Paul retorts the charge on those who make it. They promote sin, he declares, who set up legal righteousness again (ver. 18). The objection is stated and met in the form of question and answer, as in Rom. iii. 5. We have in this sharp thrust and parry an example of the sort of fence which Paul must often have carried on in his discussions with Jewish opponents on these questions.
We must not overlook the close verbal connection of these verses with the two last. The phrase "seeking to be justified in Christ" carries us back to the time when the two Apostles, self-condemned sinners, severally sought and found a new ground of righteousness in Him. Now when Peter and Paul did this, they were "themselves also found[54] to be sinners,"—an experience how abasing to their Jewish pride! They made the great discovery that stripped them of legal merit, and brought them down in their own esteem to the level of common sinners. Peter's confession may stand for both, when he said, abashed by the glory of Christ, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." Now this style of penitence, this profound self-abasement in the presence of Jesus Christ, revolted the Jewish moralist. To Pharisaic sentiment it was contemptible. If justification by faith requires this, if it brings the Jew to so abject a posture and makes no difference between lawless and law-keeping, between pious children of Abraham and heathen outcasts—if this be the doctrine of Christ, all moral distinctions are confounded, and Christ is "a minister of sin!" This teaching robs the Jew of the righteousness he before possessed; it takes from him the benefit and honour that God bestowed upon his race! So, we doubt not, many a Jew was heard angrily exclaiming against the Pauline doctrine, both at Antioch and elsewhere. This conclusion was, in the view of the Legalist, a reductio ad absurdum of Paulinism.
The Apostle repels this inference with the indignant μὴ γένοιτο, Far be it! His reply is indicated by the very form in which he puts the question: "If we were found sinners" (Christ did not make us such). "The complaint was this," as Calvin finely says: "Has Christ therefore come to take away from us the righteousness of the Law, to make us polluted who were holy? Nay, Paul says;—he repels the blasphemy with detestation. For Christ did not introduce sin, but revealed it. He did not rob them of righteousness, but of the false show thereof."[55] The reproach of the Judaizers was in reality the same that is urged against evangelical doctrine still—that it is immoral, placing the virtuous and vicious in the common category of "sinners."
Ver. 18 throws back the charge of promoting sin upon the Legalist. It is the counterpart, not of ver. 19, but rather of ver. 17. The "transgressor" is the sinner in a heightened and more specific sense, one who breaks known and admitted law.[56] This word bears, in Paul's vocabulary, a precise and strongly marked signification which is not satisfied by the common interpretation. It is not that Peter in setting up the Law which he had in principle overthrown, puts himself in the wrong; nor that Peter in re-establishing the Law, contradicts the purpose of the Law itself (Chrysostom, Lightfoot, Beet). This is to anticipate the next verse. In Paul's view and according to the experience common to Peter with himself, law and transgression are concomitant, every man "under law" is ipso facto a transgressor. He who sets up the first, constitutes himself the second. And this is what Peter is now doing; although Paul courteously veils the fact by putting it hypothetically, in the first person.[57] After dissolving, so far as in him lay, the validity of legal righteousness and breaking down the edifice of justification by works, Peter is now building it up again, and thereby constructing a prison-house for himself. Returning to legal allegiance, he returns to legal condemnation;[58] with his own hands he puts on his neck the burden of the Law's curse, which through faith in Christ he had cast off. By this act of timid conformity he seeks to commend himself to Jewish opinion; but it only serves, in the light of the Gospel, to "prove him a transgressor," to "commend"[59] him in that unhappy character. This is Paul's retort to the imputation of the Judaist. It carries the war into the enemies' camp. "No," says Paul, "Christ is no patron of sin, in bidding men renounce legal righteousness. But those promote sin—in themselves first of all—who after knowing His righteousness, turn back again to legalism."
IV. The conviction of Peter is now complete. From the sad bondage to which the Jewish Apostle, by his compliance with the Judaizers, was preparing to submit himself, the Apostle turns to his own joyous sense of deliverance (vv. 19-21). Those who resort to legalism, he has said, ensure their own condemnation. It is, on the other hand, by an entire surrender to Christ, by realizing the import of His death, that we learn to "live unto God." So Paul had proved it. At this moment he is conscious of a union with the crucified and living Saviour, which lifts him above the curse of the law, above the power of sin. To revert to the Judaistic state, to dream any more of earning righteousness by legal conformity, is a thing for him inconceivable. It would be to make void the cross of Christ!
And it was the Law itself that first impelled Paul along this path. "Through law" he "died to law." The Law drove him from itself to seek salvation in Jesus Christ. Its accusations allowed him no shelter, left him no secure spot on which to build the edifice of his self-righteousness. It said to him unceasingly, Thou art a transgressor.[60] He who seeks justification by its means contradicts the Law, while he frustrates the grace of God.