Christ Is the End of the Law

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"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."

Romans 3:23

Every human being who has ever lived carries a debt. It is not a financial debt, though Paul's language often borrows from that world. It is a spiritual debt, a moral deficit that lies between the soul and God. And like a credit card balance that a man is too afraid to check, it grows with every passing day. The debtor feels its weight even when he refuses to look at the sum. He pushes off the reckoning. He swipes the card again. But the weight is there, pressing on his spirit, and it never lifts on its own.

This is the universal condition of humanity. Every man feels the burden of sin, whether he names it or not. And it is this burden, not merely the intellectual concept of God, that drives men to rage.

In This Article

I. The Rage of the Atheist: A Rage Against Condition, Not Against God

There is a growing tendency in the modern world for men to proclaim themselves atheists, to rage publicly against the very concept of God. But their rage is misplaced. They are not truly raging against God. They are raging against their own condition.

Consider a group of men stranded in the desert, three days without food or water, stumbling along with no idea where the next town lies. One of them begins to reminisce about a pizza shop his family used to visit, describing the cold drinks, the sweat running down the glass. Someone in the group starts screaming at him to shut up. That man is not angry at the pizza shop. He is angry at his own thirst. He is angry at his condition.

So it is with the atheist. The weight of sin presses on him, the unresolved debt that he cannot name and cannot pay, and when someone speaks of God, the mention of righteousness and holiness becomes unbearable to a man who feels the crushing weight of his own unrighteousness. His rage is not directed at God. It is directed at the condition that the mention of God forces him to confront.

II. The Weight of Sin Upon the Righteous

Christians are not immune from feeling this weight. In fact, the righteous man or woman feels the power of sin far more acutely than the sinner does. This is a paradox that the world does not understand: no man truly knows how powerful sin is except the one who fights against it with all his strength. The sinner, who gives in to temptation daily, has no concept of sin's real force. It is the man who struggles hourly, minutely, against the pull of corruption who discovers just how strong that pull actually is. You will never know how wicked you truly are until you try very, very hard to be good.

Paul, the great apostle, felt this weight and cried out under it: "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7:24). He was not speaking as a backslider. He was speaking as a righteous man who had come face to face with the full power of indwelling sin.

David knew the same burden. In Psalm 38:4 he wrote: "For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me." A sinner could never make such a statement. It takes a man who is pursuing God with everything in him to feel how heavy the burden actually is.

Christ Himself, knowing that humanity groaned under this weight, said: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). This was not a promise of rest from paying bills, or from difficult bosses, or from the ordinary hardships of life. It was rest from the crushing weight of sin, the spiritual burden that no amount of human effort can lift.

III. The Requirements of the Law

Christ declared plainly: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matt. 5:17). The word rendered "fulfil" carries the deeper sense of satisfy. Christ was not saying that He came to abolish the law. He was saying, "I came to satisfy its requirements."

And what does the law require? One thing only, and it is the one thing that no man can provide: perfect, unadulterated righteousness.

Moses laid out 613 commandments, and with each one came a corresponding blessing and a corresponding curse (Deut. 28:15-68). If a man obeyed, he was blessed in the city and blessed in the field, blessed when he rose up and blessed when he lay down. But if he broke even one commandment, the curse fell upon him, upon his household, upon his children, upon his children's children. And James summarized the severity of the matter with devastating simplicity: "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all" (James 2:10).

This seems incomprehensible. A man keeps 99.99% of the law and fails in one point, and he is guilty of the entire law? Yes. Because the issue is not the percentage. The issue is the category. He is a lawbreaker. The town drunk who is arrested every Friday night is a lawbreaker. The upstanding citizen who breaks one statute in his entire life is also a lawbreaker. The label is the same, and the court of heaven makes no distinction in category, only in degree of punishment.

The singular requirement for entrance into the presence of a holy God is perfect righteousness. And that is precisely the one thing that no man possesses. As Paul confessed, "For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing" (Rom. 7:18). A man can give his time. He can give his money. He can give his friendship. But he cannot give his righteousness, because he does not have it to give. The one thing God requires is the one thing man cannot render. The two parties are at an impasse.

