14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”
15 We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16 yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
17 But if, in our endeavour to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! 18 For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. 19 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.
We should recall what was said earlier about the kind of problem that had arisen in Galatia and elsewhere: men were saying, 'Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved' - i.e. the works of the law were being stressed as essential for salvation, and salvation was by keeping the precepts of the law. Paul's assertion throughout is: 'It is not something we do, that brings salvation, but something we hear (cf also 3:2), a hearing of something Someone else has done! This is the heart of the gospel. The Shorter Catechism definition of justification speaks of our being accepted as righteous in God's sight 'only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone'. The operative word in this is 'imputed', and it is a keynote in Paul's teaching. The word itself means 'to reckon', 'to make over', 'to transfer', or 'to put to the account of'. What Paul means is this: The New Testament presents two pictures, one of man the sinner, man made in the image of God, the crown of His creation, but now fallen into sin - a temple made for God but now in ruins. Man has sinned, and come short of God's glory, guilty in His sight, and alienated from Him. To appreciate this picture in all its seriousness - and man's predicament in sin is so serious that no amount of repentance of the promise 'to do better next time' could ever hope to remedy it - is sufficient in itself to make it plain that nothing man can do can earn him salvation. Without the second picture (to which we shall turn in the next Note) the situation would be utterly hopeless.