Charles Spurgeon: Explain the Ten Commandments and obey the divine injunction: show my people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins. Open up the spirituality of the law as our Lord did, and show how it is broken by evil thoughts, intents, and imaginations. By this means many sinners will be pricked in their hearts.

John Calvin: We are certainly under the same obligation as they were; for there cannot be a doubt that the claim of absolute perfection which God made for His Law is perpetually in force.

John Wesley: When speaking of those who didn't use the Law as a school-master, Wesley said, "All this proceeds from the deepest ignorance of the nature of the properties and use of the Law. And, proves that those who act thus either know not Christ, are strangers to living faith, or are at least but babes in Christ, and as such are unskilled in the word of righteousness."

Martin Luther: The first duty of the gospel preacher is to declare God's Law and show the nature of sin. Why? Because it will act as a schoolmaster and bring him to everlasting life which is in Jesus Christ.

D.L. Moody: This is what God gives us the Law for, to show us ourselves and our true colors.

Matthew Henry: There is no way of coming to that knowledge of sin which is necessary to repentance, but by comparing our hearts and lives by the Law.

John Newton: (who penned the words to Amazing Grace) The correct understanding of the harmony between law and grace is to preserve oneself from being entangled by errors on the right hand and on the left.

John Bunyan: The man who does not know the nature of the Law cannot know the nature of sin. And he who does not know the nature of sin cannot know the nature of the Savior.

Augustine: Through the Law, God opens man's eyes so that he sees his helplessness and by faith takes refuge to His mercy and is healed. The Law was given in order that we might seek grace, grace was given in order that we might fulfill the Law.

Jonathan Edwards: What good is it to have godly principles yet not know them? Why should God reveal His mind to us if we don't care enough to know what it is? Yet the only way we can know whether we are sinning is by knowing His moral law: By the law is the knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:20).

Spurgeon: I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the Law. The Law is the needle, and you cannot draw the silken thread of the gospel through a man's heart unless you first send the needle of the Law to make way for it. If men do not understand the Law, they will not feel they are sinners. And if they are not consciously sinners, they will never value the sin offering. There is no healing a man till the Law has wounded him, no making him alive till the Law has slain him.

John Wesley: Therefore I cannot spare the Law one moment, no more than I can spare Christ, seeing I now want it as much to keep me to Christ, as I ever wanted it to bring me to Him. Otherwise this evil heart of unbelief would immediately depart from the living God. Indeed each is continually sending me to the other the Law to Christ, and Christ to the Law.

Martin Luther: The Law and the gospel are given to the end that we may learn to know both how guilty we are, and to what again we should return.

General William Booth: The chief danger of the Twentieth Century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God. . . . and heaven without hell.

A.W. Pink: The rest of the scriptures are but a commentary on the Ten Commandments, either exciting us to obedience by arguments, alluring us by promises, or restraining us from transgressions by threatenings. Rightly understood, the precepts of the New Testament are but explications, amplifications and applications of the Ten Commandments.

H.A. Ironside: But that law so terrible to the sinner, is a law of liberty to the regenerated one, because it commands the very behavior in which the one born of God finds his joy and delight.

Leon Morris: The law of Moses is not a religion of salvation, it is the categorical imperative of God by which men are accused and exposed as sinners.

Walter Kaiser Jr.: "The classic theme of all truly evangelical theology is the relationship of Law and Gospel. In fact, so critical is a proper statement of this relationship. . . . that it can become one of the best ways to test both the greatness and the effectiveness of a truly biblical or evangelical theology."

John MacArthur: Evangelism must take the sinner and measure him against the perfect law of God so he can see his deficiency. A gospel that deals only with human need, only with human feelings, only with human problems, lacks the true balance. That is why churches are full of people whose lives are essentially unchanged after their supposed conversion. Most of these people, I am convinced, are unregenerate and grievously misled. . . . We need to adjust our presentation of the gospel. We cannot dismiss the fact that God hates sin and punishes sinners with eternal torment. How can we begin a gospel presentation by telling people on their way to hell that God has a wonderful plan for their lives? Scripture says, "God is angry with the wicked every day" (Ps. 7:11, KJV).

Michael Horton: Here indeed is a revelation of man's final sin, which Luther defined as the unwillingness to admit that he is a sinner.

