Acts 13:39 - Through him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses.

In the Bible "law" does not always mean the same thing.

For example, in Psalm 40:8 we read: "I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart". Here the law is synonymous with God's revealed will. A Christian seeking to express their love for God and neighbor delights in those passages that declare what God's will is. When, however, Paul told Christians that they are no longer under the law (Romans 6:14), he obviously meant more by law than the revealed will of God. He was talking there about Christians being free from the curse of the law, not needing to depend on adherence to the law to establish our relationship to God: "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes" (Romans 10:4).

The reason Paul said that Christ is the end of the law in this sense is because, in the gospel, God unconditionally gives the righteousness that the law demands conditionally. So Christ kicks the law out of the conscience by overcoming the voice of condemnation produced by the condition of the law. In other words, the conditional voice that says, "Do this and live" gets outvolumed by the unconditional voice that says, "It is finished."

When this happens, we are freed from the condemnation of the law's conditionally (the law loses its "teeth") and are therefore free to hear the law's content as a description of what it looks like to love God and neighbor. But every day in various ways we disobey and stubbornly serve ourselves rather than others, thereby "submitting ourselves once again to a yoke of slavery." And when we do, it is the gospel that brings comfort by reminding us that God's love for us doesn't depend on what we do (or fail to do) but on what Christ has done for us. Jesus fulfilled all of God's holy conditions so that our relationship to God could be wholly unconditional. "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1).

-- Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,