Christ is the end of the law

'Christ is the end of the law'

— Romans 10:4

I do not suggest that the law is evil. It is not. God’s law is holy, just and good (I Tim. 1:8-9). I do not say that the believer is free to break the law. Not only is the believer not free to break the law, he has no desire to do so. To those who believe, God’s commandments are not grievous (I John 5:1-3). If we could, we would love God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves. But we do not have the ability to do so. I do say that in Christ the believer is entirely free from the law, because ‘Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth’. ‘We are not under the law, but under grace.’ We have been crucified with Christ and have ‘become dead to the law by the body of Christ’. There is no sense whatsoever in which it may be said that the believer is under the law.

We have no covenant with the law. We live under a covenant of grace. We have no commitment to the law. Our commitment is to Christ, who obeyed the law for us. We do nothing by the constraint of the law. ‘The love of Christ constraineth us.'

Christ is the end of the law’s purpose. The purpose and object of God’s law is to bring us to Christ. Once it has served that purpose, it has no other (Gal. 3:24-25). The law is the sheriff’s deputy, who shuts men up in prison for their sin, concluding them all under condemnation, so that they may look to the free grace of God in Christ for deliverance. The law is God’s black dog, by which he fetches his sheep home.

Christ is the end of the law in the sense that he has fulfilled it as our Representative. He has magnified the law and made it honorable, establishing righteousness to meet the law’s demands as our Representative and dying under the law’s just penalty as our Substitute.

By his obedience to the law, Christ has terminated the law’s claims upon the believer so that in Christ we are entirely free from the law.