Paul’s Own Words on the Law

This book began with your phone buzzing in the night. A new version is ready, you tap “install,” and by morning the old code of version 1.0 is gone. That, we said, is how many of us were taught to picture the Bible: the Torah was version 1.0, grace is version 2.0, and the update wiped the old system clean.

We also said that an update leaves a trace. Somewhere there are release notes, a line that says what was removed. Since Paul is the writer named as the one who announced the removal, it is fair to let him speak last, not in what others claim he said, but in what he wrote.

Paul in His Own Words

In Romans, three verses after writing that “a person is justified by faith apart from works of nomos νόμος nom'-os(law)” (Romans 3:28), he says this:

Romans 3:31 Do we then nullify the nomos(law) through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we uphold the nomos(law).

Four chapters later, he says this:

Romans 7:12 So then, the nomos(law) is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

And standing on trial before a Roman governor, years after the cross and the resurrection, asked to give an account of himself, he says this:

Acts 24:14 But this I admit to you, that according to the Way which they call a sect I do serve the God of our fathers, believing everything that is in accordance with the nomos(law) and that is written in the Prophets;

These are three places in two settings, a letter and a courtroom. In all three the same man says the same thing. Asked whether faith nullifies the nomos (νόμος), the law, he answers, “May it never be! On the contrary, we uphold the nomos(law).” The commandment, he says, is “holy and righteous and good.” And the Way he serves, the one “they call a sect,” is lived “believing everything that is in accordance with the nomos(law) and that is written in the Prophets.”

Paul said those things. What he never said is the sentence the update picture needs him to say.

Repentance, Righteousness, and Sin

Part One began with a sinner. We saw that sin is missing the mark God set, and that the mark is written down. We saw that a sinner is made right with God by grace, through faith in the Messiah’s blood, as a gift, and never by works. The curse of Galatians 3:10 fell on those who do not remain in what is written, and Messiah bore it so that we would be free of it. Then we saw what comes after the door opens: repentance that bears fruit, a man and a woman both told to sin no more, and a ransomed captive who still has somewhere to walk. At every step the order held: grace first, and then the walk.

Commandments Within Reach

Part Two faced the objection every honest reader raises, that nobody can keep the commandments. We saw that God moves first and works in us to will and to work, and we heard Moses declare that the word is very near. We heard John affirm that God’s commandments are not burdensome, and we saw Zacharias and Elizabeth again, called righteous and walking blamelessly in all the commandments. We read where anomia ἀνομία an-om-ee'-ah, Torah-lessness, is actually written, and what forsaking the Torah brought. And we let Galatians define “a different good news” for itself by its two questions: how a sinner is justified, and how the justified live.

Paul’s Letters on the Covenants

Part Three opened the letter so often quoted against the Torah and read it line by line. What Paul tore down and would not rebuild was the way of seeking to be made righteous by works, not the commandments. Hagar was a story taken from the Torah itself. The Galatians were turning back to a slavery they had known before they ever heard of Moses. Then the letters that stand beside Galatians, Hebrews and Romans above all, showed where the fault lay: with the people, not with the Torah. The new covenant does not hand us a different law. It writes the same Torah on a new heart and gives the Spirit so that we walk in it.

The Release Notes

We return now to the phone on the nightstand. We went looking for the release notes, the line in the text that says the Torah was uninstalled. We have weighed claim after claim, and we have read Paul in his own words.

The notes are not there. What we found instead looks much less like an update and much more like a homecoming. Version 1.0 was never broken code, for Paul calls it holy. Nor was grace ever a replacement for it. Grace is how a sinner comes in at the door, and the commandments are how the one who has come in walks through the house. Faith does not delete the nomos; in Paul’s own words, it upholds it.

The whole book can be put in a single line: justified by grace through faith, and then walking in the commandments of God. These are two answers to two questions, and neither erases the other.

What Comes Next

Still, you may be holding a few verses in reserve, and they are the strongest ones. They are the verses used to say that the law was abolished, the ones that seem to say it in so many words: Messiah “abolishing in His sarx σάρξ sarx(flesh) the enmity, which is the nomos(law) of commandments contained in dogmata(decrees)” (Ephesians 2:15); “having cancelled out the certificate of debt,” “having nailed it to the stauros σταυρός stow-ros'(cross)” (Colossians 2:14); “Messiah is the telos τέλος tel'-os(goal, completion) of the nomos(law)” (Romans 10:4); and then 1 Timothy 1:9, Mark 7:19, and others like them.

Those verses deserve more than a closing paragraph, and so they will have a book of their own. Book 3 of this series, “Free from the Law?” opens them one at a time, in their own words and in their own places. It also reads what Scripture calls food and what it calls clean and unclean, and then turns the page to read the verses that say to keep the Torah.

The phone still lies on the nightstand, and the release notes have never been written. The reading continues in the next book.