When you enter a courtroom, the judge sits high upon an elevated platform, while the accused stands below. The sentence is passed down. The very position of the courtroom reveals a universal truth: the one seated above possesses authority, while the one standing below is under that authority.
This same imagery appears in Scripture. The Torah was read from a raised platform, called the bema, while the people stood beneath it (Nehemiah 8:4). The people were literally under the law, under its authority, its jurisdiction, and its sentence. To be under law means to stand beneath the law’s authority and to be subject to its judgment.
Even in modern language we say, “Under American law, he faces the death penalty,” or “Under international law, this crime is punishable by…” The expression carries the same meaning in Scripture: those under law are those over whom the law has rightful jurisdiction to punish.
The Phrase “Under Law” in Scripture
Paul uses the phrase “under law” (Greek: ὑπὸ νόμον, hypo nomon) several times in the New Testament (Romans 3:19; 6:14–15; Galatians 3:23; 4:4–5, 21; 5:18; 1 Corinthians 9:20–21). In every case it describes a legal condition, not mere obedience.
To be under law is to be subject to its condemnation.
To be under grace is to be freed from its penalty through Messiah’s atonement.
“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
Romans 6:14–15 (ESV)
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!”
Paul does not say the law is abolished. He says its dominion to condemn has been broken.
The Purpose of the Law
The Torah was never a plan of salvation. It was the divine standard revealing God’s righteousness and exposing man’s sin.
“Through the law comes knowledge of sin.”
Romans 3:20
“If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.”
Romans 7:7
“Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.”
1 John 3:4
The Torah functions in three primary ways:
- Instruction in Righteousness – It defines right and wrong, good and evil.
- Blessings and Curses – It establishes the covenantal consequences of obedience or disobedience (Deuteronomy 28).
- Revelation of Sin – It exposes guilt and makes clear that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
The Torah does all these things perfectly, yet it was never designed to save the guilty. It identifies sin and condemns it, but it cannot redeem a sinner.
That is a problem for sinners who look to the Torah for redemption.
The Problem: All Are Guilty Under Law
Since the Torah defines sin and demands death for transgression, every human being who has ever sinned stands condemned beneath it, or under law.
“Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them.”
Deuteronomy 27:26
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Romans 3:23
According to the law of sin and death, even one sin is sufficient to invoke the curse. No amount of subsequent obedience can erase a single violation. The entire world is therefore “accountable to God” (Romans 3:19) since we all have sinned (Romans 3:23).
This is the human dilemma: the law is holy and just, but we are not. Its standard is perfection and we are not, and its penalty is death.
All humans are under the curse of death and in need of redemption. A redemption the Torah cannot legally provide.
Legal Solution: Messiah
Into this hopeless situation, God sent His Son, Yeshua, whose name means Yehovah Saves.
“When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law.”
Galatians 4:4-5
Yeshua was born under the same jurisdiction as every man, subject to Torah’s blessings and curses, but unlike us, He never sinned. He was therefore innocent, yet willingly took the place of the guilty.
“Messiah redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’”
Galatians 3:13
On the cross, the Torah’s full sentence fell upon Him. He bore the penalty of our transgression until its jurisdiction was satisfied. Once He died, the law’s authority to curse Him was exhausted. Death ends legal jurisdiction of Torah.
“Do you not know… that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives?”
Romans 7:1
Through death, Messiah became dead to the law, not because the law was abolished, but because its legal demands were fully satisfied in death.
Survivability
In every legal contract, there is what lawyers call a “survivability clause.” It determines how long the terms of the agreement remain in effect and under what conditions they cease. Once one of the parties dies, the contract’s jurisdiction typically ends. You cannot sue or sentence a dead man, because the law no longer applies to him.
Paul uses this exact legal concept in regard to the law of marriage to illustrate our freedom from condemnation under the Torah:
“A married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage.”
Romans 7:2, ESV
In other words, the law does not survive death. Once the sentence is carried out, its authority ceases. The law can only condemn the living to death, it cannot condemn the dead.
This is the foundation for Paul’s next argument: when we are baptized into Messiah, we are united with His death. His death becomes legally our death, and therefore, the law’s jurisdiction over us ends.
“We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.”
Romans 6:4–5 (ESV)
If the law legally cannot curse a dead man, and we have died with Messiah, then the law cannot curse us.
The sentence has already been executed. The penalty has been paid.
But our story doesn’t end in death—we rise with Him. Having died to sin and to the condemnation of the law, we now live by the Spirit to fulfill the righteous requirements of the law (Romans 8:3–4).
The contract’s curse clause no longer applies to us because we are no longer under the same legal standing. The law still exists, the standard still stands, but its jurisdiction to condemn has ended for all who have died and risen with Messiah.
