Every Mouth Stopped.
I. Perhaps some readers are aware of a feeling of disappointment at reaching this result. Not that they doubt the native depravity of mankind, or the certainty that all men, left to themselves, will go very far astray from righteousness. But it may be said, ail men were not left to themselves. God interposed with a holy and awful law. He took one race under His own moral education. He taught them carefully the way of duty, and did what was possible to fence them in it and cut off all temptation to wander out of it. Surely the average moral standard was greatly raised within that sheltered Hebrew commonwealth, and many individual Hebrews succeeded in leading very virtuous and devout lives "in all the ordinances of the law blameless"! Does it not sound hard to say that not one of them was good enough to justify his life in the sight of God? Is this not like confessing that the whole Mosaic system of religious training and moral legislation was a failure.
II. To put us in a right attitude for judging of this whole matter, it is of the first consequence to see what the purpose of God was in giving His law at all. You cannot judge whether the Mosaic law was a failure or not until you know what it was intended to accomplish. Now, the express teaching of St. Paul is that God did not expect the Jews to attain such a righteousness as would justify them at the last by their own attempts to keep the Mosaic law. A law is not intended to give life: it is only intended to regulate life. The law was not meant to lead to righteousness, because it could not give spiritual life. The law was meant to fill a far humbler office: it brought us a better knowledge of our sin. Each addition to revealed law widens men's knowledge of what is sinful, and pushes forward the frontier of the forbidden a little nearer to that ideal line which God's own nature prescribes: "Through the law cometh the knowledge of sin."
J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul,p. 66.
Reference: Romans 3:10. J. H. Thom, Laws of Life,p. 1.