3007.—What Is the Added Law?
Please explain Gal. 3:19. Christ said He did not change the law. A minister explained the above text as proof that the law was added until Christ came, and since then it is of none effect. How are we to understand this text? We can better understand Gal. 3:19 perhaps by comparing it with a scripture that is parallel. We read in Rom. 5:20: “Moreover the law entered, that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The apostle here refers to the giving of the law from Mount Sinai. God gave it that sin by the law might be seen to be exceeding sinful. This does not mean that they did not have God’s law before that, because the transgression of the law is sin; “for where no law is, there is no transgression.” Rom. 4:15. But sin has been in the world from the very beginning, because death, which came in consequence of sin, has been here since man fell. See Rom. 5:12, which proves conclusively that sin existed from the very beginning; and if sin existed, the law existed, because “sin is the transgression of the law.” 1 John 3:4; Rom. 3:20; 7:17. Man by nature has a certain amount of the law written on his conscience, depending on how faithfully he himself walks in harmony with God. If he walks in sin and defilement, his conscience becomes defiled and blunted. The whole world had wandered far from God, so that their consciences were becoming deadened to a sense of sin. That was especially true of God’s children when they came out of Egypt; therefore He gave them the written law in addition to the law that was taught by the precepts of fathers and by holy men; so we read in Deut. 5:22 regarding the giving of the law upon Mount Sinai, “These words the Lord spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice; and He ADDED no more.” The law which God added, then, is the Ten Commandment law. The apostle Paul tells us that it was “added because of transgression,” added that men might know how sinful sin was; as expressed in Rom. 5:20, “The law entered, that the offense might abound.” Paul tells us that the law showed him to be a sinner, in order “that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.” Rom. 7:13. How long, in God’s purpose, would the law fill such an office as that? The answer in Gal. 3:19 is, “Till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made.” The Seed, we learn in verse 16, is Christ. The promise is that He should be “heir of the world” (Rom. 4:13), referred to in those words in Ezekiel, who thus speaks of the kingdom of God in this world as represented in Jerusalem: “I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more, until He come whose right it is; and I will give it Him.” Eze. 21:27. When Ezekiel spoke, Babylon already possessed the kingdom. Three overturnings were to follow: Medo-Persia, Grecia, and Rome were each to possess it in turn, and then Christ our Lord would come the second time to reign upon the throne of David. The law was added till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made; not the Seed as He was manifest to die for mankind, but the Seed as He would be manifest to restore all that man lost in the beginning. That is the second coming of Jesus Christ. The law was added, given in written form, until Christ should come the second time, in order that men might know how exceedingly sinful they were. After Christ comes the second time, there is no more need of a law to point out sin. That law will be written in the hearts of all God’s children, unchanged from eternity.