"… for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Cor. 3:6b).
Speaking of the old and new covenants, Paul says, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The Mosaic covenant was a “ministry of death” because the “law was not an inward principle or power,” Hodge explains. “It held up the rule of duty to which men were to be conformed, but it could not impart the disposition or ability to obey.… On the other hand, the Gospel is spiritual.… It is the power of God, Romans 1:6; the organ through which the Spirit works in giving life to the soul.”
Paul’s presentation of the Mosaic covenant makes it seem like something entirely legal, a covenant of works that demands perfect obedience. We know that the law kills, or condemns, because it reveals man’s inability to be righteous. This is why Paul calls the law the ministration of death or condemnation. It cannot save. Yet, in Romans 3:21–31, 4, and Galatians 3, Paul teaches that the plan of salvation has been the same from the beginning, that Christ atoned for sins committed under the old covenant, that men were saved then by faith in the promise, just as they are today. How then can Paul say the Mosaic covenant imparted death when, in some aspects, it revealed the Gospel? “To reconcile these apparently conflicting representations it must be remembered that Mosaic economy was designed to accomplish different objects, and is therefore present in Scripture under different aspects,” Hodge wrote. “What, therefore, is true of it under one aspect, is not true under another.” In the sense that it was a re-enactment of the covenant of works and a national covenant that demanded national obedience, it brought condemnation. But it also contained a revelation of the Gospel in its priesthood and sacrificial system as types of the coming Redeemer. Those who trusted in the promise of the coming Redeemer, to which the sacrificial system pointed, were saved. This was a matter of faith and not of works. Thus Moses wrote of Christ (John 5:46), and Romans 3:21 tells us that the law and the prophets witnessed of faith.
When, therefore, Paul spoke of the law as being a ministry of death, he was not overlooking the fact that Old Testament believers were saved by faith. But he was referring to the law under its legal aspect in which it condemns.
Read Romans 4 and Galatians 4:19–25. How do these passages prove that under the Mosaic covenant people were saved through faith and not works? What, then, was the purpose of the law as Paul refers to it in 2 Corinthians? Why is it hopeless to trust in works of the law for salvation? Are you trusting in works or in Jesus Christ?
