Because the law worketh wrath
Not the wrath of man, though that is sometimes stirred up through
the prohibitions of the law, to which the carnal mind of man is
enmity, but the wrath of God the law is so far from justifying
sinners, that it curses and condemns them; and when it comes into
the heart and is let into the conscience of a sinner, it fills
with terrible apprehensions of the wrath of God, and a fearful
looking for of his judgment and fiery indignation:
for where no law is, there is no transgression;
(hrybe alw hwum al)
(wnyav) F18; a
sort of a proverbial expression: had the law of Moses not been
given, there was the law of nature which sin is a transgression
of; but the law of Moses was added for the better discovery and
detection of sin, which would not have been so manifest without
it, and which may be the apostle's sense; that where there is no
law, there is no knowledge of any transgression; and so the
Ethiopic version reads the words, "if the law had not come, there
would have been none who would have known sin"; but the law is
come, and there is a law by which is the knowledge of sin, and
therefore no man can be justified by it; since that convinces him
of sin, and fills him with a sense of divine wrath on account of
it.
F18 Caphtor, fol. 10. 1.