The Jews thought they were special because they had received the Law, because God had given it to them. But being righteous by the Law required one to obey the Law, all of it. This was the fundamental error of the Jews, something they were completely blind to. Yet within the Law man’s sin was central, that is why they had all the sacrificial laws. So they thought that the blood of lambs or bulls would take away their sin. The writer to the Hebrews points out the foolishness of this. How could the blood of an animal take away a man’s sin?
“It is those who obey the Law who will be declared righteous”. This verse illustrates why it is so important to understand Scripture in its context, to see a phrase or a sentence within the context of the whole argument. Taken on its own one might think that Paul is saying it is possible to be saved by obeying the Law, or that some will be saved by obeying the Law. But, as we have pointed out, if we look at the whole argument that Paul is making, and the part of that argument that he is stressing in this chapter, we see that that is not the case. Paul is telling the Jew how the principle of Law works, and how the Jew’s understanding of the Law was fundamentally flawed. If a Jew wanted to be saved by the Law then he had to be able to stand before God and prove that he had obeyed all of the Law, something no one, except Christ, could hope to do.
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