+I. The state in which the apostle describes himself to be.+--"I am dead to the law." Not the moral law of God. Every rational creature in the universe is under its dominion, the believer as well as others. He must escape from existence before he can escape from the law of God. The apostle means he is dead to it as a covenant between God and himself. There still stands the law before him in all its primitive authority, purity, and majesty; he honours it and strives to obey it, and often rejoices in the thought that the time will come when he shall have his soul in a state of perfect conformity to it, but this is all. Its life-giving, death-bringing powers are utterly at an end, and he knows they are at an end. He is dead to all hope from the law, dead to all expectation of heaven or of salvation from it. He builds no more hope on his obedience to it than as though the law had ceased to exist, and no more fear has he of condemnation from it. The believer, dead to the legal covenant, rests from it. The connection between him and it is over, and with it are over the feelings within him, the painful, perturbing, apprehensive, slavish feelings arising out of it. +II. The means whereby the apostle has been brought into the state he describes.+--"I through the law am dead to the law." Suppose a man anxious to pass from one country to another, from a dangerous and wretched country to a safe and happy one. Directly in his road stands a mountain which he cannot pass over, and which he at first imagines he can without much difficulty climb. He tries, but scarcely has he begun to breast it when a precipice stops him. He descends and tries again in another direction. There another precipice or some other obstacle arrests his course; and still ever as he begins his ascent he is baffled, and the little way he contrives to mount serves only to show him more and more of the prodigious height of the mountain, and its stern, rugged, impassable character. At last, wearied and worn, heart-sick with labour and disappointment, and thoroughly convinced that no efforts of his can carry him over, he lies down at the mountain's foot in utter despair, longing still to be on the other side, but making not another movement to get there. Now ask him as he lies exhausted on the ground what has occasioned his torpor and despair; he will say that mountain itself: its situation between him and the land of his desires, and its inaccessible heights and magnitude. So stands the law of God between the Christian and the land he longs for. The impossibility of making our way to God by means of the law arises from the extent of its requirements, and the unbending, inexorable character of its denunciations. We can do nothing but die to it, sink down before this broad, high, terrific mountain in utter despair. While through the law the believer dies to all hope from the law, through the cross of Christ he also dies to all apprehension from it.