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The relationship of Law and Gospel

Paul’s letter to the Galatians addresses whether or not the law with its demands for holiness can help the Christian to keep it, or whether it even gets in the way, and if so, how.

The question arose among the churches in the Roman province of Galatia when certain unnamed teachers there advocated that also Christians must become circumcised as prescribed by the law of Moses. The circumcision party neither questioned that Jesus was the Messiah, nor that he was raised from the dead and Lord of all, nor that faith in him is necessary for salvation. Given their apparent orthodoxy in all of these points, the polemic unleashed by Paul against the circumcisers is all the more staggering (Gal 5:12). In the words of the late theologian J. Gresham Machen (Christianity and Liberalism, 1923, p25-26):

“Paul as well as the Judaizers believed that the keeping of the law of God, in its deepest import, is inseparably connected with faith. …Surely Paul ought to have made common cause with teachers who were so nearly in agreement with him; surely he ought to have applied to them the great principle of Christian unity. As a matter of fact, however, Paul did nothing of the kind; and only because he (and others) did nothing of the kind does the Christian Church exist today.”

Machen summed up the essence of the disagreement as follows:

“…the trouble was, they believed that something else was also necessary; they believed that what Christ had done needed to be pieced out by the believer’s own effort to keep the Law. …The difference concerned only the logical – not even, perhaps, the temporal – order of three steps. Paul said that a man (1) first believes on Christ, (2) then is justified before God, (3) then immediately proceeds to keep God’s law. The Judaizers said that a man (1) believes on Christ and (2) keeps the law of God the best he can, and then (3) is justified. …Such an attempt to piece out the work of Christ by our own merit, Paul saw clearly, is the very essence of unbelief; Christ will do everything or nothing, and the only hope is to throw ourselves unreservedly on His mercy and trust Him for all.”

In other words: The Galatians did not question what we need to be saved from (namely the guilt, power and, eventually, the presence of sin), nor that this salvation requires faith in Jesus. The disagreement introduced by the false teachers came from their false belief about how such salvation is possible, i.e. from their distortion of what exactly Jesus taught about it.