Should We Avoid Preaching the Law? - A Quote

A key element of biblical teaching that's absent from our churches today is expositional teaching on the Law, the Torah. Possibly one of the causes of this want of the “whole council of God” is that of the false dichotomy—shall we preach Christ and His New Covenant, or shall we commit our preaching to that which has passed away? In other words, the either-or proposition erroneously leads our churches to decide between preaching Law or Gospel.

 This dichotomy is false in that it ignores the Law’s inspired profit to us even today (2 Tim 3:16–17) and that it fails to divine part of God’s intent in the Law—to lead His people to the glories of the Gospel. Without the Law, the good news has no meaning.

 Consider this from Bridges:

[The Law’s] cognizance of every thought, imagination, desire, word, and work, and its uncompromising demand of absolute and uninterrupted obedience, upon pain of its everlasting penalty—convince the heart of its guilt, defilement, and wretchedness, and leave the sinner without excuse and without help; under the frown of an holy and angry God; prepared to welcome a Saviour, and lost forever without him. Thus is the prayer—" God be merciful to me a sinner"—forced even from him, whose external deportment had been, " touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless" He now sees in himself the very character of sinfulness and misery to which the Gospel addresses itself; and, stretching out the hand of desire and faith, he receives the free gift of Christ. And now he feels the advantage of the law too well, to be willing, with the Antinomian, to cast it off, because it has lost its justifying power. For its covenant form enlarges his apprehension of the necessity, character, and excellency of the gospel!

--Charles Bridges, The Christian Ministry. Kindle Edition. 

 The Law, when properly preached, leads our people away from legalistic living, not towards it.