Galatians 2:19–21

He had been under law as a Jew. What was the effect when God applied law to his own conscience? It made him feel himself a dead man. Romans 7 reasons it out: the law came, and he died... The law is never life to the dead; it kills morally those who seem alive... The Spirit of God can use it to make a man feel that everything is over with him. But He goes further in grace. By that very law He brings the man in dead to the law, and not merely condemned.

God Himself, by His strong hand, taught the greatest expert under the law that all the law could do for him was to kill him... He had boasted in the law. He had thought, wrongly, that it gave him righteousness. But what were they worth now that he knew the law in its spiritual reach — now that "the commandment came" to his conscience in its true light? It was a "ministry of death." The very law he looked to for life struck him dead as to all expectations from it. Until that law was out of the way, he could not live to God.

Now the law has power over a man only as long as he lives. In bringing out the effect of this truth, the apostle uses the example of the law of marriage... In this illustration, the husband died. But when we apply it to ourselves, the law does not lose its force and its rights by dying. It loses them by our dying. The law does not die — for in that case sin would be free — but we, by the body of Christ, are dead to the law.

The law had pronounced the sentence of death and condemnation on him, and through the law he had died to the law. But the sentence of the law fell on him in the person of Christ. Christ took the curse of the law, the condemnation, on Himself. Believing in Christ, he had died as to the old man. The law had slain him, but Christ had died in his place.

Paul did not count himself dead to the law so that he could live to himself and his own will. That would be pure lawlessness. He counted himself dead so that he might live with God Himself as the End and Object of his life. Previously the law had controlled him, or rather had failed to control him. Now God really did control him... Now He is fully revealed in His Son. So we pass from the control of law to the control of the One who gave it. That control is far higher, and it works on the opposite principle: grace.

The teaching in both passages makes the same point. Neither life nor fruit to God can go together with a legal conscience. The reason is that such a conscience is in every case an evil conscience.

There was no striving, as we often see these days, to keep the law in a spiritual way now that he was converted... The law never produced life in a single soul: it kills. Whereas here you find Paul dead to the law, but alive to God on a totally different principle... What is the spring of the new life? Not the law, but Christ.

For the one who believes in Jesus, Christ our Substitute has already taken that death sentence in His own death. His death was the death of our old man — the man under judgment. So the believer can say, "I have been crucified with Christ." We passed through death in the death of our Substitute, so we are free from the law. The law can condemn a man to death for the life he has led. But once the man is dead, he no longer lives the life the law applied to. The law can have nothing to say to a dead man.

The word of God treats the believer's crucifixion with Christ as a finished act that will never happen again. He died once, and we were then, and there, and forever identified with Him... God never tells the believer to crucify himself or his flesh. He counts it as already done.

All this involves a paradox, which the apostle states in verse 20. He has been crucified, he says, and still he lives. Crucifixion has reached me, yet it has left me a living man. It has reached me because I am joined to Christ. Its effect is to push self, the old "I," out of the way and put Christ in its place. He now lives in us by His Spirit, so that His character can be seen in us.

Though crucified we live. We are still living people on earth, yet we no longer live the old character of life. We live a life of a new order, a life whose character, summed up in one word, is CHRIST. Saul of Tarsus had been crucified with Christ. Yet the individual known as Saul of Tarsus was still living. Still living, yet in an entirely different character... he did not keep his old name. Soon after his conversion he became known as Paul, which means "Little one." He must be little if Christ is to live in him.

Self, wretched self, which is the end and object of the natural man in everything he does, is gone... Christ enters and takes the place of self. "For to me to live is Christ" — that is, to have Christ, not self, as my end and object. Christ, not self, is the spring now.

This new life, like all life in the creature, has and must have an object to sustain it. If the Lord Jesus is our life, He is also personally the object of that life... Faith sees Christ, looks to Him, trusts Him, feeds on Him, and rests in His love. It knows with joy that He is for us, in all the depth of the love that led Him to give Himself for us.

"He loved me and gave Himself for me." It is impossible to find language more individual. It is more than the general truth that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life." The soul that now believes can claim the love of Christ as its own.

Peter's turning aside from the truth of the gospel in this practical way might look like a small thing, but it had a very serious side, and Paul makes this clear in the last verse of the chapter. Paul had defined his own position, which agreed exactly with the truth of the gospel, and then said: "I do not frustrate the grace of God." The emphasis clearly falls on the "I" — "It is not I who am setting aside the grace of God." He implies that Peter, and those influenced by him, were the ones committing themselves to this sorry work. The grace of God had brought Jews and Gentiles together in this new and high privilege, and they were frustrating that in practice by separating them! What is more, they were in principle going back to law. If you go back to it at all, you go back to it for all. To go back to it for righteousness means that Christ has died "for no purpose."

If a person can gain righteousness by works, by a self-made character, or by keeping religious ceremonies, then Christ's death was unnecessary, and that sets aside the grace of God.

Righteousness can be shown in only two ways: by law or by the grace of God. By the first, man stands, if he can stand at all, on the footing of his own obedience. He is righteous as a doer of the will of God. By the second, man takes a new name in place of the one he was born with. He stands on the merit of a righteousness that has proved and glorified itself apart from him, and that righteousness freely makes itself his own. Because Another is righteous, he is justified by faith in Him.

Suppose someone else could have kept the law for the offender — though that was impossible. In that case no one would ever have paid the law's penalty for breaking it. People could break the law with no punishment, and no sacrifice would be needed. If such a substitute obedience had been possible, His life, not His death, would have met the need.

Now here Christ's death and righteousness by law are contrasted. We are told pardon comes by death, righteousness by law, with Christ fulfilling it. But the apostle declares that it does not come by law; and that if it did, Christ is dead in vain. Indeed, why should He die, if I was righteous without it?

Suppose a righteous man could knock at the door of heaven and claim to enter by right on the ground of his own works. Such a person would never know God; love would not have brought him there, and God is love. It would have been the wages of his own work; he would have deserved to enter. But it is not love when you pay a workman the wages he has earned. You may pay him politely, but it is always a debt — there can be no love in it. It is love that has saved me.

Law could never produce righteousness. Grace alone has done this by the cross. Suppose I dare to suggest some other cure for my unrighteousness than the cross of Christ. Suppose I dare to think I can gain or keep a righteous standing before God by law-keeping. Then I am saying in effect that it was useless for Christ to have died! Yet this is exactly what many professing Christians are guilty of, although they don't realise it. If it is not Christ alone that a person clings to for safety, how dangerous is the ground!