In What Sense “Christ Is the End of the Law” (Romans 10:4)?
Slawomir Gromadzki
ESV STUDY BIBLE
“’End’ probably includes the idea of both goal and termination. The Mosaic law has reached its goal in Christ, and the law is no longer binding upon Christians (the old covenant has ended). Since Christ is the goal and end of the law, righteousness belongs to all who trust in Christ.”
CSB STUDY BIBLE: NOTES
“Christ is the end of the law in being both its fulfillment and its termination. Any system of salvation based on performance is excluded.”
LOVE AND TRUTH – SODIUM AND CHLORIDE (SALT)
The truth must always be proclaimed with love and, conversely, true love should always be combined with truth because truth without love can kill while love without truth can be deceptive.
Very helpful in understanding this principle is the comparison of two elements, sodium and chlorine.
Sodium is an extremely active element, occurring in nature only as a compound and is always bound to other elements. Chlorine, on the other hand, is a poisonous gas with a characteristic sharp, irritating, and unpleasant smell. But when they combine, chlorine is transformed into chloride, and together they become sodium chloride (common salt), a stable compound that preserves food, enhances its flavour, and is essential for life.
It is similar with love and truth. Love and truth are like sodium and chlorine. Love without truth, just like sodium without chlorine, tends to bind itself to everything it encounters on its path. Without truth, love is careless, blind, and naive, and always tends to cling the first available theory or doctrine, even if it is false.
Truth without love, on the other hand, resembles chlorine without sodium, for truth alone proclaimed without love can irritate, destroy, and even kill. Truth alone proclaimed without love can cause people to turn away from God and the gospel, thus condemning themselves to death.
If, however, in our personal or church life, truth and love always constitute two inseparable components of our Christian life, then we will be the “light of the world”, a blessing, and what Christ called the “salt of the earth”.
JOHN STOTT ON GRACE AND LAW
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that the extremely important principle of combining love with truth has been forgotten by the vast majority of contemporary evangelical Christians. They claim that under the New Covenant only love matters, and the truth associated with the Decalogue (including the Sabbath commandment) is no longer binding upon us.
They commit a cardinal error by focusing exclusively on love and grace alone, whilst disregarding the whole truth.
And this is not merely my opinion, but such a view on the subject is currently expressed, among others, by one of the greatest authorities in the Protestant church, who is undoubtedly John Stott.
“For justification we look to the cross, not the law, and for sanctification we look to the Spirit, not the law. Legalists fear the law and are in bondage to it. Antinomianists hate the law and repudiate it. But the law-abiding free people love the law and fulfil it.” – Stott, J. R. W. (1994). The Message of Romans: God’s Good News for the World. The Bible Speaks Today, Chapter 7.
In the article “Grace and Law” he wrote the following statement:
“In these days, God’s call to moral obedience (that is, to keeping God’s Commandments) needs to be particularly emphasised, because at least two groups of people oppose it. The first are the defenders of the so-called ‘New Morality’ developed in the 1960s. They claim that the only and absolute commandment of God is the commandment of love, and all other laws have been abolished, and that love alone is a sufficient guide for a Christian’s conduct. They forget, however, that love needs directions, and it is precisely such directions that God’s commandments provide. Love does not abolish the law, it fulfils it (Rom 13: 8-10). Secondly, there are evangelical Christians who believe that Paul’s statements ‘Christ is the end of the law’ (Rom. 10:4) and ‘you are not under the law’ (Rom. 6:14) mean that Christians are no longer obligated to obey the moral law of God. Attempts to keep it, they claim, are ‘legalism’ which denies the freedom that Christ gave us. However, they misunderstand Paul. The ‘legalism’ that Paul rejected is not the law of God itself, but the attempt to gain God’s favour and forgiveness through obedience. He himself wrote that this is not possible, because ‘by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight’ (Rom 3:20). Justified, however, solely by the grace of God, we are obligated to keep this law and we desire to do so. Therefore, our Christian freedom is a freedom to show obedience, not disobedience.”
This statement, whose author is not an Adventist but one of the world’s most prominent Protestant theologians, proves that the Protestant churches committed a cardinal error by separating love from truth. The Catholic Church, in turn, neglected both. We (SD Adventists), on the other hand, face yet another danger, which is that we may have a tendency to focus exclusively on the truth, whilst neglecting love and grace!
JB PHILLIPS NEW TESTAMENT
“Christ means the end of the struggle for righteousness-by-the-Law for everyone who believes in him.”
ROMANS 10:4-5 IN ROMANS PARPHRASED BY JACK SEQUEIRA
“This righteousness, produced in Christ’s doing and dying, fully met the positive demands as well as the justice of God’s holy law, so that every believer stands perfect in Christ. Thus, Christ brought to an end our futile attempts to produce our own righteousness through legalism, because the righteousness man produces through his own efforts is never perfect. And Moses, through whom God gave His law, made it very clear: ‘Only the person who perfectly obeys God’s law in every detail has a right to live’ (Lev. 18:5; see also Gal. 3:10)”. – J. Sequeira Romans Paraphrased (link).
W. BARCLAY ON ROMANS 10:4
“The whole Jewish approach was that, by this kind of obedience to the law, they earned credit with God… To this, Paul answers: ‘Christ is the end of the law.’ What he meant was: Christ is the end of legalism.” – Barclay, W. (2002). The Letter to the Romans (3rd ed. fully rev. & updated, pp. 162–163).
ELLEN WHITE
“Many in the Christian world do not see that it was only the ceremonial law which was abrogated at the death of Christ. They claim that the moral law was nailed to the cross. They may talk of Christ as their Saviour; but He will finally say to them, I know you not. You cannot have genuine faith in Me, for it was My mission to exalt God’s law.” — Selected Messages, book 1, p. 239.
LAW AND CHEAP GRACE
Only the cheap grace Christians who want to be saved without revealing fruit of the Spirit and without Jesus in them the hope of glory draw the conclusion that under the new covenant we are free from keeping 10 commandments.
And to justify their point they quote Rom 10.4 or Rom 7.6 but even greatest non-SDA protestant theologians such as Stott, Wescott, Nygren, Torrence, etc. clearly stated that Paul never meant we are free from keeping the moral law as a standard of Christian living.
According to them Paul only suggested we are now free from the condemnation of the law (punishment). Paul was against legalism or using the law as a way of salvation, but he was never against keeping the law by already saved believers as a demonstration of the power of the gospel and working of Holy Spirit.
Any honest and careful student of Pauls writings will draw this conclusion.
The role of the law is not to save us but to increase understanding of our sinfulness and to keep us in cage of fear and condemnation until we accept Jesus as our only way of salvation.
And as soon as we truly accept Christs righteousness and death as ours in Him and are saved by grace and free from condemnation of the law, and are no longer under the law but under grace, what does Jesus do now?
He takes us saved in Him believers and leads us back to the law and bids us to keep it but not to be saved because we are already saved by Him but to keep the moral law as the fruit of salvation by grace.
And to enable us to keep the law the Lord through Holy Spirit dwells in us and repeats the same victory He already accomplished in sinful flesh when He lived here 2000 years ago.
In addition, we now can keep the law (by the power of indwelling Christ and HS) not out of fear but out of love because since we accepted Jesus, we are one with Him and therefore the law can’t condemn us any more even though in practice we are not perfect yet.
The gospel is indeed a most wonderful truth of amazing freedom in Christ but is not freedom to break the commandments or sin but freedom from sin and breaking the holy law of God.