Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. Galatians 3:24  NASB

Tutor – According to many commentators, once we arrive at the goal of salvation by faith, school’s out.  We no longer need the law because its only purpose was to prod us into recognizing our sin in order that we would be spurred to repentance.  After all, the law is burdensome.  No one can actually keep it all.  Christ is the real answer, ushering in a life of spiritual freedom where we follow him from the heart, not from an ethical code.  Following Luther, the law is viewed as a weight that needs to be removed by Jesus and grace is the garbage truck that has come to carry it away.

But this view of the law is entirely Roman, not Hebraic.  That’s not surprising.  The Church is also Roman in its thinking, having inherited Greco-Roman Hellenism since its beginning.  In the Roman world, law is a restriction of personal freedom for the communal good.  That is to say, every man desires ultimate freedom, defined as the right to pursue any action that produces personal happiness.  Of course, Greeks and Romans recognized that this leads directly to anarchy.  Everyone will do whatever is right in his own eyes (hum, where have we heard that before?).  Law is impingement on personal freedom in order to prevent societal anarchy.  Therefore, the law should be no more stringent than necessary to keep individuals from harming each other in their pursuit of personal happiness.

This concept of the law is still with us today.  In fact, the assertion of personal rights (spelled “freedom”) over the wishes of general society is at the center of most of our legal battles about the law.  As the society collapses into full personal freedom, anarchy rises.  In the end, the one with the most power will decide what is “right.”  It’s a sad legacy.

The Hebrew view of the law is completely different.  Heschel remarks: “The soul would remain silent if it were not for the summons and reminder of the law.”[1]  Let’s place this remark within the context of the ancient Near East.  In that world the gods saturated life.  Every action had divine consequences.  The problem for ancient man was this: what do the gods really want?  Just like the Greek gods, the gods of ancient Semitic societies were fickle.  They never actually told men what to do or not do in order to gain their favor.  Until YHVH.  For the first time, the God (YHVH) actually told men what was right and what was wrong.  The “law” was the source of personal freedom because now men knew what He wanted.  The anxiety of living in a world without divine instruction was over.  Exactly opposite of the Greco-Roman world, law was freedom, not restriction.  So Heschel points out that until the law was revealed by God, we had no real voice because we did not know what was right and what was wrong.  Now we do.

This is the sense of “tutor” in Paul’s statement.  The tutor is not replaced when the Messiah becomes our way to salvation.  In fact, the tutor is all the more necessary since now the tutor shows us how to live in conjunction with the Messiah.  Replace the law?  How is that possible?  Do we really want to go back to the world of anarchy?

Topical Index:  law, tutor, Galatians 3:24

[1] Fritz A. Rothschild, “Introduction,” in Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 32.