Christ is the end of the law, the Mosaic law. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. You see, do you know what happens? When you believe, that is, when you come to Christ and receive him as the Messiah, you no longer
Look to the Mosaic covenant law for your place with God and your blessings in God. That’s the end of it. The word end in the text for Christ is the end of the law. It has two uses. One of them is the purpose of
Telios what is aimed at. It also has the idea of termination. It’s used for both those purpose and termination. In this text, both are true. For here’s the Mosaic Covenantal Law. To live.
For Jews to live down the centuries, to live under the Mosaic Covenantal Law, which was a law saturated with the grace of God, the goodness of God, the kindness of God, the faithfulness of God, all of that. To live under that as a trusting person and as a trusting nation.
There was a righteousness that came from the law. You could be right with God under the law.
You never earned anything. Earning earning is something we come up with, particularly in the fifteenth, sixteenth century when the Protestant Catholic wars brought it to focus. The Bible never talks about people earning life with God or God’s blessings. They never speak of that.
We do that since the worst face of Calvinism and post Calvinism come into being. That’s a nice interesting discussion, but it won’t it doesn’t matter for now. The Mosaic Covenantal Law was a law in which and under which you could live and rejoice with God. Look, look, we need to get
that clear.
Read take an hour just nice and casually. Take an hour when you’ve nothing other that you must do, and read Psalm one hundred and nineteen.
One hundred and seventy six verses.
Where a psalmist or a number of scientists psalmist yeah scientists, Psalm one hundred and nineteen, one psalmist or a number of psalmist, all they do is rejoice in the law of God. It gives me life. It makes me alive. It guides me. It makes me rejoice.
It makes me wiser than my teachers. It goes on and on and on and on. It is a wondrous and gracious things. The psalmist will say, Be gracious unto me, O Lord, and teach me your law and your statutes. The Mosaic Covenantal Law was not a legalist handbook. You didn’t earn anything.
But if you didn’t love God in a covenantal responsive love, the law became your accuser. It became your judge. It hammered home death. Yeah, that’s the law for you. No.
It’s not only the law. In Second Corinthians two, Paul speaking of New Testament believers, Jews and Gentiles. He said, Do you know who we are?
We are the aroma.
of Christ in the world.
And with the background of a Roman procession.
He says, We are the aroma of Christ. And when people smell us
They know it’s life unto life or death unto death.