What's Wrong with the Law?

The Apostle Paul is often a difficult guy to understand. Peter nailed it when he said,

Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction(2 Pet. 3:15-16).

This just goes to show that we must work hard to understand the text. Diligence is a must as we wrestle with the writings of Paul as with all Scripture.

One of the central issues in Paul's theology is the role of the Law of Moses. And of course, this has been at the center of the debate between Lutheran and NPP scholars. As we study letters such as Galatians and Romans, it quickly becomes apparent that Paul has a problem with the Judaizers' use of the Torah. What's wrong with their use of the Torah? Is there something wrong with the Torah in of itself? Those are central questions that we must ask in order to understand Paul.

In the past, I have often heard that the problem with the Law is that the Torah is just a bunch of rules and that rules can never change somebody within. So when Paul talks about the shortcomings of the Law he is referring the fact that rules can't make people right with God. Now surely there is some truth to that, but this can't be the whole problem that Paul is dealing with. Why? Because throughout his writings Paul presents people with all sorts of rules that we are to follow out of obedience to Christ (cf. Ephesians 4:17-6:9).

Now as a corrective, some folks suggest that the Judaizers' problem was in the relation between rules and faith. In other words, the Judaizers taught that you must follow the rules in order to be accepted by God. And the truth is that since you're accepted by God through faith in Christ, you must now follow the rules out of gratitude for God's grace.

The difficulty with this view is with the nature of the rules. In Galatians, the rules of that Judaizers seem to esteem are circumcision and food regulations. And Paul actually says that they shouldn't follow these rules. Paul could have said, "You silly Galatians, don't you know that since you are accepted by faith, follow the rules. You have it the wrong way around. First you believe in Jesus and then you get circumcised. Not the other way around." But that's not Paul's argument. Paul doesn't want them to follow these rules. And the question that we must address is "Why?"