A question Christians and Jews have wrestled with for centuries
Few questions sit at the centre of Christian theology quite like this one: what was the law for? The law given to Moses — the Ten Commandments, the Levitical code, the full Torah — occupies more space in the Bible than almost any other subject. Israel's covenant with God was built around it. The Psalms celebrate it ("Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long" — Psalm 119:97). The prophets measured Israel's failures by it. And yet Paul can write in Romans 3:20 that "no one will be declared righteous in God's sight by the works of the law" — and then say in Romans 7:12 that the law is "holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good."
The apparent tension is not a contradiction. It is a clue that we need a more nuanced picture of what the law was designed to accomplish and what it was never designed to accomplish. The answer unlocks one of the central threads of the Bible's story — from Sinai to Jeremiah's promise of a new covenant to Paul's letter to the Galatians to the transformation of the heart that the Gospel promises. And for anyone shaped by the Divine Principle, it also illuminates the logic of God's long work of restoration: how fallen humanity, unable to live from their hearts alone, needed an external framework until the healing of the heart made something better possible.
What the law was not given to do
The most important thing to establish is what the law was not given to do: it was not given as the mechanism of salvation. Paul is unambiguous in Galatians 3:11 — "Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God, because 'the righteous will live by faith.'" He makes the same point in Romans 4 by pointing to Abraham, who was declared righteous by God before the law existed, simply because he trusted God's promise. Abraham's justification by faith was not the exception; it was the pattern the law was meant to point back to, not replace.
This does not mean the law is useless or that its demands were arbitrary. It means that the law was given with a specific purpose — and when we mistake it for a ladder to climb to God by our own effort, we misuse it. Paul describes the result of that misuse in Romans 9:31–32: Israel "pursued the law as the way of righteousness" but did not attain it, "because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works." The problem was not the law itself; the problem was treating the law as something it was never designed to be. A thermometer measures a fever accurately, but no one is healed by swallowing the thermometer.
This is also why Jesus could say in Matthew 5:20 that our righteousness must "surpass that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law" — people who kept the commandments more carefully than almost anyone — in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. External law-keeping, however meticulous, is not the goal. It is the starting point of a longer journey. The Pharisees had mastered the external form; they had not necessarily been transformed in the interior disposition from which the law flows.
What the law was given to do: three functions
The Protestant tradition, particularly in the Reformed stream, has identified three functions of the law that together account for its continuing relevance even after Christ has come. The first is the civil use: the law restrains evil and protects human society. Even people who do not love God benefit from laws against murder, theft, and false witness, because those laws keep society from destroying itself. This function of the law operates regardless of anyone's spiritual state — it is the law as social guardrail.
The second function is the theological use or the law as mirror. Paul describes this function in Romans 3:20: "through the law we become conscious of our sin." The law does not create sin, but it names it and makes it visible. Before you encounter the law's demands, you can deceive yourself about your own moral condition. The law ends that self-deception. "I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet'" (Romans 7:7). This is not a comfortable function, but it is a necessary one. It creates the awareness of need that makes grace meaningful.
The third function is the normative use: the law as guide for the redeemed life. Once a person has received grace, the law no longer functions as a threat or an accuser. It functions instead as a description of the kind of life that pleases God — a map of love's terrain. We do not keep the law to earn what Christ has already given; we keep it because we want to walk in step with the God who has transformed us. This third function is what Jesus is pointing toward in John 14:15: "If you love me, keep my commands" — love first, obedience as its expression, not obedience as the payment for love.
The law as tutor: Galatians 3 and spiritual maturity
Paul's most concentrated treatment of the law's purpose comes in Galatians 3. He is writing to a community that has received the Gospel but is being pressured to add law-keeping — particularly circumcision — as a condition of full standing before God. His argument is layered, but the key image appears in verses 23–25: "Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian."
The word translated "guardian" or "tutor" is the Greek paidagogos — not a teacher in the modern sense, but a household slave in the Greco-Roman world whose job was to escort children to school, keep them out of trouble, and enforce basic standards of conduct. The paidagogos did not educate the child; the teacher did. The paidagogos prepared and protected the child until the child was mature enough to benefit from real instruction. Paul's image is developmental: the law was God's provision for a period of spiritual immaturity, doing the work of external constraint and guidance until the maturity — the "faith" — that Christ brings was available.
This is not a dismissal of the law. It is a placement of the law in the correct position in a larger story. A child needs a paidagogos; an adult does not. That does not mean the paidagogos was useless — without that protective escort, the child might never have reached adulthood. But it would be a mistake to insist that adults still need a paidagogos walking beside them at all times. The law was exactly what the people of God needed in that particular period of history, and it served God's purposes faithfully. Now that Christ has come, the relationship with God intended from the beginning — one of mature, internalized love rather than external constraint — has become possible.
