Week #2 - Grace and the Law: What Was the Law For?
Blog Series Intention Recap
Grace.
We sing about it. We name churches after it. We talk about being saved by it. But what exactly is grace? And just as importantly, what it isn’t?
Is grace God’s New Testament replacement for Old Testament Law? Were Abraham, Moses, and David saved differently than we are? If salvation is entirely by grace, do our works matter?
Those questions take us across the biblical story, where we discover something remarkably consistent:
Grace isn’t God’s backup plan.
From Abraham to the apostles, sinful people have always needed what they could never earn for themselves: God’s grace.
Over the next four weeks, we’ll look at what grace is, what it isn’t, and why different ages and responsibilities have never meant different ways of salvation.
Different ages. Different responsibilities. One Savior. Grace through faith.
This page is a post in the series “Grace: A Study On What It Is And What It Isn’t.” Click here to see the rest of the posts.
Let’s jump into Week #2:
"Grace and the Law"...
When most people picture Mount Sinai, they picture the moment God got strict.
Thunder. Smoke. A trembling mountain. Stone tablets. Commandments.
If there is one place in the Bible where it looks like God stopped dealing in grace and started dealing in rules, this is it. Abraham believed God and was counted righteous. But Moses came down the mountain with a list. Surely this is where the arrangement changed. From here on, it seems, Israel would have to earn its standing with God.
That is how many Christians read the Old Testament. It is not how the Old Testament reads itself.
Before God gave Israel a single commandment, He did something else first. And the order matters more than almost anything else in the story.
Why it Matters:
God rescued Israel from Egypt before He gave the Law. Redemption came first. Instruction came second.
The Law had important, God-given purposes. Saving sinners by their performance was never one of them.
The sacrifices were not a competing way to be saved. Scripture says plainly that animal blood could not take away sins.
Obedience still mattered under the Law, and it still matters now. But obedience is a response to grace, never the price of it.
Go Deeper:
Grace Before Sinai
The Exodus does not begin with Israel reaching for God. It begins with God hearing slaves.
"And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob." (Exodus 2:24, ESV)
Israel was not rescued because it had proven itself faithful. God acted because of a promise He had made to Abraham centuries earlier, a promise received by faith before any Law existed.
Then came Passover. The night of judgment did not spare Israelite homes simply because they were Israelite homes. God told them to put the blood of the lamb on their doors, and He told them why:
"The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt." (Exodus 12:13, ESV)
Then the sea opened. Israel walked through on dry ground and watched Pharaoh's army disappear behind them. They had not fought a battle. They had not negotiated a treaty. They had not earned their rescue by keeping the Law, because the Law had not even been given yet.
God did what they could never have done for themselves.
Redemption Before Commandments
In the third month after leaving Egypt, Israel camped at the foot of Sinai. Before God spoke the Ten Commandments, He told Moses what to say to the people:
"You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." (Exodus 19:4–6, ESV)
Notice the order. First: "You yourselves have seen what I did." Then: "Now therefore." Everything God asks of Israel at Sinai flows out of what He has already done for them.
The commandments themselves begin the same way:
"And God spoke all these words, saying, 'I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.'" (Exodus 20:1–2, ESV)
Only then does God say, "You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3, ESV).
God did not say, "Keep these commandments, and I will rescue you from Egypt." He said, "I am the God who already rescued you. Now here is how My people live."
First redemption. Then instruction.
This was Israel's national redemption from slavery in Egypt. It did not mean every Israelite was personally right with God. We will come back to that distinction in a moment. But the order matters: God did not give Israel the Law as the means of escaping Egypt. He rescued them first.
Moses makes the same point later, when he reminds Israel why God chose them at all:
"It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt." (Deuteronomy 7:7–8, ESV)
Not because of their size. Not because of their strength. Not because of their record. Because the LORD loved them and kept His word.
Even when Israelite parents explained the Law to their children, the story began with rescue: "We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand" (Deuteronomy 6:21, ESV).
The Law was never a ladder Israel climbed to reach God. It was instruction given to a people God had already redeemed.
What the Law Could Do
None of this means the Law was unimportant. God gave it, and Paul calls it "holy and righteous and good" (Romans 7:12, ESV). It had real purposes.
It revealed God's character. The commandments showed Israel what the holy God they belonged to was like and what He valued.
It set Israel apart. God called them to be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation," a people whose worship, justice, and daily life would look different from every nation around them. God gave the Law to Israel as a nation (Romans 9:4). It governed their worship, their courts, their diet, their calendar, and their life in the land.
It exposed sin. "For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin." (Romans 3:20, ESV) The Law did not create a path around human sinfulness. It made that sinfulness impossible to ignore.
