“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes…” (CSB – Read the chapter)

It’s hard to know what something is unless you know what it’s for. But if you get what it is for wrong, you’ll get what it is wrong too. Perhaps the best illustration of this comes from Scuttle the seagull in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. When Ariel brings him a fork, he identifies it as a “dinglehopper,” used by humans for doing their hair. Among followers of Jesus there is an occasionally robust debate about the purpose of the Law of Moses in light of Christ and His ministry. Paul gives us an important clue here. Let’s talk about it.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the Law and Prophets but to fulfill them. Interestingly, both followers and critics alike will occasionally use this statement and its contextually linked partner that Heaven and Earth will pass away before one any part of the law will be undone “until all things are accomplished,” to insist that all of what we know of as the Old Testament is operative in the lives of followers of Jesus.

Critics who do this typically do so out of a basic ignorance of the broader New Testament teachings regarding the old covenant versus the new covenant. Because of the cultural difficulty of many parts of the Law of Moses, it makes for a convenient line of attack that many believers don’t know how to respond to. Doing this gives them what appears to be a haze of legitimacy for their rejection of the Gospel. It gives them an apparently theological or at least intellectual-sounding justification for a decision that is vastly more likely to have been emotional or relational in origin.

Professed believers who do this are often fueled by a similar basic ignorance of the new covenant versus old covenant thinking across the New Testament, but instead of looking for reasons to reject the Gospel, they are looking for a means of following Jesus more faithfully. It’s the same essential mindset that was often in operation among first century Jews.

Faithfully following Jesus can feel at times like a nebulous thing. Having some guidelines and guardrails in place can help us have more confidence that we are on the right track, and the Law of Moses offers nothing if not a laundry list of guidelines and guardrails that can easily be used toward that end. This feels especially helpful for teaching children the faith. When you can give them an easy-to-follow list of do’s and don’ts, you can more easily regulate their behavior and give them a basic moral framework that can help keep them on the right track as they grow and start to make their own decisions.

These are certainly opposite errors to make in almost every respect, but they are nonetheless equal in their core thinking. Both groups operate on the theological assumption that the Old Testament law still has authority over the lives of modern followers of Jesus. As we have talked about before more than once, it does not. And thinking that it does can lead both to the creation of modern Pharisees – of which there are many in the church today – and to ignorant and unnecessary rejections of the Gospel on false grounds.

The truth is just as Paul writes here: “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” This is perfectly consistent with what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Whether you abolish or fulfill a law, though, at the end of the day, the necessity and authority of that law is removed. Jesus’ work on the cross, as the author of Hebrews put it, made the law obsolete. It is not needed any longer. It definitely doesn’t have power over those who are in Christ.

Jesus said the law won’t go away “until all things are accomplished.” Well, He was right and not just because He was Jesus. Okay, but what are these “all things” whose being accomplished would bring about the time when the Law and Prophets would finally pass away? He was talking about His work and ministry which culminated in His sacrificial death on the cross and life-giving resurrection from the dead. Once those were accomplished, the Law of Moses became unnecessary. As Paul gloriously put it back in Romans 3:21: “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed.” There is a way to receive the righteousness of God that is entirely separate from the law. That way is Jesus. He is the end or the fulfillment of the law.

Any effort to pursue the righteousness of God apart from Christ is nothing more than a works-based righteousness. They are all different flavors of our attempting to make ourselves good enough for God (and if not God, then whatever alternative we have substituted in His place even if that is nothing more than our own self-assessment). The trouble is, those standards never work. They never accomplish their goal. We always fall short in one way or another. The law fails to make us righteous because it can only address external matters of behavior while the heart of our problem lies in the heart. If we want to experience and receive the righteousness of God, Jesus is the only way to get there.

Jesus brought an end to the need for the law. He fulfilled the old covenant and replaced it with a new one. The law always pointed to Him. Once He came and accomplished “all these things,” the need for the law was satisfied. Now our need for righteousness is fulfilled not in keeping some external standard, but in trusting in Jesus and receiving His righteousness shared with us. This trust is demonstrated by our doing what He said. And what He said is that we should love one another after the pattern of His own love for us. In other words, He replaced 613 commands to keep to hit the mark of righteousness with one that comes as a consequence of having already received righteousness as a gift. Not a bad trade if you ask me.

Paul’s whole point here, though, is that we shouldn’t be like those members of physical Israel who rejected the Gospel in an ignorant attempt to establish their own righteousness rather than submit to the righteousness of God. We should instead realize that “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” We don’t have to keep a bunch of commands to live with the righteousness of God. We simply have to go to Jesus in faith and live like He is Lord. That’s much, much simpler.