John Owen was a master of distinguishing between Law and Gospel, yet he never underestimated the goodness and beauty of the Law despite its apparent weakness. The quote below is one of the clearest and most precise expressions of the correlation of both the Law’s goodness and its inability to save sinners:
‘The law is holy,’ but it cannot make them holy who have made themselves unholy; it is ‘just,’ but it cannot make them so, – it cannot justify them whom it doth condemn; it is ‘good,’ but it can do them no good, as unto their deliverance from the power of sin.
-John Owen, Sin and Grace: Of the Dominion of Sin and Grace, p. 544
That is the classic Reformed position on the Law in relation to salvation: It is holy, but it cannot make a sinner holy; it is righteous and/or just, but it cannot justify the sinner; it is good, but it cannot make something that is bad good. In other words, the weakness of the Law is not actually the Law’s weakness – it is our weakness in relation to it. The Law is, as the Apostle Paul puts it, ‘weakened by the flesh.’
Hence the first use of the Law: to drive us to Christ and his gospel.
- 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).
- Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure (Romans 7:13)