IS GOD LIMITED TO THE LAW AS A SYSTEM FOR GOVERNING THE BELIEVER? Most people are inclined to think so, and this for a number of reasons. First, there is a great lack of knowledge concerning the true nature of Law. The Law as God gave it to Israel is a system of command and penalty (Hebrews 2:2; 10:28). For instance, the Law commanded the Israeli not to commit adultery but also demanded the death of the adulterer. There are large denominations in Christendom today that insist on retaining the Law as a rule of life, but what man has any right to reduce the Law from a system of command and penalty to simply a rule of life? The "sentencing" portion of the Law is as divine in its origin as the "indicting" portion. Today’s would-be law teachers and keepers insist that God has not terminated the Law as a means of His government of the believer, but most of them do not wish to execute adulterers. In attempting to rescue half of the Law they unwittingly sacrifice the other half. The Law is a unit (James 2:10; Galatians 3:10). It is not only command, it is command with penalty. This is the way it came from the drawing board of Heaven. No man has a right to change it. No one has a right to alter it, modify it, diminish it, or tailor it to suit his theological position.

Law presupposes sin, and that is why it is never given to a righteous person (1 Timothy 1:9). The Law was designed for Lawbreakers, to indict them, convict them, and slay them (2 Corinthians 3:7,9). Until it has done all of these things it has not done its perfect work.

Christ came under the Law voluntarily (Galatians 4:4). It had no claim on Him; it could not have. The Law cannot stand over Deity, and Christ is absolute Deity. It was never given to unfallen man, and Christ is perfect humanity. Infinite in His Deity, perfect in His humanity, above the Law as Himself the Lawgiver, beyond the reach of Law because of His spotless nature, He could only come under its reign voluntarily to answer its charges against others and to redeem those properly condemned by its curse (Galatians 3:13).

The Law was given to the nation Israel alone (Romans 9:4). It was never given to the Gentiles and it could not be (Romans 2:14). It was a covenant between God and His covenant people (Exodus 19:3-5). The Gentiles had already been given over to a debased mind when God called Abraham centuries before the giving of the Law (Romans 1:28). When the Law was finally given through Moses to Israel, the Gentiles were strangers to the covenants of Promise and not in a position to be related to God by any contract (Ephesians 2:11-13). For the sixteen hundred year history of the Law, the Gentiles were only related to God through spiritual death. God might bless them with such general blessing as survived the cursing of the Earth upon Adam’s fall, giving them sunshine and rain, and (indirectly) good crops...etc., but to have access to Him they had to come through Israel, the Covenant people, the people of Promise; and the people of Promise were under the Law.

The Law still exists. It has been abolished as a means of approach to God, having proved its point, that no sinful man can approach a holy God on the basis of a standard that requires perfection. It is still the measure, not of the holiness of God as some suppose, but of what an infinitely holy God has a "right" to require of the flesh. If God were to impose it on man today it would still thunder the judgments of God’s wrath against sin and it would still call for the death of the sinner.

We, we who died to sin, who died to the sin nature with which we were born, who died to the Adam-life when we died with Christ, have also died to the Law (Romans 6:1-4; 7:1-6). Scripture says that we were "slain" to the Law (Romans 7:4). That this death to law was a death to the Moral Law, that which was engraved in stone, the Ten Commandments, is clear from Paul’s choice of the tenth commandment to illustrate how sin produced death in him through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful (Romans 7:7-13).

The woman of Romans seven, whose husband died, continued to live as a person but died as a wife. The relationship that she had under the marriage law while her first husband lived, now ceased to exist. The marriage law still existed, but no longer applied to her since she was no longer married. Through the death of her husband she had died to the law that had previously bound her. She had to die to the first union, the first marriage, before she could begin another union, another marriage, or else she would have been a bigamist and an adulteress.

Scripture tells us that we, in like manner, died to the Law that once applied to man in the flesh. Through the death of Christ we became dead (literally, "were slain") to the Law that we might enjoy a new union. Not only so, but we are told that the first union did not produce "fruit to God." The new union (marriage to Him who was raised from the dead), is designed for producing fruit, or for childbearing since children are the fruit that marriage produces.

The "Christian life," or more accurately, the Grace Believer’s life, can only be lived this side of the cross on resurrection ground. It is a life derived not from the first Adam, for he could only bequeath to us condemnation and death; nor is it an achievement of man in the flesh under law. It is a new sphere of life found only in the last Adam, and Him risen and glorified; a life born and lived totally in the sphere of Grace.