Christ the End of the Law

The Lord himself has made it plain that it was not only the prophets and many righteous men who, foreseeing his coming through the Holy Spirit, prayed that they might reach the time when they would see their Lord face to face and hear his words. For he says to his disciples, “Many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” In what way, then, did they long to hear and to see, unless they knew beforehand that he was coming? And how could they have known it beforehand, unless they had first received that foreknowledge from him? [a]

And how do the Scriptures bear witness to him, unless everything had always been revealed and shown to those who believe by one and the same God through the Word? He talks with the creature he has made; he lays down his law; at one moment he rebukes, at another he urges on; then he sets his servant free and takes him as a son; and at the right time he gives an inheritance that cannot rot away — all so as to bring man to perfection. For he formed him to grow and to increase, as the Scripture says: “Increase and multiply.”

This is where God differs from man: God makes, and man is made. The one who makes is always the same, but the thing made must have a beginning, and a middle, and something added, and a growth. God creates with skill; man is the thing skillfully created. God is perfect in everything, always equal and like himself, since he is all light and all mind and all being, and the spring of everything good. But man receives advance and increase toward God. For as God is always the same, so man, once he is found in God, will always be going on toward God.

God never stops doing good to man and enriching him, and man never stops receiving the good and being enriched by God. The man who is grateful to the one who made him is the vessel that holds God’s goodness and the instrument of his glory; and the ungrateful man is the vessel that holds his just judgment — the man who despises his Maker and will not be subject to his Word. And God has promised to give a great deal to those who keep bearing fruit, and more and more to those who have the Lord’s money in hand. “Well done,” he says, “good and faithful servant. Because you were faithful with a little, I will put you in charge of much. Enter into the joy of your Lord.” That is how much the Lord himself promises.

So he has promised to give a great deal to those who bear fruit now — by the gift of his grace, not by the shifting of any “knowledge,” since the Lord stays the same and the Father who is revealed is the same. In just this way the one and the same Lord has granted, through his coming, a greater gift of grace to the people of the later time than he had granted to those who lived under the old covenant. They used to hear through his servants that the King would come, and they rejoiced up to a point, since they were hoping for his arrival. But those who have seen him actually present, who have been set free and given a share in his gifts, have far more grace and far greater gladness, rejoicing because the King has arrived. As David says, “My soul will rejoice in the Lord; it will be glad in his salvation.”

And that is why, when he entered Jerusalem, all those who were on the road recognized David their king in his grief of soul, and spread their garments out for him, and dressed the road with green branches, calling out with great joy and gladness: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

But there were the envious and wicked stewards, who cheated the people under them and lorded it over those who had little understanding, and who for that very reason did not want the king to come. When they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” the Lord answered, “Have you never read: Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have brought praise to its full?” By this he pointed out that what David had said about the Son of God was carried out in his own person. He showed that they knew nothing of what the Scripture meant or of how God was arranging things, and he declared that he himself was the one the prophets had announced as Christ — whose name is praised over all the earth, and who brings praise to his Father to its full out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies. That is why his glory too has been lifted above the heavens.

So if the very person the prophets announced is here — our Lord Jesus Christ — and if his coming has brought fuller grace and greater gifts to those who have received him, then plainly the Father too is the same one the prophets proclaimed, and the Son at his coming spread the knowledge of no other Father, but of the very one who was preached from the beginning. From that Father he has brought down freedom for those who serve him lawfully, with a willing mind and with the whole heart. But there are the scoffers, men not subject to God, who keep up outward washings for the praise of other people — practices that had been given as a pattern of things to come, the law sketching certain things in shadow and outlining eternal things by temporal ones, heavenly things by earthly. And there are men who make out that they keep more than was laid down, as though setting their own zeal above God himself, while inside they are full of pretense and greed and every kind of wickedness. To such men he has assigned everlasting ruin, cutting them off from life.

