In itself, the law is righteous and its commandments are relatively simple to comprehend. In fact, unschooled and irreligious Gentiles "by nature" understand the essence of the law as well as Jews (Rom. 2:11-16). But all men - Jew and Gentile alike - are condemned by the law for their failure to obey it. Thus through the law, apart from the grace of God, comes nothing but the knowledge of sin and the outworking of death (Rom. 3:20; 4:15; 7:9-10); and thus it is the universal failure of man to obey the law of God that leads Paul to pronounce a blanket indictment on all men as sinners who fall short of God's glory (3:23). This is actually a major theme of the OT itself, though it had been long buried beneath mountains of rigorous self-determined legalism in the Judaic traditions and interpretations of the law. As a pesher exegete, Paul uses OT Psalms to pull the covers off traditional rabbinical Judaism and reveal that even the most righteous of men have always been sinners (3:19-20), and the OT examples of Abraham and David to reveal that men have always been justified by faith apart from the works of the law (4:1-7). Paul's is a startling interpretation of the Torah - warnings, judgments and all - as an expression of God's grace. To the mind accustomed to legalism or self-reliance the doctrine of salvation by faith seemed scandalous, as it seemed for so long to Martin Luther and still seems to many professing believers today. The still pertinent, still shocking revelation here is that the law is not a rigid set of commandments to be obeyed, but a guide to the way of salvation by grace through faith alone, "our tutor to bring us to Christ," as Paul states in Galatians (4:24).
All of this ties together the OT with the NT, and the teaching of Jesus with that of his apostles. Justification is and always has been by faith, and faith is more than casual intellectual assent to the proposition that God exists. The contrast between legalistic self-justification and justification by faith is expressed most visibly in Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the publican. In praying with himself and reminding himself of his own alleged good works, the Pharisee represents the dominant school of OT Judaism blinded to the grace of God and the necessity of Christ's sacrifice on the cross; while the publican (or "tax-collector"), bemoaning his sins, refusing to lift his eyes to heaven, and pleading to God for mercy, represents the NT life of faith. In what is doubtless for many a surprise ending to the parable, Jesus declares the publican rather than the Pharisee "justified" before God (Luke 18:9-14). The lesson is clear: Man cannot justify himself in his unrighteousness, but must be justified by the righteousness of God. Paul taught precisely the same to the Romans, "that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law" (3:28).
Moreover, Paul regarded his own authority - as a former Pharisee trained in the law as well as a bona-fide apostle, one to whom Christ had revealed himself personally - sufficient to unlock other "mysteries" of the gospel. Following the lead of Jesus himself, Paul adopted the revelatory exegetical style of the Qumran maskilim in pronouncing his teachings of the mysteries to the church as revelations from God himself, specific dispensational fulfillments of OT promises. One of these mysteries is mentioned in Ephesians 3:3: "He made known to me the mystery (as I have briefly written alreadly)..." An examination of the surrounding verses which open the third chapter of Ephesians discloses the nature of this mystery, that as recipients of the promises of God the Gentiles are on equal terms with Jews as candidates for salvation. In verse 1 the apostle describes himself as "the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles," and verse 7 states the mystery clearly: "that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, of the same body, and partakers of His promise through the gospel." This ground-breaking revelation, thought an impossibility for defenders of the Jewish scribal traditions, is in keeping with the lofty theological themes of Ephesians: the omnipotence of God, the riches of his grace, the unity of the church, the dispersion of spiritual gifts, and the ever-present reality of spiritual conflict with the powers of darkness. Paul, the self-styled "apostle to the Gentiles," suggests the unifying nature of the mystery when he utters the sweeping eschatological declaration in chapter 1, "that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ..." (v. 10).
Taken collectively as a definitive genre, Paul's letters place a strong emphasis on salvation through faith and the gospel to the Gentiles. Ephesians pieces these themes together in a grand appeal to spiritual unity in Jesus Christ. Thus the revelation of Gentile access to to grace is closely connected with that of salvation by grace through faith (Eph. 2:8-9). After all, if salvation cannot be attained by works, then Jews have no more inherent righteousness than Gentiles. The result is an unprecedented social equality under God and a prohibition against spiritual discrimination. By the broken body of Jesus all social, ethnic and political barriers are shattered: "For he himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation" (2:14 [see also Galatians 3:28]). But Paul takes this a step further: Since this is a new revelation for the Gentiles, his responsibility is "to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all see what is the fellowship of the mystery..." (3:8-9). To take the imperfect analogy of discrimination further, it could be argued that in advocating an aggressive program of outreach to the Gentiles to go along with a new theology of Gentile equality, Paul endorsed not only a sort of spiritual equal opportunity but something akin to affirmative action.
In addition to the disctinctively personal revelatory exegesis of Paul in his letters to the churches, the NT presents a variety of insights and hermeneutical methods used to decipher OT truth for a Jewish audience familiar with the Torah. Arising during the post-exilic period of intertestamentary Judaism, midrash was a popular form of scribal interpretation used to make the Torah sensible and practically relevant to the Jewish community. The author of Hebrews wisely makes use of midrashic techniques to appeal to a NT Jewish audience. One example of this can be seen in Hebrews 10:22, as the writer exhorts believers: "let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our