The End Of The Law

“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.” (Romans 10:4)

I saw an article just after the New Year about some of the new laws going in to effect on January 1st of this year. It is common practice to set a “start date” for new laws, and picking the first day of the year is as good as any. I always sort of wondered about that. I mean, if you are going to pass a law, why should we all have a set period of time to violate it before it can be enforced? So, for instance, current “drinking age” is 21, but say we make a law that pushes it to 25, but the law does not go into effect until January 1, 2013. Doesn’t that give the 21-25 crowd even more incentive to go out and tie one on? You are just asking for a problem with a drunken bash of epic proportions on December 31, and there isn’t anything you can really do about it. But I guess a lot of our laws have to have some sort of time-line on them for some reason.

But the thing that really caught my eye in this article was the number of new laws that took effect at the beginning of this year. Over 40,000 new laws are waiting to be broken. Is there anyone on earth that can keep up with even a small percentage of that number? That does not include all the hundreds of thousands – dare I say millions – of laws already on the books. I am absolutely certain that simply sitting here typing these words, I am doing something that could be construed to be against the law. I would bet that it would not be very difficult to find some reason to arrest every single one of the 300 million citizens of the country right now. Yet the Federal, State and local law makers find another 40,000 ways every year to add to the list. Will it ever stop?

I thank God every day for the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary for my sins. Those who “believe in God” but have never trusted Jesus as their Saviour are on a non-stop relentless pursuit to try to please God by their own efforts. They are “God-fearin’ people” who keep trying to obey every law they can think of to please God. But it never ends. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) There never comes a time when a person can do enough good to overcome one sin. One drop of arsenic in a full gallon of water poisons the whole thing. One sin makes you short of God’s glory, and denies your access to his presence. Heaven is a perfect place reigned by a perfect God. If he let you in with just one little sin, it would no longer be perfect. The person who tries to please God by keeping the myriad of never ending rules and regulations can never know when he has satisfied the demands of a holy and righteous judge. Just like none of us even know all the laws of the land and cannot possibly keep all of them, the sinner cannot buy his way to heaven through the law.

Then there is the Christian who has trusted Christ to save him, but then he thinks that the only way to please God after his salvation is by keeping the myriad of rules and regulations of his particular “religion”. At least he is going to heaven because of his trust in the sacrifice of Christ, but he has the same problem. There is no end to his list. He can never know when he has really achieved righteousness, because he has his sin nature to deal with that cannot be tamed. Every time he turns around, there is another “twist” of the law that he has violated. He spends his entire Christian life in utter frustration trying to “appease” God rather than just letting God be pleased simply because he is his child destined for an eternity in heaven.

The verse above tells us that Jesus is the “end of the law” for a believer. That is because he already fulfilled it for us. There is a simple statement in Romans 8:4: “That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us…” The simple words of the Bible are important. The law is not fulfilled by us, it is fulfilled in us. Jesus already did it for us, so all we have to do is let him live through us. We still mess up because we are human. But God has given us everything we need to be fulfilled in him. Just let the light of Jesus shine.