Consider Abraham, Paul tells us. He was a friend of God, was he not, long before Moses and the Law? Hence, the Law was never really necessary to God’s plan, only faith was—the faith that Abraham had when he believed (better, trusted) in God (Gen. 15:6). The Law came much later and its role, rather, was (as I mentioned above) to expose the depth of sin, or, as he puts it in Galatians 4:1–7, to act as temporary trustee for God’s people until Jesus came. Then the Law could step aside and we could be released from the Law’s Hagarlike bondage.