The Record of Debt Removed
Paul describes this transaction in legal terms:
“He canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross.”
Colossians 2:14
The “record of debt” is not the Torah itself but the documentation of our violations, the written charges that declared us guilty. Messiah did not remove the law; He removed our guilt.
Therefore:
- The law still stands as God’s eternal standard.
- The curse still exists for those who reject His mercy.
- But for those who are in Messiah, the record of sin is erased, and the law’s condemnation is satisfied.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Romans 8:1
Grace Restores Relationship, Not a License for Lawlessness
In Paul’s teaching, grace does not abolish the law, it abolishes guilt.
Being under grace means being freed from condemnation, not freed from obedience.
Paul makes this unmistakably clear, Paul already defined sin as a violation of Torah, and he says:
“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!”
Romans 6:15
If sin is a violation of Torah (1 John 3:4), and grace were permission to sin, then grace would be permission to break God’s law. That is impossible. Grace does not make sin permissible; it makes forgiveness possible.
Grace empowers us to obey the Torah.
Grace restores fellowship with God so that we can once again walk in His ways.
The Holy Spirit does not nullify the Torah, it writes it upon the heart.
“I will put My law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
Jeremiah 31:33
“For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
Romans 8:3-4
The Law was Holy, Just, and Good. Our flesh was weak. So the Law could not save us, and we could not save ourselves. Yeshua alone is our salvation.
Grace does not erase the standard; it empowers us to meet it through the Spirit.
Grace is not the opposite of law, it is the power to live in harmony with it.
James warns against misusing the gift of grace as a cloak for sin:
“Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
James 2:17 (ESV)
To be under grace means to under the authority of God’s mercy, to have received the free gift of justification that covers our transgressions and clothes us in righteousness and is given to us on account of our faith.
“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”
Romans 4:7-8 (ESV)
Grace removes our guilt, not the law. It covers our record of debt, not the standard.
Under grace, we stand before the judgment seat without blemish, robed in the spotless garment of Messiah’s righteousness (Revelation 19:8).
We are not freed from obedience, we are freed to obey. Grace delivers us from the penalty of sin so that we can now walk according to the Spirit, fulfilling the righteous requirements of the Torah in love and truth.
The Great Error of Modern Christianity: A Gospel of Lawlessness
Having established the legal framework of salvation and justification expounded on by Paul in Romans 1-8, we must now confront a sobering truth: modern Christianity has lost the Gospel that the apostles preached.
What passes for “grace” in most of Christendom today is not grace at all, but a doctrine of lawlessnessEvery time the phrase “under law” appears in Paul’s letters, modern teachers interpret it as “no longer required to obey.” They read “you are not under law” as “you are not under obligation.”a counterfeit gospel built upon eisegesis (reading one’s own ideas into the text) rather than exegesis (drawing meaning from the text).
Twisting “Under Law” into Lawlessness
Every time the phrase “under law” appears in Paul’s letters, modern teachers interpret it as “no longer required to obey.” They read “you are not under law” as “you are not under obligation.”
This is a grave error.
Paul’s language was never about obedience, it was about enforceability and condemnation of the curse of the law.
To be under law means to be under the authority of the law to sentence, to judge, or to curse. That is how the term is used in the “New Testament”
Paul foresaw how the lawless would twist his words, so he immediately corrected the misunderstanding:
“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
Romans 6:14–15 (ESV)
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? God forbid!”
In other words: “Shall we break the Torah because we are not under its penalty? Absolutely not.”
Yet the church today ignores Paul’s own clarification. The very next verse destroys their interpretation, but they skip it.
Grace is not freedom from obedience; it is freedom from condemnation. The Torah still defines sin, still instructs in righteousness, and still blesses obedience while cursing rebellion. The difference is that Messiah bore the curse in our place.
The False Divide Between Law and Faith
Modern Christianity also imagines that people “used to be saved by keeping the law and offering sacrifices,” but now “we are saved by faith.”
That is false.
The Torah was never a plan of salvation. (But the gospel of salvation was taught within.)
It was the divine standard revealing God’s righteousness and exposing man’s sin.
“Through the law comes knowledge of sin.”
Romans 3:20
“If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.”
Romans 7:7
Without the Torah we would have no definition of sin. It is the Torah that teaches us how to Love God and How to love our neighbor, upon those to commandments hang entire law.
Torah: The Divine Instruction
The word Torah meaning “to instruct,” “to teach,” and comes from the Hebrew root יָרָה (yarah), or literally “to take aim.”
The related term for sin, חָטָא (chata’), means “to miss the mark.”
The imagery is simple and profound:
- Torah shows us where to aim.
- Sin is when we miss that target.
