27 Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the "law" that requires faith. 28 For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from observing the law. 29 Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, 30 since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. 31 Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.
Dig Deeper
If you’ve ever been a parent you know that one of the most annoying and grating things that you can ever encounter is an incessantly whining child. It is uncanny how quickly the constant whining can get to you and make every part of your body tense. Someone should seriously contact Amnesty International or the United Nations and have a whining child put on the list of banned torture techniques. The other day my youngest became somehow convinced he needed to have a particular treat. He became equally convinced that whining for it would help him attain his desired treasure. He asked fairly nicely the first time and after getting an answer that he did not want, he committed two cardinal sins. The first was asking for something when he had already been told “no.” The second was that he began to whine in asking for it. Rather than yelling at him or simply telling him to “stop” I took a minute to quiet him down so that he could listen to me and then explained to him the error in his thinking. It doesn’t matter when you whine, I told him, because whining was never going to help him get what he wanted. It wasn’t designed for that and could never accomplish it.
The Jews were often compared to children in the Old Testament and they took great pride in the fact that they were God’s children. Where they went wrong, according to Paul, was that they began to think that following the elements of the law, especially those that set them apart from the rest of the world, was the way in which they were justified in the present. They lost sight of the fact that God always desired his people to live by faith in him, a fact that Paul will explain in chapter 4. Obedience to the law had a purpose, but the works of the law could never accomplish justification. It simply wasn’t designed for that. The weakness of the analogy of a whining child is that whining never really has a positive purpose as the law did, but just as my son would never accomplish his goal by whining, Jews could, quite ironically, never fulfill the law by following the law. The law was designed to keep them quarantined from the pagan nations but it was not the uniform of God’s people as they thought it was. Something else was desperately needed.
Every culture, whether you realize it or not, has a metanarrative. A metanarrative is a fancy word that has been assigned to describe the overarching story of a group of people that defines their history, who they are, and what their place is in the world. Israel’s metanarrative included the belief that they were the people of God, given the law of the Old Testament and charged with keeping that law to set them apart from the pagan world around them. Those who kept God’s law, namely Israel would be vindicated on the day of the Lord when he returned to set things straight. In the meantime, though, you could clearly tell who God’s people were, those who were justified, because they were the ones that were keeping God’s law. The uniform in the present age that they were the people of God was that they kept the works of the law.
This did not mean, as most commentators incorrectly assume, that the Jews believed that they could work their way into God’s grace and salvation. This belief is due largely to a mythology that the Jews, and specifically the Pharisees, believed in works as though they could somehow earn their salvation. Careful study of early Judaism, however, shows no such thing. The debate about earning salvation was a 4th century argument between church figures Augustine and Pelagius that has been anachronistically transplanted back into Paul’s day. The Jews believed that the works of the law was what demonstrated to the rest of the world who was justified, not the avenue through which they were justified. It was, in other words, the evidence not the means. What did happen, though, was that many splinter groups within Judaism, whether it was the Pharisees or the Qumran community, began to stress certain works of the law as being the important ones to truly distinguish who God’s people were. The Pharisees, for instance, paid special attention to the Sabbath regulations (as is evidenced consistently throughout the New Testament). In their minds, if you wanted to know who the true people of God were, the ones that would be vindicated on the final day, then look and see who was strictly observing the Sabbath (although this is just one work among many). They were the ones that were wearing the right uniform.
Paul called this mindset that “our interpretation of following the law is right and yours are wrong,” boasting. He makes it clear, however, that this sort of thing is summarily excluded. It is nothing other than the resurrection of Jesus and the gospel announcement that stems from that victory that has nullified all of this sort of boasting. That time has passed. The works of the law were never intended to accomplish that end and they never will. Paul says that if you want to be able to tell who the true people of God were, look for those who live by faith in the life of Christ alone. This has a striking continuity with the promise that Jesus gave his disciples over their concerns on just this matter of how could you distinguish who the true people of God were (who would be justified in the present). He told his disciples in Matthew 21:21 that if they had enough faith, the mountain (the Old Testament symbolic language for the Temple and the works of the law that went along with the Temple) would be thrown into the sea (Old Testament symbolism for the place of destruction and evil). He was, in other words, promising them that God’s people would be justified and vindicated by faith and those who trusted in the works of the law would not.
The cure to the faulty logic in trusting in the works of the law for justification that Paul clearly exposes is contained in the Shema from Deuteronomy 6 which was Israel’s most oft-repeated and most venerated prayer. It began with a declaration that there was one God and he was YHWH (Deut. 6:4-5). If God is one, an assertion that all Jews would affirm, then there can be only one covenant. God made Abraham a promise to create a covenant family that would bring blessing to the whole world and would consist of many nations. If we follow Paul’s logic it means that there is only one God, only one covenant, and only one covenant family. This excludes the law from being the means through which the covenant people could be justified or declared to be in the covenant family because the law, by it’s nature, separated rather than unified. The law, as Paul makes clear in Galatians 3:19, was added to the covenant because of transgressions to keep Israel pure until the coming of the Messiah (although that does not mean that the law, if used properly, contradicted Israel’s vocation to be the light of the world). If people could be justified by the works of the law that separated Jew from Gentile then the Jews would have a distinct advantage over the Gentiles. It would be akin to saying that God is the God of the Jews only but that would stand in opposition to God’s covenant promises.
But the fact is that being declared to be part of the covenant family is something that was always enacted by faith in God not by observing the law. There is one God, who has issued one covenant promise to create one family of both the circumcised and the uncircumcised. They both must rely on faith in the life of the Messiah rather than their own boasts. This doesn’t nullify the law, rather it puts it in proper perspective rather than assuming that the law accomplished something that it didn’t.
We have to keep in mind firmly though what Paul means when talks of or alludes to justification by faith. He is not referring to a warm feeling of mental assent. He is not referring to emotions, or to saying a little prayer, or slipping your hand up during a prayer that someone else led while asking you to agree to have faith in Jesus. Our modern world speaks often of having faith in Jesus, with little thought as to what that actually means. When Paul speaks of faith, he is referring to the act of believing that the life of Christ is in the right place before God covenantally speaking and that your own life is not and never can be. Having faith in that life means dying to self and entering into the life of the Messiah at baptism (Paul will get to that in chapter 6). Entering into that life is an act of believing obedience, faith, that calls one to a life of repentance and seeking holiness as we are transformed into the image of God. In a strange twist, then, Paul’s point is that when one realizes the true purpose of the law of the Old Testament and lets it turn them to their need for the life of Christ in faith, then and only then, are they truly able to uphold the covenant and the law.
Devotional Thought
If you look at people in the world around you, you will realize that people trust in many things to demonstrate their status before God. It seems that the most popular of those things is that of being a “good person.” Have you subtly bought into that belief for those around you or do you unflinchingly challenge your neighbors that only by dying to self and entering into the life of Christ can one be justified before God?
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