Question: What does Paul mean when he says that we’re not under Law but under grace?

This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise voice. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise. Galatians 3.17, 18

In the minds of many Jewish people in Paul’s day, salvation was a privilege only Jews could possess. They were the physical descendants of Abraham, after all, and the heirs of the Law of God given through Moses.

Like the religious leaders who confronted and opposed Jesus, many – perhaps most – Jews in that time were persuaded that they were God’s chosen people by virtue of their ethnic and cultural heritage. They claimed descent from Abraham and stewardship of the Law as their special privileges, and chafed and rebelled at the notion that the gift of God should be extended beyond them to the Gentiles.

This, after all, is why Paul made so many Jewish leaders angry during the course of his ministry. He dared to teach that salvation could be attained apart from the Law and apart from the Jewish nation.

He was, of course, correct. And when Paul taught that we are not under Law but under grace, he meant to say that salvation is by grace, according to the promise of God given to Abram before he was identified as a Jew under the Law, and it is for all people who believe the Gospel (Rom. 1.16, 17). That promise was a promise for all people, all, that is, who share the faith of Abraham, and not simply the physical descent (cf. Rom. 4.13-17). The Law coming under Moses did not nullify the promise, as though God had changed the way salvation was to be obtained. As He explained to the people of Israel to whom the Law was given, His choice of them was entirely of His own determination, and had nothing to do with anything inherent in them (Deut. 7.6-11). He chose them by grace, and He called them to obey His Law.

Human beings are not under the Law as a means of salvation, and those “Judaizers” who followed Paul around, corrupting his teaching and trying to corral his disciples into a salvation dependent upon identity with and submission to the Law of God, were simply trying to keep alive the idea that salvation is only properly from and for the Jews. When Paul said that we are under grace, not Law, he meant emphatically to deny this claim to salvation privilege based on ethnic or cultural descent.

T. M. Moore

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