Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.
Do we then make void the law through faith? 'Does this doctrine of justification by faith, then, dissolve the obligation of the law? If so, it cannot be of God; but away with such a thought, for it does just the reverse.' God forbid: yea, we establish the law. The reader should carefully observe, that, important as was this objection, and opening up as it did so noble a field for the illustration of the special glory of the Gospel, the apostle does no more here than indignantly repel it, intending at a subsequent stage of his argument (Romans 6:1-23) to resume and discuss it at length.
Remarks:
(1) It cannot be too much insisted on, that according to the doctrine of this Epistle throughout, and particularly of the present chapter, one way of a sinner's justification is taught as well in the Old Testament as in the New-though more dimly, of course, in the twilight of Revelation, and only now in unclouded light.
(2) As there is no difference in the need, so is there none in the liberty to appropriate the provided Salvation. The best need to be saved by faith in Jesus Christ; and the worst only need that. On this common ground all saved sinners meet in the Church below, and will stand forever. (See the notes at Luke 7:36-50, p. 255.)
(3) The love of God and His grace the guilty, apart from the sacrifice of Christ, would yield no solid relief to the convinced and trembling sinner. It is on the stoning sacrifice of Christ as the one propitiatory and all-sufficient sacrifice, which God in unspeakable love bath set forth to the eye of the guilty, that his faith fastens for deliverance from wrath; and though he knows that he is "justified freely by God's grace," it is only because it is "through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" that he is able to find peace and rest even in this.
(4) The strictly accurate view of believers under the Old Testament is not that of a company of pardoned men, but of men whose sins, put up with and passed by in the mean time, awaited a future expiation in the fullness of time; or, to express it otherwise, of men pardoned on the credit of an atonement which all the sacrifices of their own economy did not yield, and only rendered to Justice when, "in the end of the world, Christ appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself" (see the notes at Luke 9:31; and at Hebrews 9:15; Hebrews 11:39-40).
(5) It is a fundamental requisite of all true religion, that it tend to humble the sinner and exalt God; and every system which breeds self-righteousness, or cherishes boasting, bears falsehood on its face.
(6) The fitness of the Gospel to be a universal religion, beneath which the guilty of every name and degree are invited and warranted to take shelter and repose, is a glorious evidence of its truth.
(7) The glory of God's law, in its eternal and immutable obligations, is then only fully apprehended by the sinner, and then only felt in the depths of his soul, when, believing that "He was made sin for him who knew no sin," he sees himself "made the righteousness of God in Him." Thus we do not make void the law through faith; yea, we establish the law.
(8) This chapter, and particularly the latter part of it, which Olshausen calls 'the Acropolis of the Christian Faith'-is (and here we use the words of Philippi) the proper seat of the Pauline doctrine of Justification, and the grand proof-passage of the Protestant doctrine of the Imputation of Christ's righteousness and of Justification, not on account of, but through faith alone.' To make good this doctrine, and reseat it in the faith and affection of the Church, was worth all the bloody struggles that it cost our fathers; and it will be the wisdom and safety, the life and vigour of the churches, to "stand fast in this liberty wherewith Christ hath made them free, and not be again entangled," in the very least degree, "with the yoke of bondage."