For the tradition of the elders, which they claimed to be keeping out of the law, was contrary to the law given through Moses. That is why Isaiah says, “Your merchants water down the wine.” He is showing that the elders were in the habit of mixing a watered tradition into the plain command of God — that is, they set up a counterfeit law, a law contrary to the true one. The Lord made this plain as well when he said to them, “Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?” For they did not only set God’s law at nothing by breaking it outright, mixing the wine with water; they also set up a law of their own against it, the one that is still called to this day the law of the Pharisees. In it they suppress some things, add others, and interpret others as they see fit, each of their teachers using it in his own way. And because they wanted to keep these traditions standing, they refused to be subject to the law of God, which is the very thing that gets them ready for the coming of Christ. [l]

They even found fault with the Lord for healing on the Sabbath — which, as I have already said, the law did not forbid. They themselves performed a kind of healing on the Sabbath when they circumcised a man on it. Yet they did not find fault with themselves for breaking the command of God through their tradition and through this law of the Pharisees, and for failing to keep the law’s own command, which is to love God.

That this is the first and greatest command, and that the next one has to do with love toward our neighbor, the Lord taught when he said that the whole law and the prophets hang on these two commands. He himself brought down no other command greater than this one; he renewed this very one for his disciples when he told them to love God with their whole heart, and others as themselves. If he had come down from some other Father, he would never have made use of the first and greatest command of the law. He would certainly have done everything he could to bring down a greater one than this from the “perfect” Father, so as not to use the one that had been given by the God of the law.

Paul says the same: “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” And he says that when everything else has been destroyed there will remain “faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of all is love”; and that apart from the love of God, knowledge is worth nothing, and neither is the understanding of mysteries, nor faith, nor prophecy — without love they are all hollow and empty. He says as well that love makes a man perfect, and that the one who loves God is perfect both in this world and in the world to come. For we never stop loving God; and the more we go on gazing at him, the more we love him.

So then: in the law, and in the Gospel alike, the first and greatest command is to love the Lord God with the whole heart, and a command like it follows, to love your neighbor as yourself. The author of the law and of the Gospel is therefore shown to be one and the same. The rules for a life that is perfect through and through are the same in each covenant, and so they have pointed us to the same God — a God who certainly did publish particular laws fitted to each. But the greater and more prominent commands, the ones without which there is no salvation, he has urged on us in the same form in both.

The Lord does not do away with this God either. He shows that the law did not come from some other God when he speaks like this to the people he was teaching, to the crowd and to his disciples: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So do and keep whatever they tell you, but do not do as they do; for they say things and do not do them. They tie up heavy loads and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not shift them with so much as a finger.”

So he laid no blame on the law that was given through Moses when he urged that it be kept — Jerusalem being still standing at the time. The blame he laid was on those men, because they repeated the words of the law and yet had no love; and that is why they were held to be in the wrong toward God and toward their neighbors as well. Isaiah says the same: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Their worship of me is empty, teaching as teachings the commands of men.” He is not calling the law given through Moses “commands of men,” but the traditions of the elders, which they had invented themselves; and by propping those up they cancelled the law of God, which is also why they were not subject to his Word.

This is what Paul says about these men: “Not knowing the righteousness of God, and setting out to establish a righteousness of their own, they did not submit to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law, for righteousness to everyone who believes.” And how is Christ the end of the law, if he is not also the purpose the law was made for? The one who has brought in the end is the one who worked the beginning. It is he himself who says to Moses, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, and I have come down to rescue them.” From the beginning it has been the Word of God’s own habit to go up and to come down for the sake of saving people who are in distress.

That the law taught people beforehand that they must follow Christ, he makes plain himself in the answer he gave to the man who asked what he should do to inherit eternal life: “If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” When the man asked, “Which ones?” the Lord answered, “Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He was setting the commands of the law before those who wanted to follow him as a flight of steps, the way into life; and what he said then to one man he said to everyone.

When the man said, “I have done all these” — and most likely he had not kept them, since otherwise the Lord would not have told him, “Keep the commandments” — the Lord brought his greed out into the open and said, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell everything you have and give it out to the poor; and come, follow me.” To those who would act like this he was promising the portion that belongs to the apostles. And he did not preach to his followers another God the Father besides the one the law had proclaimed from the beginning; nor another Son; nor the Mother, the enthymesis of the Aeon, who existed in suffering and in falling away; nor the Pleroma of the thirty Aeons, which has been shown to be empty and impossible to believe in; nor any of the other tales the heretics have invented. What he taught was that they should keep the commands God laid down from the beginning, undo their old greed by doing good, and follow after Christ. And that property handed out to the poor does cancel a man’s old greed, Zacchaeus made clear when he said, “Look, I give half of what I own to the poor; and if I have cheated anyone of anything, I pay it back four times over.”