It provided a way for a holy God to dwell among a sinful people. The tabernacle, the priesthood, and the sacrifices were God's gracious provision so that He could live in the middle of Israel's camp. When an Israelite brought a sin offering as God commanded, Scripture says, "he shall be forgiven" (Leviticus 4:31, ESV). That forgiveness was real.
And it pointed forward. Paul asks the obvious question directly:
"Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made..." (Galatians 3:19, ESV)
Paul does not say the Law was added to replace the promise to Abraham or to provide another way of salvation. It was added "because of transgressions," and it had a defined place in God's unfolding plan, lasting until the promised Offspring came. The promise came first, and the promise was never canceled.
What the Law Could Never Do
For all it could do, the Law was never designed to do everything.
It could not give life. Paul is blunt: "if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law" (Galatians 3:21, ESV). The Law could describe righteousness. It could not produce it in a sinner.
It could not take away sin. The same Hebrews that honors the sacrificial system tells us its limits:
"For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near... For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." (Hebrews 10:1, 4, ESV)
So how could an Israelite be forgiven, as Leviticus says, if animal blood could not remove sin? The sacrifices were God's appointed means within the Mosaic system, but the animal's blood was never the ultimate basis upon which God could forgive sin. The sacrifices pointed beyond themselves to the sacrifice that could actually take away sin. The animal was not competing with Yeshua (Jesus) the Messiah as another way to be saved. It pointed to Him. Hebrews goes on to say that "we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10:10, ESV). How God could forgive before that offering was made is a question we will take up later in this series.
And the Law itself could not create the transformed heart it demanded. That is why Moses looked ahead to a day when God Himself would do what the commandments could not: "And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live" (Deuteronomy 30:6, ESV).
This is also where we have to be careful with two categories that are easy to blur.
Being part of the covenant nation was not the same thing as being personally right with God. Every Israelite was born into the covenant God made with the nation at Sinai. Its blessings and curses concerned Israel's life as a people in the land God gave them. But membership in that nation did not make anyone individually righteous before God. Paul says it plainly: "not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel" (Romans 9:6, ESV).
Individual Israelites were made right with God on the same principle Abraham was: by grace through faith, not by earning righteousness through the Law. David, who lived under the Law and offered its sacrifices, understood that outward sacrifice could never substitute for genuine repentance and faith:
"For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." (Psalm 51:16–17, ESV)
The faithful Israelite brought the sacrifice God required, and he brought it as a sinner trusting the God who had redeemed him, not as a worker presenting his wages.
How does this help me understand “Grace: A Study On What It Is And What It Isn’t?”
Obedience Was the Response, Not the Price
If the Law could not save, it would be easy to conclude that it did not really matter whether Israel kept it.
That is the opposite mistake, and Scripture rejects it just as firmly.
Obedience mattered for Israel's life with God. God's covenant with the nation carried real blessings for obedience and real discipline for rebellion (Deuteronomy 28). When Israel turned to other gods, the consequences were severe, all the way to exile. Grace never meant that Israel's choices were irrelevant.
Obedience mattered for Israel's witness. Moses told the people that when the nations saw them living by God's statutes, they would say, "Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people" (Deuteronomy 4:6, ESV). A kingdom of priests was meant to show the world what the true God is like.
And obedience mattered because it was the fitting response of people who had been rescued. A people carried out of slavery "on eagles' wings" had every reason to love the God who carried them and to live the way He said.
The order never reversed. Israel did not obey in order to be redeemed. Israel was redeemed and was therefore called to obey.
God redeems. God speaks. His people respond.
Not in God's Debt
We do not live under the Mosaic Law. It was given to Israel at a particular point in history, and how God's instructions for His people differ from one age to another is part of the story this series will return to. But the pattern at Sinai still speaks to us, because the temptation it exposes is still ours.
We are always tempted to turn obedience into payment. We pray more, give more, serve more, and quietly start to believe that God now owes us something. Or we fail, and we assume that God's love for us has shrunk to the size of our latest performance.
Obedience never puts God in our debt. It is the response of people who have received what they could never earn.
This week, read Exodus 19:3–6 and Exodus 20:1–3 slowly. Notice how much God says about what He has already done before He says a word about what Israel must do. Then ask yourself:
Do I obey God as someone trying to be rescued, or as someone who already has been?
Where have I started to think that my obedience puts God in my debt?
What It Is. What It Isn't.
Grace is: God acting first, then teaching His redeemed people how to live.
Grace isn't: Freedom from every command, responsibility, or consequence.
God brought Israel out of Egypt.
Then He gave them His Law.
It was grace before Sinai, and it was grace at Sinai.
