Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
'So that the law hath proved to be х Gegonen (G1096)] our schoolmaster ('tutor,' 'pedagogue;' among the Greeks, a faithful servant intrusted with a boy from childhood to puberty, to keep him, with severe disciplinary strictness, from evil, physical and moral, in his amusements and studies) to guide us unto Christ,' with whom we are no longer "shut up" in bondage, but are freemen. "Children" (literally, infants) need such tutoring (Galatians 4:3). The law did so by warnings, threatenings, and convictings of sin.
Might be, х dikaioothoomen (G1344)] - 'that we may be justified by faith;' which we could not be by the law. Meanwhile the law-by outwardly checking the sinful propensity, ever afresh breaking out, and so awakening consciousness of the power of the sinful principle, and hence of the need both of forgiveness of sin and of freedom from its bondage-became our 'schoolmaster to guide us unto Christ.' The moral law shows us what we ought to do; so we learn our inability. In the ceremonial law we seek, by sacrifices, to answer for our not having done it, but find that dead victims are no satisfaction for the sins of living men, and that outward purifying will not cleanse the soul; that therefore we need an infinitely better sacrifice, the antitype of all the legal sacrifices. Thus delivered up to the judicial law, we see the awful doom we deserve: thus the law leads to Christ, with whom we find righteousness and peace. 'Sin, sin! is the word again and again in the Old Testament. Had it not there for centuries rung in the ear, and fastened on the conscience, the joyful sound, "grace for grace," would not have been the watchword of the New Testament. This was the end of the whole system of sacrifices' (Tholuck.)