IV. Why God’s Righteousness Cannot Relent

At this point, men often protest: "Why must God be so exacting? Why can He not simply overlook sin?"

Consider this: a man with six prior convictions for driving under the influence runs a red light and kills a family of five, a young couple and three children, all their lives snuffed out in an instant. He is brought into the courtroom, and the judge looks down and recognizes him as the mayor's son. So the judge says, "We'll just push this one through. Twenty-four hours of community service, at your convenience, within the next nine months."

Not a soul in the courtroom would call that a good judge. Your righteous indignation would nearly make you stand up and cry out. Why? Because the judge flagrantly let unrighteousness go unpunished. He perverted justice. He failed the victims.

And yet, this is precisely what we ask God to do when we ask Him to simply overlook our sin. We want Him to wave it through the court of heaven without a reckoning. But God's holiness demands righteousness, and righteousness demands a just and righteous verdict, not only for the worst man in the city, but for every man who has ever lived. A righteous court cannot function on partiality.

V. Christianity’s Singular Distinction

It is here that Christianity stands utterly alone among the religions of the world. Every other religious system in human history, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and even atheism, which is itself a religious framework, operates on the same fundamental principle: the individual's salvation is contingent upon the individual's goodness. The worshipper must earn his way out of whatever judgment his system prescribes. The mechanism differs, karma, good deeds, ritual observance, moral improvement, but the principle is the same. It all comes back to you.

Christianity alone rests the entire weight of salvation upon a third party.

There are two parties in the dispute: man and God. Man owes a debt to God that he cannot pay. God's righteousness demands a payment that man cannot render. The two are at an impasse. But Christianity introduces a third party, an innocent man who volunteers to pay the debt wholly, completely, and without reservation on behalf of the guilty.

This is the heart of the gospel. It is not a program of moral improvement. It is a divine exchange.

VI. The Great Exchange

Paul makes the astonishing declaration: "For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth" (Rom. 10:4).

What does this mean? It means that Christ came to the guilty man and said, in effect: "You have lived a rough life, and you have a heavy burden against you. I have lived a perfect life, and there is nothing against me. Let us trade. You take my record to the court, and I will take yours. You receive the reward for my life, and I will receive the punishment for yours."

This is the doctrine of imputation, the transfer of Christ's righteousness to the believer's account, and the transfer of the believer's guilt to Christ's account. It is the great exchange upon which all of Christianity rests.

And the exchange is made by faith alone. God does not respect human effort in this matter. He respects faith, faith in His Word, faith in the finished work of His Son. A man may fast every week of his life, pray every night, labor with all his strength to make himself acceptable to God, and he will not move God so much as a hair's breadth. For 3,500 years, the Jews have stood before the Wailing Wall, crying out to God under the old covenant of works, and heaven has not budged. Not because God does not hear, but because God made the universe by faith in His Word, and He has ordained that the great transaction of salvation be accomplished the same way, by faith, and by faith alone.

VII. The Price Paid at Calvary

When Christ took the sinner's record to the court of heaven, the full weight of the law fell upon Him. Every curse that Moses had written, every penalty attached to every one of the 613 commandments that humanity had broken, all of it was exacted upon the body of Jesus Christ.

They beat Him. They scourged Him with a cat-o'-nine-tails. They ripped out His beard. They spat in His face. The Bible records that "his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men" (Isa. 52:14), He was beaten beyond recognition as a human being. They stripped Him naked before His own mother, and He "endured the cross, despising the shame" (Heb. 12:2). They nailed His hands and feet to a wooden beam like a board being fastened with spikes. They mocked Him. They cast lots for His garments. His friends fled: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isa. 53:6). We hid our faces from Him. We acted as though we did not know Him, the very One who had traded places with us.

And when every friend had forsaken Him, He turned to the one Person He had given His whole life for, the God of heaven, and cried out, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46). And God turned His back. Not because He did not love His Son, but because God has no fellowship with sin, and the record Christ was carrying said sinner. The full alienation from God that the sinner deserved was laid upon Christ in that hour.

