"For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ."
— John 1:17 (NASB95)

As ways of standing righteous before God, law and grace are mutually exclusive — Scripture allows no blend: "if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace" (Romans 11:6). The Law's currency is doing; grace's currency is believing what has been done. This post presses the antithesis — what going the law-route actually requires, what the Law is and does, and the New Testament's massed testimony that the believer is not under it. (For the ways law and grace cooperate across redemptive history; for the Law's positive assignment.) The two key terms frame everything: νόμος (nomos, Strong's G3551, "law") and χάρις (charis, Strong's G5485, "grace" — "a beneficent disposition toward someone... favor, gracious gift," unearned by definition; BDAG, 3rd ed., s.v. "χάρις," 2). What is earned is the Law's category — and Scripture names sin's earned payout: "the wages of sin is death, but the free gift (χάρισμα) of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23).

What One Must Do to Follow the Law

The Ten Commandments are not all of the Law — the law-route is a total package (James 2:10; Galatians 5:3 — the circumcised man "is under obligation to keep the whole Law"). Anyone proposing to stand before God on Sinai's terms takes on, at minimum:

1. Circumcision — Galatians 5:3; 6:13. The covenant sign was mandatory (Genesis 17:14); Paul's verdict on those seeking it for standing: "you have been severed from Christ... you have fallen from grace" (Galatians 5:4).
2. Covenant membership in Israel — Hebrews 7:11; the Law was given to the Jews (Psalm 147:19–20; Romans 3:1–2; Deuteronomy 5:2–3), administered through the Levitical priesthood — and "when the priesthood is changed, of necessity there takes place a change of law also" (Hebrews 7:12).
3. Works — all of them, continually — Romans 10:5, quoting Leviticus 18:5: "the man who practices the righteousness which is based on law shall live by that righteousness" — the operative verb is do, the standard "ALL THINGS WRITTEN IN THE BOOK OF THE LAW, TO PERFORM THEM" (Galatians 3:10, quoting Deuteronomy 27:26).
4. Blood sacrifice — Hebrews 9:22: "without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness" — the law-keeper needs the altar constantly, for the Law assumes he will fail; yet "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (Hebrews 10:4) — and the temple and priesthood required for those sacrifices have not stood since AD 70, making full Torah-observance impossible on the Law's own terms.

The package deal is the point: the modern movements that urge Torah-keeping on believers — Hebrew Israelite groups making law-keeping the badge of true identity, Torah-observant "Hebrew roots" teaching, or Seventh-day Adventism's Sabbath test — invariably select fragments (days, foods, feasts) while omitting circumcision, priesthood, and altar. The Law itself refuses the selection: one point broken, guilty of all (James 2:10).

What Is the Law?

The Law defines sin and transgression — "where there is no law, there also is no violation" (Romans 4:15). Scripture's own portrait, point by point:

1. Knowledge of sin — Romans 3:20: through the Law comes the knowledge (ἐπίγνωσις) of sin. The Law showed man he was sinful and proved he could not be justified by the Law alone — the mirror, never the bath.
2. Holy — Romans 7:12: "the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good." It shows us what holiness is — and that we could not attain it without God's help. The fault was never in the standard but in the flesh (Romans 8:3).
3. Curse — Galatians 3:10: "as many as are of the works of the Law are under a curse" — not the disobedient only, but as many as are of law-works, because the Law curses every shortfall. The exit is substitution, not effort: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us" (Galatians 3:13, quoting Deuteronomy 21:23).
4. Slave driver — the Law demands and condemns but cannot empower; Paul calls the Sinai administration "the ministry of death, in letters engraved on stones" and "the ministry of condemnation" (2 Corinthians 3:7, 9), and Peter calls the law-yoke one "which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear" (Acts 15:10). Hagar-Sinai bears children "who are to be slaves" (Galatians 4:24–25).
5. School master (tutor) — Galatians 3:23–24: the παιδαγωγός (paidagōgos, Strong's G3807 — the household guardian of a minor, whose authority ended at the heir's majority). The Law points us to Christ and Christ alone: because the Law could not be kept by man, man needed the sacrifice of Jesus as mediator to God (1 Timothy 2:5; Hebrews 9:15) — man could never be holy enough before God under the Law.

Standing conclusions, with their texts: no one can live under the Law and follow Christ at the same time — seeking law-righteousness nullifies the cross ("if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly," Galatians 2:21); whoever is justified by law is "severed from Christ" (Galatians 5:4). God condemned sin in the flesh through Christ, doing what the Law could not (Romans 8:1–4). Jesus abolished in His flesh the enmity, the Law of commandments in ordinances, making peace (Ephesians 2:13–17). Jesus alone kept the Law without sin (John 8:46; 1 Peter 2:22; Hebrews 4:15). And anyone who attempts the Law and fails at one point is guilty of all (James 2:10).

We Are Not Under the Law

The New Testament's testimony, passage by passage:

• Romans 10:4 — "Christ is the end (τέλος, telos — termination and goal) of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes." The gospel we believe is His death, burial, and resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:1–4).
• Romans 6:14–15 — "you are not under law but under grace" — and precisely therefore sin's mastery is broken.
• Galatians 2:19–21 — "through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God." Righteousness is not through the Law but through Christ alone.
• Galatians 5:1–4 — "It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery." Christ benefits nothing to those seeking law-standing.
• Romans 7:1–6 — the marriage analogy: death dissolves the bond; "you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead" — dead to the Law, married to Christ, "released from the Law... so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter."
• Galatians 2:16 — justified by faith in Christ "and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified" — stated three times in one verse.
• Romans 4:4–5 — "Now to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but as what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness" — the ledger logic that makes law and grace unmixable.
• Romans 3:25–28 — propitiation in His blood through faith; boasting excluded — "by a law of faith"; "a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law."
• Galatians 3:1–2, 10–14, 26 — the Spirit received by hearing with faith, not law-works; the curse borne by Christ; "you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus."
• Romans 4:13–16 — the promise to Abraham came not through law but through the righteousness of faith; "for this reason it is by faith, in order that it may be in accordance with grace."
• Ephesians 2:8–9 — "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast." Saved by grace and grace alone through faith in Jesus Christ.

And the one "work" God asks? "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent" (John 6:29). Bruce's summary of Galatians stands as the epistle's banner: the letter is a charter of Christian freedom against every attempt to re-impose the law-yoke on those the Son has freed (Bruce, NIGTC: The Epistle to the Galatians, Eerdmans, 1982, introduction — non-Calvinistic in its exegesis here; cf. John 8:36). Read Galatians whole to see that we are not under the Law any longer.

Conclusion

Law says do; grace says done. The law-route demands the whole package — circumcision, covenant membership, total continual obedience, perpetual blood — and pays the whole wage: knowledge of sin, curse, condemnation, death. Grace gives what law demanded and could not produce: righteousness as a gift, credited to faith, grounded in the one Law-keeper who became the curse-bearer. The two cannot be mixed without destroying both — works-plus-grace is no longer grace (Romans 11:6), and law-minus-totality is no longer law (Galatians 5:3). The believer's standing is therefore not partly Sinai and partly Calvary: dead to the Law, married to Christ, justified by faith alone, kept by grace alone — "grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ."