The End of the Law
In Romans 10:4 it says that “Christ is the end of the law.” This is a decent translation. But many people have misunderstood it to mean that Christ is the termination of the law. If this was what Paul actually meant, it would contradict virtually all of Christ’s teaching during his ministry. For example, he states rather emphatically in Luke 16:17 that “It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the law.” He said many things like this. One of the best-known is Matthew 5:17 where he says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets.” That seems pretty unambiguous.
The problem is that “end” can have different meanings. Consider the phrase, “The end justifies the means.” In this phrase, “end” means “goal” or “purpose”. This is actually a common meaning of the Greek word, “telos”, that we find here. An example is a similar verse in I Timothy 1:5, which in KJV reads, “Now the end of the commandment is charity…”. More recent translations tend to read, “The goal of this command is love…”, which captures the sense much better.
If we consider that Paul meant that the goal or purpose of the law is Christ, it opens up new insights. The reason that the law was given was to have people who obeyed it. Jesus was a person who kept it perfectly. In other contexts it states that he fulfilled it (e.g. Matthew 5:17), which means the same thing. If he had not kept it perfectly, he could not have been our sinless sacrifice.
Unfortunately, during the second century, the Fiscus Judaicus, a heavy tax on Jews or those who acted Jewishly, gave Gentile followers of Jesus a big incentive to reject all of God’s commands that looked Jewish. They distanced themselves from Judaism and from obedience to God in these ways and started calling themselves “Christians”. They were able to find phrases that Paul used that could be interpreted as countering the law of Moses. In other cases, they translated the passage so that it seemed to say that. (e.g. Mark 7:19, Galatians 2:14) It became Christian tradition that followers of Jesus were not to follow God’s commands given through Moses, even though there are many passages that teach otherwise.
II Peter 3 should have warned them about this trend. In verses 15-17 the author states that some of Paul’s epistles are hard to understand, and people that misunderstand them are liable to fall into the error of lawless men. Much of Christianity seems to have fallen into this error, in spite of passages like I John 5:3 that says that loving God entails obeying him and I Corinthians 7:19 that states that it doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or Gentile, the main thing is keeping God’s commands. The Christian church, like the Prodigal Son, has been out feeding pigs since the second century. Let us pray that it wakes up and decides to return to the Father.