The new covenant: from external to internal law
Jeremiah prophesied this transition with extraordinary clarity six centuries before Christ. In Jeremiah 31:31–33, God announces: "The days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them. This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time: I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people."
The contrast is precise and important. The old covenant was a covenant of external law — tablets of stone, commandments given from outside, obedience enforced by consequences. The new covenant does not change the substance of what God wants — his character is unchanging — but it changes where his law is located and how it operates. The law moves from the stone tablet to the heart. The mechanism changes from external enforcement to internal transformation. God does not lower the standard; he provides what is needed to meet it: a renewed heart that wants what God wants, that loves what God loves, that does not need to consult a rulebook for every decision because the principle behind every rule has been written into who the person is.
This is what Jesus is pointing toward in the Sermon on the Mount. "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not murder'... But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment" (Matthew 5:21–22). He is not adding a harder external rule. He is pointing to the interior reality that the external rule was always pointing toward. The command against murder was never just about the act; it was about the heart that produces the act. The new covenant gets at the root. In Ezekiel's parallel vision, God promises: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26).
What the Divine Principle teaches about law and restoration
The Divine Principle situates the law within the broader arc of God's providence of restoration, and the picture it draws is deeply consistent with the biblical theology traced above — while extending it in ways that illuminate what is at stake. The Principle begins from the conviction that God created human beings with an original inner nature — a heart, a moral compass, a capacity for love — that was intended to guide them naturally toward God's will without needing external commandments. Adam and Eve did not need the Ten Commandments to know how to love. The love was meant to be in them, growing toward perfection through their life and relationship with God.
The fall disrupted this. The transgression in Eden did not merely produce guilt; it damaged the inner nature that was supposed to be humanity's guide. Human beings after the fall found themselves with a conscience that could partially see God's will but with a heart insufficiently aligned with it, and with a lineage that transmitted that misalignment to every subsequent generation. In this condition, external law was a mercy: it told people what their damaged inner compass could no longer tell them clearly. It was a fence around a wound — not the healing of the wound, but protection against worse injury while the healing was underway.
The goal of restoration, in the Divine Principle's framework, is always the recovery of the original inner nature — a heart so aligned with God's heart that commandment becomes, as Jeremiah promised, unnecessary in the external sense. This is not antinomianism — it is the fulfillment of the law's deepest intention. The restoration of the heart is what God was working toward through the long history of the law, the prophets, Jesus' life and teaching, and the ongoing work of the Spirit in the lives of believers. The commandments are not discarded; they are internalized, embodied, and lived from the inside out rather than the outside in. That transformation — from external law to internal heart-law — is the trajectory of the Bible's whole story, and it is what the Divine Principle understands as the restoration of the original human nature that was lost in the fall.
For the reader who wants to understand how this relates to the specific question of salvation, our post on faith and salvation takes up exactly that question. And for a deeper look at what grace provides that the law cannot, our essay on grace traces how the unearned gift of God's love is what makes the transformation possible in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
Does keeping God's law save us?
No. Paul writes in Romans 3:20 that "no one will be declared righteous in God's sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin." The law reveals the standard we cannot meet on our own; it does not provide the power to meet it. Salvation comes through grace received in faith (Ephesians 2:8–9). This does not make the law worthless — it was given for profound purposes — but keeping it is not the mechanism of salvation.
If the law doesn't save us, why did God give it?
Paul gives the clearest answer in Galatians 3:24: the law was a paidagogos — a guardian or tutor — meant to lead us to Christ. The law protected a people in spiritual immaturity, diagnosed sin accurately, made the Messiah's arrival historically possible, and pointed to the deeper, internal transformation that would become available in Christ. The Divine Principle adds that the law was God's interim provision for a humanity whose original inner compass had been damaged by the fall, preparing them for the restoration of that inner compass.
Did Jesus abolish the law?
No. Jesus said explicitly, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17). In the Sermon on the Mount he intensified the law's demands, driving them inward — not just no murder, but no hatred; not just no adultery, but no lust. Christ brought the law to its intended destination: a transformation of the heart from which lawful behavior flows naturally, not a relaxation of the standard.
What is the new covenant Jeremiah prophesied about?
Jeremiah 31:31–33 promises: "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts." The new covenant does not change the substance of what God commands — his character is unchanging — but it changes the mechanism from external enforcement to internal transformation. God's will becomes our will, written into who we are through the work of the Spirit, so that obedience flows from love rather than fear.
What does the Divine Principle say about the law?
The Principle sees the law as God's interim provision for fallen humanity — a fence around a damaged heart, an external guide for people not yet mature enough to live from renewed inner conviction. The goal was always restoration of the original inner nature: a heart so aligned with God's that commandment becomes unnecessary not because the standard dropped, but because the heart was healed. This is the trajectory from Sinai to Jeremiah's new covenant to Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.