Unfortunately, the context here doesn`t give us many clues, and that becomes clear in the next chapter, Romans 4. Once the term “works of the Torah” is introduced, evidence of what exactly Paul has in mind quickly accumulates. Ephesians 2:8-10 makes this reality even stronger. Although we are saved by grace by faith, the real reason we were created are the good works that God Himself has prepared for us in advance. The gospel of the kingdom of God provides the reasons why works are necessary: the most important is to prepare ourselves to live in the kingdom of God. In 3:28, Paul repeats his thesis that “a man is justified by faith without the works of the Torah.” To support this, he asks rhetorically: “Or is God only the God of the Jews? Is he not also the God of the pagans? yes, also of the Gentiles” (3:29). The works of the Torah” must therefore be something characteristic of Jews rather than Gentiles. If Paul has anything specific in mind here, it is probably the ceremonial components of the Torah (circumcision, dietary laws, festive laws) that are characteristic of Jews. They would not be the moral components of the Torah, since even the pagans wrote them on their hearts (2:15) and therefore do them “naturally” (2:14).1 Our hypothesis that Paul primarily has in mind the ceremonial elements of the Torah through the “works of the Torah” is thus confirmed by the discussion of circumcision in the Romans.
It is also confirmed by the discussion of circumcision in Galatians. A Catholic can be perfectly happy when he says that “the works of the Torah” (including works of love) are not necessary to be justified because the Council of Trent, the official Catholic response to the Protestant reformers, says: “Everything that precedes justification, whether faith or works, deserves the grace of justification. For if it is by grace, it is no longer by works. Otherwise, as the apostle says, grace is no longer grace. 6 Trent thus teaches that nothing deserves justification before justification, including works (of any kind). Dr. R.C. Sproul writes in his commentary on Rome: “If we keep the law, we know that it will not justify us.
We know that we can never go to heaven because of our works, because the law reveals our weaknesses. Over the past two months, we have long and seriously examined the reality of human sin. The question for us now is whether we really believe that none of our work is good enough to save us. If we don`t believe that, we don`t believe in the gospel. We must therefore turn to exegesis and evidence to determine whether the “(moral) work of the Torah” is contained in Paul`s phrase “works of the Torah.” There are a number of very strong arguments for the idea that they are not: 1. One piece of evidence we mentioned earlier comes from outside the Bible. Recent archaeological and linguistic studies have shown that in first-century Judaism, the term “works of the Torah” was a technical term for actions that served as Jewish identity characteristics (i.e., “works of the Torah”). ceremonial works) that indicated their membership in the Jewish covenant, as opposed to those who were not.5 On the one hand, there is the implication that a person does not receive the Spirit through the works of the law, and on the other hand, there is the clear statement in Acts 5:32 that the Spirit is given only to those who obey God—those who follow His law. As with the apparent discrepancy between Galatians 2:16 and Romans 2:13, these statements are easily corrected if we separate the means by which something is achieved from the requirements. Thus, the term “works of the Torah” is older than Paul and a term he borrowed from the Jewish vocabulary of his time (which is why he must discuss it with the peoples of the Romans and Galatians because they already used the term).
And as I said, his first occurrence in Paul is Romans 3:20. Prior to this point in Romans, the term ergon (“work” or “deed”) and its related words were found only in 2:6, 7, and 15. At no point does the term indicate what Paul has in mind here. Those things that specifically set you apart as a Jew. In Galatians 2, Paul begins to discuss how “you” Peter, although “you” live like a Jew, behave like a Gentile. and emphasizes his hypocrisy of obeying dietary laws and no longer eating with pagans. In the next verse (2:15), he identifies with Peter and says, “We Jews by nature, and not sinners of the `Gentiles,` know that a person is not justified by the works of the law `except` by the faith of the Messiah Jesus. Paul is a Jew and he followed the law, the law was a temporary disposition until faith came, but now the Spirit has been poured out and there is no need for the wisdom of the law, and the Spirit has gone to the Gentiles, so there is no need for the law that once distinguished Israel from the nations. and so for Paul, although the law does not contradict the promise, the problem is that there is now a new people of God and Peter should not have stopped eating with the Gentiles, and the Galatians are also not to take circumcision upon them to be justified, but they already have the Holy Spirit promised.
I`m sorry it`s a vomit of words, but a deep look at the first half of the Romans and Glanatians will show that what is at the heart of the complete sentences of the Law is the observance of the Torah and not a good work.