Kay Arthur: The Old Covenant is the Law which came by Moses, and, believe it or not, it plays a vital role in bringing a man or woman to Christ. If we would use it more, we would probably not have so many false professions of salvation.

Alexander Maclaren on Romans 3:19-26: Every word of God, whether promise, or doctrine, or specific command, has in it some element bearing on conduct. God reveals nothing only in order that we may know, but that, knowing, we may do and be what is pleasing in His sight. All His words are law. But Paul sets forth another view of its purpose here; namely, to drive home to men's consciences the conviction of sin. That is not the only purpose, for God reveals duty primarily in order that men may do it, and His law is meant to be obeyed. But, failing obedience, this second purpose comes into action, and His law is a swift witness against sin. The more clearly we know our duty, the more poignant will be our consciousness of failure. The light which shines which shows the path of right, shines to show our deviations from it. And that conviction of sin, which it was the very purpose of all the previous revelation to produce, is a merciful gift; for, as the Apostle implies, it is the prerequisite to the faith which saves.

Donald Grey Barnhouse on Romans 3:20: Here we meet by far the most difficult Divine utterance for the human heart to yield to that we have met in the entire epistle. Even those without law Gentiles that have not the law (of Moses Rom. 2:14) we find throughout history so many committed to their ideas of what is right, that they will desperately fight for their convictions. . . . It is much easier to detach a Chinese from the analects of Confucius and bring him to a knowledge of Christ, than it is to detach some people, born within the sphere of Christendom, from their hope of salvation by the golden rule. They are astonished when you tell them that Christ did not give them the golden rule as a formula for salvation, but as a means of revealing to man that he is fundamentally crooked (sinful, i.e., full of sin) and that therefore he needed a power outside himself. . . . The law was a standard that was given in order to convince men of their own hopeless incapacity, so that they might come to God in grace. The law of God is like a mirror. Now the purpose is to reveal to you that your face is dirty, but the purpose of a mirror is not to wash your face. When you look in a mirror and find that your face is dirty, you do not then reach to take the mirror off the wall and attempt to rub it on your face as a cleansing agent. The purpose of the mirror is to drive you to the water. Any other use of the mirror is plain folly. It is by the straight edge of the law of God, whether expressed by Moses or reaffirmed by our Lord Himself, that man may know how crooked he really is, and may turn from the folly of self effort to the reality of the life of faith in Christ. This new life furnishes us with power which we can never have of ourselves, and which will act within us. May God slay us with the law, in order that we might be raised from the dead by His gospel. For this is the true relationship between the two. Before God can ever give us the gospel, He must slay us with the law. The gospel is the power of resurrection; the law is the power of condemnation; and when the two are put together, they then serve their proper purpose.

Jamieson, Fausset, Brown on Romans 3:20: How broad and how deep does the Apostle in this section lay the foundations of his great doctrine of justification by free grace in the disorder of man's whole nature, the consequent universality of human guilt, the condemnation, by reason of the breach of divine law, of the whole world, and the impossibility of justification before God by obedience to that divine law! Only when these humiliating conclusions are accepted and felt, are we in a condition to appreciate and embrace the grace, next to be opened up. It is that which ascertains what sin is, shows how men have deviated from its righteous demands, and sentences them to death because they have broken it.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones: So that, finally, we can put it like this. The law was never given to save man, but it was given as a school master to bring him to the Savior. The whole object and purpose of the law is to show that man can never save himself. Once he has understood the law and its spiritual meaning and content he knows that he cannot keep it. He is undone. . . . It shows us our utter helplessness and hopelessness, and thereby it becomes our school master to lead us to Christ, the only one who by the grace of God can save us, and deliver us, and reconcile us to God, and make us safe for all eternity.

Alexander Mclaren: The voice that spoke from Sinai reverberates in all lands. . . . This voice like a trumpet on that day, waxes louder and louder as the years roll. Whose voice was it? The only answer explaining the supreme purity of the commandments, and their immortal freshness, is found in the first sentence of this paragraph, God spake all these words.

Gleason Archer: It was only the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the law as a system of merit-earning and self-justification which is rejected in Romans 3 and Galatians 3 (and related passages). As for the Decalogue (Ex. 20:1-17), the whole basis of its sanctions is stated to be God's act of redemption by grace (I am the Lord thy God, who wrought thee out of. . . . bondage).

