Galatians 2:17-21

The argument of these verses is somewhat obscure an obscurity due, partly to the inadequacy of language to express the intensity of the Apostle's feelings, partly to the introduction of metaphorical expressions, which elude the attempt to define them accurately.

St Paul, like other Jewish believers, earnestly desiring to escape the penalty of conscious sin, had abandoned all trust in the law, and had thrown himself entirely on the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. If he is now told that in doing this, he and they had foregone their privileges as children of Abraham, and reduced themselves to the position of sinnersof the Gentiles (Galatians 2:15), it might be said that Christ is a minister of sin. Away with such a false conclusion! St Paul had swept away all notion of justification by obedience to the law, because he knew that a man is justified by faith apart from such obedience, and to build up the edifice which he had pulled down would be to stand self-convicted as a transgressor of the law. -I", he says, -for one, through the law, through experience of its inability to give life, turned my back on it for ever as a ground of justification before God. I died to the law. Thenceforth, as a ground of justification, it was no more to me than to a dead man. I did this, not that I might be free from the law, as a rule of life, but that I should live the only life worth living a life impossible to me so long as I sought justification by the law a life consecrated to God. I have been speaking of dying. There is another sense in which I died. I am crucified with Christ, a partaker of His death, a death issuing in resurrection; and this resurrection life, which I share with and derive from my Divine Lord, itself not natural but spiritual, transforms my whole natural and earthly life, so that I live this latter in the faith of Jesus Christ, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not, like the Judaizers, set at nought that grace of God to which I owe so much. And yet to seek justification by works would be practically to nullify it: for if by the law man obtains justification, Christ's death was purposeless and superfluous".