Now we know that the law [is] good if any one uses it lawfully,
Paul has just named teachers who wanted to teach the law without understanding it. Now he grants what no one disputes: the law is good — but good only when a person handles it lawfully, which raises the question of who the law was written for.
Good in itself
The law's goodness belongs to its own character, not to the results people get from it:
The law itself is "holy and just and good" (Rom. 7:12) whatever men may do with it. This verse says that when someone uses it lawfully, its practical effects are good. When people use it wrongly, as these law-teachers did, it does harm — though it stays perfectly good in itself.
What "lawfully" means
The next verse gives the answer: God gave the law not for a righteous person but for the lawless. So using it rightly means turning it on sin. Wielding the sword and standing under it are worlds apart:
I hold that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully. It is useful to convict of sin, but it is not made for the righteous — at least so Scripture says. Using it to convict a sinner of sin is one thing. A Christian being under it is another. The difference is like holding a sword by the handle and running someone else through with it, compared with being run through yourself. The law is good, if one uses it lawfully; it is death and condemnation if he is under it.
Aimed at the bad, not the good
Law of any kind has wrongdoers in view:
Law does not contemplate the good but the bad. Law is enacted to detect, convict, and punish. Law never made a just man, still less a good man. It is a sharp weapon to wound and kill lawbreakers. It was never designed to shape honest motives or a walk of true righteousness. Its excellence lies in sparing no evil; and man is evil, and that by nature.
Misusing the law
If the law was given for sinners, then pressing it on people God has already justified turns it to the wrong target. That is exactly the mistake of the teachers Paul is correcting:
The law was not enacted for the righteous but for sinners. So to strongly enforce it upon those who were righteous, because justified by God Himself, was not a lawful use of it.
There is a second misuse, closer to home: taking the law up as evidence of one's own goodness. That reverses what the law is for, and it also asks the law for something it never carried:
Too many use it only to prop up their own self-righteousness. That use is completely false, for the law was not even given for a righteous man, but for the lawless, disobedient, ungodly, and sinners. It will expose and condemn sin without mercy, and it leaves the sinner — that is, everyone — under condemnation. It has no power whatever to forgive nor to justify, nor to take away the sin it exposes.
Still good for something
Since Paul calls the law good, it cannot be treated as cancelled. But good for what?
It is a very serious error to suppose the law is set aside. Far from it. The apostle in 1 Timothy declares, "the law is good, if one uses it lawfully." If the law were dead or set aside, it could not be called good for anything. What is dead is good for nothing. What then is the law good for? Not for justification, but for conviction — not as a rule of life, but as a rule of death.
Commentators differ here. Another writer warns that running the law down is itself a failure of the lawful use:
There is sometimes a mistaken effort to exalt the gospel by contrasting it with, and by implication belittling, the law. This is not "using the law lawfully." Even in its most legal and condemning passages, the law holds a foreshadowing of good things to come, by implication or prophecy.
What shapes the believer instead
If the law is not the believer's rule, something must take its place. Kelly points to Christ, the whole of Scripture, and the Spirit's help in applying it:
It is Christ Who above all acts by faith on the believer's soul. So he needs the word of God as a whole throughout his life, and the Spirit helps him to apply it in practical detail. This is the Christian's secret of true morality. In divine wisdom it ties the heart to the Saviour day by day. It makes the written word something to ponder constantly, for comfort and for careful application in the Spirit. But all of this is held in the sense of the true grace of God in which we stand.
The law is not the believer's rule, yet as Scripture it still teaches God's mind:
The law may also be used like all Scripture that teaches the mind of God. Ephesians 6 does this with obedience to parents: God thinks so much of it that it is the first commandment with a promise attached.
Summary
- Good — the law's goodness never changes, whatever people do with it. Only its effects change.
- Lawful — the lawful use is to convict of sin; holding the sword by the handle is not the same as being run through by it.
- Target — the law is written for the lawless. Press it on those God has justified, or use it to prop up your own goodness, and you aim it at the wrong person.
- Limit — it exposes and condemns sin, but has no power to forgive, justify, or remove what it exposes.
- Replacement — Christ, the whole word of God, and the Spirit shape the believer's walk. He stands in grace, not under law.