R.C. Sproul: He (Chemnintz) insists that the Christian church make a clear distinction between Law and gospel, but not a separation! If we see the Law of God as separated from the gospel of God, we would see these two ideas as being intrinsically and fundamentally opposed one to another.

Now, if you confuse the two ideas: Law and gospel, then what happens is you either eliminate the Law by reducing it to a simple expression of the gospel, or you eliminate the gospel by making it a new law. So, you have to distinguish between them. And what Cheminitz understood as the two great distortions of understanding Christian truth that have plagued the church not just from the first century, but from the garden of Eden, have been the distortions of legalism and antinominism. Legalism, in its simplest definition, is that error, indeed not just an error, but rank and deadly heresy that teaches that people can be saved through their own acts of righteousness, that people may be saved legally through performing the works of the Law.

Antinomianism is the heresy that says, because we are not saved by the Law, but by the gospel, not by merit, but by grace, not by works, but by faith, that therefore the Christian life has nothing to do with law, nothing to do with obedience. That's antinomianism. And so, what Cheminitz and Luther were concerned about was this, that if you try to have the gospel in isolation from the Law, you are going to end somehow in antinominism. If you try to have the Law without the gospel, you are going to end in legalism. Cheminitz makes the startling observation that the whole struggle of Israel in history, was the struggle over an understanding of the relationship between these two things, and he starts with Cain and Abel as exhibit A; trying to answer the question, Why was it that Abel's sacrifice was accepted by God, and Cain's wasn't? The answer that Cheminitz gives to that question is, because Abel made his offering by faith, which meant, even in the making of the offering of worship and of praise before God, he came in a spirit of humility; understanding that the only way even this offering would be acceptable to God would be on the basis of divine grace and mercy. On the other hand, Cain was trusting in his performance. (The offering Cain brought represented the work of his own hands.) It's not by accident that the two greatest leaders of the sixteenth century reformation, both Luther and Calvin, were both deeply trained students in secular law before they embarked on a career in theology. They were students of jurisprudence, and they had a keen eye for the Old Testament Law, and they saw what the Law was trying to show them, their own inadequacy.

D. A. Carson: If you begin (presenting the gospel) with a massive view of God; of His holiness, of the sheer ugliness and odiousness of sin, and of the terrors of judgment, then preaching justification brings immense relief! And with the relief, a sense of gratitude from which a great deal of Christian ethics springs. There is a tremendous amount of Christian ethic that springs from the sheer gratitude to the grace of God. If on the other hand you barely mention Law, or God, or judgment, or terror, or hell, and then you preach justification, justification is very easily confused with a cheap grace decisionism. Then afterwards, you feel you have to whip people into shape with lots of talk about commitment. The fact that God spends two thousand years from Abraham to the cross, almost a millennium and a half from Sinai to the cross, to teach the function of Law, to bring about a sense corporally in the people of God of the nature of transgression, and of the futility of human effort, and the critical importance of recognizing how lost we are. So, if then we now start evangelizing without presupposing any of that, or without people knowing any of that, we just dive right into a Jesus who meets your needs, however you define your needs, then it's not too surprising we start having distorted views on justification, and a lot of other things as well." "If all we learn from chapter three of Galatians is the vastness of the fact that the Law prepares the way for the gospel, but do not grasp how and why it prepares the way, we will not apply it to people's lives appropriately. And, then we will end up with a cheap gospel, and then we will end up with such a diluted justification that there will be tremendous pressures to redefine justification, which is precisely what is going on now.

Erwin W. Lutzer: Christ's answer to legalism is that external obedience to the moral law must be coupled with a corresponding inner attitude of love and honesty. Christ's teaching was not intended to abrogate obedience to the moral law, but to add to its intended spirit.

Erwin W. Lutzer: I always start at Sinai before I take them to the cross!

Noah Webster: Moral 1. Relating to the practice, manners or conduct of men as social beings in relation to each other, and with reference to right and wrong. The word moral is applicable to actions that are good or evil, virtuous or vicious, and has reference to the law of God as the standard by which their character is to be determined.

Ravi Zacharias: Without God, there is no moral law.