Paul now moves to his understanding of what it is which puts a person right with God. What he says in 2: 15-16 comes right out of his own experience. Paul's years of following the Jewish Law scrupulously had not put him right with God, in fact, had turned him into a persecutor of Jesus Christ. Only God's direct and loving intervention, through Jesus Christ, in Paul's life, which Paul had done nothing to deserve, had brought Paul into a state of reconciliation with God. 'Yet we know that a person is put right with God only through faith in Jesus Christ, never by doing what the Law requires ... For no one is put right with God by doing what the Law requires.' His argument in 2: 17-18 means that both Peter and he had found salvation in Jesus Christ and not in the Law, and so were no different from the Gentiles who were also finding salvation outside the Law. Paul's thought is moving towards the great truth that he states in 3:28. In the eyes of God, there are no Jews or Greeks, men or women, those who follow the Law and those who do not; there are only sinful human beings who are all offered salvation in Jesus Christ, through God's loving grace. For Peter or Paul to try to force the Gentiles to follow the Law which had not brought salvation to them themselves, was not only absurd but sinful. In 2: 19-20 Paul shows what he did learn from the Law and that was the fact of his own sinfulness, from which the Law could not save him. He was saved from the power of sin only by Jesus Christ. He describes his conversion experience as being the death of his old self, as if everything belonging to his old life had been crucified, to be replaced by a new self, a Christ-like self, Christ himself actually living in Paul.

2:21 finishes off his argument by a refusal to reject the gift of grace which God had given him, and the bold comment that if the Law could put a person right with God, then it would mean that Christ had died for nothing!

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