But then He rose. And when He rose, He said in effect: "Because I live, you shall live also" (John 14:19). "Go cash in your record. I have already cashed in yours. The reward that belongs to the life I lived, peace, righteousness, adoration, eternal life, it is all yours now."

VIII. The Blotted Record: Nothing Against You

Paul writes to the Colossians: "Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross" (Col. 2:14). Every ordinance, every charge, every indictment that the law held against the believer, Christ took it and nailed it to His cross. It is paid. It is finished.

And it cannot be tried again. The principle of double jeopardy, which even earthly courts recognize, holds true in the court of heaven: once a debt has been paid, the debtor cannot be held liable for it again. If heaven should say, "You were evil in your heart," the believer can answer, "I paid for it on Mount Calvary. You cannot try me again." Christ is the end of the law to all those who believe.

The author of Hebrews confirms this from another angle: "For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second. For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant" (Heb. 8:7-8). The old covenant, predicated on man's righteousness, was found to be faulty, not because the law itself was flawed, but because the flesh was too weak to keep it (Rom. 8:3). So God established a second covenant, the gospel, the good news, predicated not on man's righteousness but on Christ's.

And under this new covenant, every time a believer approaches the throne of heaven, the record reads: Jesus Christ. Paid in full. Nothing against you.

IX. In His Name, Not Your Own

This is what Christ meant when He commanded: "Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus" (Col. 3:17). He was not merely prescribing a formula for prayer. He was declaring the principle by which all of the believer's dealings with God must be conducted: come in His name, not your own.

To pray in your own name is to come before the court of heaven and say, "Lord, I have been trying so hard. I have been so sincere. I have fasted. I have served. I have been a preacher for thirty years." And the clerk of heaven, as it were, keeps pushing the petition back across the counter, "No, no, you don't want to submit that." Because if that petition were actually brought before the court on its own merits, the sentence would be devastating. Coming in your own name means presenting your own righteousness, and your own righteousness is the very thing that the law has already condemned.

This is why the self-righteous Christian is the most miserable Christian in the world. He cannot understand why the man next to him, the one he considers far less pious, lives in freedom and joy, while he himself lives in perpetual bondage and frustration. The answer is simple: the free man is coming in Christ's name; the self-righteous man is coming in his own.

But when a man comes to God and says, "Lord, I have nothing to offer You except the sacrifice of Your Son. I am dealing with depression. I am dealing with loneliness. I am dealing with a sense of worthlessness. I need help. And I am bringing nothing but the blood of Christ", then heaven responds. The court recognizes the name on the petition. The debt has already been paid. The request is processed. Everything that the believer needs has already been purchased at Calvary.

If the court of heaven should ever ask to examine the believer's life, the believer should say: "Stop right there. If you want to examine me, send me to hell, I am done for. But if you want to examine my sacrifice, give me ten thousand years and I will tell you how perfect it is." The Levitical priesthood prophesied this very thing in its daily oracles: when the priest selected the sacrificial lamb, he turned it over and over, inspecting every inch for any blemish. If he found one, he handed it back: "This one will not do. Bring me one without blemish." They were prophesying, without knowing it, of the coming of a sacrifice so perfect that no fault could be found in it, "a lamb without blemish and without spot" (1 Pet. 1:19).

X. Free Indeed

Christ declared: "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed" (John 8:36). The word "indeed" carries the force of completely, totally, unequivocally, without reservation. There is nothing remaining against the one who has believed.

The mechanism of this freedom is faith, and faith alone. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die" (John 11:25-26). Christ Himself asks the question: "Believest thou this?"

The gift is offered freely to the whole world. Whosoever will may come and drink of the water of life freely (Rev. 22:17). Hell will not be full of men whom God rejected. Hell will be full of men who rejected God, who refused the free exchange, who would not surrender their pride long enough to accept a gift they did not deserve.

And so the proper posture of the believer is not striving, not self-condemnation, not the exhausting effort to make oneself acceptable. It is gratitude. It is the simple, overwhelming recognition: "God, I know I did not deserve it. But it was Your goodness, not mine, that accomplished it. Let me approach You always with Your Son's life offered up before You, not my own life, not my own works. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth."

"Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross."

Colossians 2:14