“Though Christ has redeemed us from the ‘curse of the law,’ yet not from the command of it, but still we are under the law to Christ. When the Saviour, in His sermon on the Mount, expounded the moral law, and vindicated it from the corrupt glosses with which the scribes and Pharisees had broken it (Matt. V. 19), He did in effect renew the tables, and make them like the first, that is reduce the law to its primitive sense and intention.” (Matthew Henry).
“Some speak as if the servant were greater than the Master, and the disciple above his Lord; as if the Lord Jesus honoured the law, and His people were to set it aside; as if He fulfilled it for us, that we might not need to fulfil it; as if He kept it, not that we might keep it, but something else in its stead, they know not what. The plain truth is, we must either keep it or break it. Which of these men ought to do let those answer who speak of the believer having nothing more to do with the law. There is no midway. If it be not a saint’s duty to keep the law, he may break it at pleasure, and go on sinning because grace abounds.
“The word duty is objected to as inconsistent with the liberty of forgiveness and sonship. Foolish and idle cavil! What is duty? It is a thing due by me to God; that line of conduct which I owe to God. And do these objectors mean to say that, because God redeemed us from the curse of the law, therefore we owe Him nothing, we have no duty now to Him? Has not redemption rather made us doubly debtors? We owe Him more than ever, and we owe His holy law more than ever; more honour, more obedience. Duty has been doubled, not cancelled, by our being delivered from the law; he who says that duty has ceased, because deliverance has come, knows nothing of duty or law, or deliverance. The greatest of all debtors in the universe is the redeemed man. What a strange sense of gratitude these men must have that, because love cancelled the penalty of law, and turned away its wrath, therefore reverence and obedience to that law are no longer due. Is terror in their estimation the only foundation of duty; and when love comes in and terror ceases, does duty become a bondage?
“No, they may say, but there is something higher than duty, there is privilege; it is that we contend for. I answer, the privilege of what? Of obeying the law? That they cannot do with; for they are no longer under the law, but under grace. What privilege them? Or imitating Christ? Be it so. But can we imitate Him Whose life was one great law-fulfilling without keeping the law? What privilege, again we ask? Of doing the will of God. Be it so. And what is law but the revealed will of God? And has our free forgiveness released us from the privilege of conformity to the revealed will of God?
“But what do they mean by thus rejecting the word duty and contending for that of privilege? Privilege is not something distinct from duty, nor at variance with duty; but it is duty and something more! It is duty influenced by higher motives, duty uncompelled by terror or suspense. In privilege the duty is all there, but there is something superadded, in the shape of motive and relationship, which exalts and ennobles duty. It is my duty to obey government; it is my privilege to obey my parents. But in the latter case is duty gone because privilege has come in? Or has not the loving relationship between parent and child only intensified the duty by superadding the privilege, and sweetening the obedience by mutual love? ‘The love of Christ constraineth.’ There is something more than both duty and privilege added.” (Andrew Bonar).
“Christ redeems us from the curse of the law, not from the command of it. He saves us from the wrath of God, not from His government, Gal. III, 13, 14; Rom. VIII, 3, 4. Had it been otherwise, so firm and indissoluble is the connection between our duty and our felicity, that the sovereign Ruler had been eternally injured, and we not advantaged. Were we to have been set free from the preceptive obligation of God’s holy law, then most of all from that most fundamental precept, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, soul, mind and strength’ (Mark XII, 30). . . . Redeemed from loving God! What a monstrous thought!
“When, therefore, our Lord Jesus Christ was to redeem us from the curse of the law, it was that the promised spirit might be given to us (Gal. III, 13, 14), who should write the law in our hearts, (Jer. XXXI, 33; Ezek. XXXVI, 27); fulfil the righteousness of it in us, by causing us to walk after His dictates, according to that law; regenerating us; begetting us after God’s image, and making us partakers of a God-like nature. So we through the law become dead to the malediction and curse of it, that we may live to God more devoted lives than ever (Gal. II, 19).”
by John Howe (Puritan Divine).