This twenty-first verse shows that the giving of the law was to emphasize the importance of the promise. All the circumstances attending the giving of the law,—the trumpet tone, the awful voice, the quaking earth, the “fire, and blackness, and tempest,” the thunders and lightnings, the bounds about the mount, beyond which it was death to pass,—all these told that “the law worketh wrath” to “the children of disobedience.” But the very fact that the wrath which the law works comes only on the children of disobedience, proves that the law is good, and that “the man that doeth them shall live in them.” Did God wish to discourage the people?—Not by any means. The law must be kept, and the terrors of Sinai were designed to drive them back to the oath of God, which four hundred and thirty years before had been given to stand to all people in all ages as the assurance of righteousness through the crucified and ever-living Saviour. [Sidenote: All Shut Up in Prison.] Note the similarity between verses 8 and 22. “The Scripture hath concluded [that is, shut up] all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe.” “The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the Gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.” We see that the Gospel is preached by the same thing—the Scripture—that shuts men up under sin. The word “conclude” means literally “shut up,” just as is given in verse 23. Of course, a person who is shut up by the law is in prison. In human governments a criminal is shut up as soon as the law can get hold of him; God’s law is everywhere present, and always active, and, therefore, the instant a man sins he is shut up. This is the condition of all the world, “for all have sinned,” and “there is none righteous, no, not one.” Those disobedient ones to whom Christ preached in the days of Noah were “in prison.” 1 Peter 3:19, 20. But they, like all other sinners, were “prisoners of hope.” Zech. 9:12. God “hath looked down from the height of His sanctuary; from heaven did the Lord behold the earth; to hear the groaning of the prisoner; to loose those that are appointed to death.” Ps. 102:19, 20. Christ is given “for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.” Isa. 42:6, 7.