How to Keep the Law

So there's the active obedience of Christ.  He followed rules.  He did what He was supposed to do.  And there's the passive obedience of Christ.  He took the punishment that the law demanded. 

You want to make God happy with how you obey the law?  You can try and try and try.  You can do your darnedest to follow the rules.  You might even do a bang-up job of it!  But you're not going to do it absolutely totally perfectly, every single day of your life.  After all, there was that naughtiness one day when you were learning to crawl, which you might not remember, but your mom will.  And what does the law demand for that?  Yup, "the wages of sin is death." 

So the only way to keep the law would be to spend eternity in hell, if only in payment for those occasional slip-ups.  If you don't suffer eternally, then you didn't do what the law demanded, did you?  But if you have to spend eternity in hell to fulfill the law's demands, then you can't enjoy God's company in heaven, because you're in hell, and .... oh ... phooey, ... there's just no way to do it!

Exactly.

That's just how STUCK we are when we want to earn heaven.  It's an impossibility, an inescapable conundrum.   

But with God, all things are possible.   Who will set me free from this body of death?  Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in our Lord Jesus Christ! 



Keeping the law. 
It's not just about doing everything right. 
It's mainly about living through the punishment.