Thus, the Torah teaches righteousness, defines sin, and lays out blessings and curses. Without Torah, we would have no definition of good works, no understanding of holiness, and no knowledge of what offends God.
The Torah Defines Love
Without the Torah, we would have no definition of sin, and we would have no definition of love. It is the Torah that teaches us how to love God and how to love our neighbor. Upon these two commandments hang the entire law and the prophets.
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 23:34-40
The first commandment Yeshua quotes is called the V’ahavta (“And you shall love”), drawn from the Shema, the daily confession of Israel’s faith:
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”
Deuteronomy 6:4–7 (ESV)
This is the very commandment Yeshua identified as the greatest. It defines love for God as obedience to His Torah.
The second commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” comes from Leviticus 19:18. It defines love for others as the practice of Torah toward our fellow man, honesty, compassion, justice, mercy, and respect for life and property.
The whole Torah teaches these two principles:
- Love God — by keeping His commandments.
- Love your neighbor — by treating others as His image-bearers.
Neither of these commandments has been done away with, and neither can exist apart from the Torah that defines them.
As John wrote centuries later:
“For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.”
1 John 5:3, ESV
The love Yeshua taught is not sentimental, it is obedient.
The Torah defines what love looks like in action. Without it, “love” becomes an empty word, and “faith” becomes a cover for lawlessness.
Law and Faith are not at odds. Faith is the believe in Messiah, and Law is our code of conduct, which Messiah empowers us to pursue by filling us with the Spirit and writing the Torah on our hearts.
Messiah came and was a living example of how to obey and fulfill Torah and we are to follow his example.
Misinterpreting “Fulfill” as “Abolish”
Modern Christianity also abuses Yeshua’s words in Matthew 5:17–19.
They claim that when He said, “I have come to fulfill the law,” He meant “I have come to abolish it.”
But Yeshua said the exact opposite:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
Matthew 5:17–18
For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”
Heaven and earth are still here. The law still stands. Heaven and Earth will pass away in the future according to the Bible it has not yet happened. The Torah still stands.
To “fulfill” does not mean “abolish” — it means to fill up, to complete, to bring to fullness of meaning.
Modern Christians ignore both the sentence before and the sentence after, reading into the text their own presuppositions. This is eisegesis at its worst.
The Legal Debt Was Paid, Not the Law Removed
Messiah did not cancel the Torah, He canceled our record of sin.
He satisfied the law’s righteous demand for death and freed us from its curse, not from its standard.
“He canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross.”
Colossians 2:14
We died with Him, and therefore the law cannot curse us. But our story does not end in death; we rise with Him to walk in righteousness.
“Having died to sin and to the condemnation of the law, we now live by the Spirit to fulfill the righteous requirement of the law.”
Romans 8:3-4
The Redefinitions of a Counterfeit Gospel
This modern, lawless gospel twists the very words of Scripture. It commits four fatal errors:
- Redefines “under law” to mean “obedient to law,” rather than “under the penalty or jurisdiction of the law.”
- Redefines Messiah’s work to mean He canceled the Torah, instead of canceling our sin.
- Redefines freedom from the curse of the law to mean freedom from obedience.
- Redefines grace as permission to sin, rather than empowerment to live righteously.
These errors have produced a lawless faith, one that denies the authority of God’s commandments and treats His grace as license for sin.
The Apostolic Warnings Against Lawless Grace
The apostles warned repeatedly that false teachers would twist Paul’s words to their own destruction:
15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.
2 Peter 3:15-17
James warns:
“Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
James 2:17
“So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty.”
James 2:12
Jude warns:
“Certain people have crept in unnoticed, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”
Jude 4
Paul warns:
“For you, brothers, were called to freedom; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.”
Galatians 5:13
John warns:
“He who says, ‘I know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”
1 John 2:4
“For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.”
1 John 5:3
The consistent message from every apostle is the same:
Grace is not permission to sin. Obedience is not optional.
The Call to Repentance
Modern Christendom must repent for preaching a gospel of lawlessness.
The Torah was not abolished. The standard of righteousness has not changed. Heaven and earth still stand as witnesses.
Yeshua did not free us from the law; He freed us from our guilt.
He did not remove the curse from existence; He bore it Himself.
He did not erase righteousness; He wrote it on our hearts.
The true Gospel does not free us from obedience but restores us to obedience.
It does not replace the Torah; it fulfills its righteous purpose in us.
“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.”
Romans 6:14
To be under grace is to be forgiven, justified, and empowered by the Spirit to walk in God’s ways. To continue in lawlessness is to reject that grace and trample underfoot the blood of the covenant.
The call today is the same as it was then:
Repent. Return to the commandments of God and the faith of Yeshua. Walk as he walked in obedience to Torah.
“Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.”
Revelation 14:12
