What the Law Could Not Do

…the blessed David: “I said in my alarm, ‘Every man is a liar’” (Psalm 116:11). The same reasoning would apply to God and to us in all other matters too; for example, in the matter of righteousness. For one could say, and not unreasonably, “Let God be righteous, and every man unrighteous.”

“But if our unrighteousness shows the righteousness of God” (Romans 3:5). The occasion for this slander arose in this way. After the return from Babylon, the sons of Israel, ordered by Cyrus to rebuild the temple, to pay their vows and to offer sacrifices, grew slack, pleading poverty and the hardship left by the captivity. For this they were corrected by measured chastisements: failed harvests and lack of rain (Haggai 1:9–11). Chafing at such blows, they called the foreigners and those who did not serve God happy, as living in good cheer, and said that those people were better off than they were. And so the prophet Malachi said to them: “You have made your words heavy against me, says the Lord. And you said, ‘How have we spoken against you?’ You said,” he says, “‘It is vain to serve God. What more have we gained because we kept his charges, and because we walked as suppliants before the Lord Almighty? And now we call strangers happy, and those who do lawless deeds are built up; they opposed God and were saved.’ This is how those who feared the Lord spoke against him, each to his neighbor; and the Lord gave heed and heard” (Malachi 3:13–16).

For this reason, he says, some thought that the Jews were saying, “Let us do evil so that good may come” (Romans 3:8). But when he says that their condemnation is just, he means those who pinned those words on the Jews, or rather those who dared to say, “Let us do evil so that good may come.”

“But now the righteousness of God has been made manifest apart from the law” (Romans 3:21). I know that it is written of certain people that “they were both righteous, walking blameless in the commandments and ordinances of Christ” (Luke 1:6); and the blessed Paul too said that he himself had become “blameless as to the righteousness that is in the law” (Philippians 3:6). But one who is blameless in these things has not yet done the deeds that will make him illustrious and renowned. Indeed, the blessed Paul himself said again that he counted everything in the law as loss and reckoned it as so much refuse, and that he would seek instead “the surpassing excellence of the knowledge of Christ” (Philippians 3:7–8).

Again, the law condemns those who transgress; that is why he says elsewhere, “For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of righteousness abound in glory” (2 Corinthians 3:9). And since the law contains a great many commandments, even the careful keeper of the law must surely stumble in some of them and become a transgressor of the law. The inspired disciples plainly admitted that it is truly burdensome, for they said: “Now therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?” (Acts 15:10).