between people and the individuals in their communities. These things are rooted in individual self-interest, and not an interest in the highest possible good (Philippians 2:19-21, Ephesians 4:17-24).

It is because of those selfish dynamics that the law can neither save you or make you right with God.  God is not interested in someone who has a dead and robotic adherence to the law, but rather, he is interested in a person whose behaviors and choices are naturally born out of a living love for him as the highest possible good. The purpose of the law, in part, is to point us toward his righteousness, and to show us that we, as fallen humanity, are depraved apart from God, and that we slouch completely short of his intended righteousness for us – which is to be like Jesus. In that sense, the law is a signpost designed to show us that we need a savior. It is not a means to self-salvation.

A person who loves God doesn’t follow the law to avoid punishment, or to attain religious status, or to appease the cultural dictates of the day. Those motivations are selfish.  Instead, the person who actually loves God does so because he recognizes the love, kindness and sacrifice of Christ. That recognition compels him to naturally adhere to the law without even thinking about it because he trusts in Christ to shape him into a proper image of God (Galatians 5:22-23). His honest orientation becomes aimed toward the highest possible good – so much so, that he cannot have any self-centered boasting, but can only recognize that his trust in Christ magnifies what is truly good (Romans 3:21-31). In that process, he begins to demonstrate in his life those things that are required by the law and that are genuine and godly. And against those things, there is no law (Galatians 5:23b, Matthew 22:35-39).