NOTES for Gal 5:4-5
In gospel times people viewed the Torah, the Law, differently. For the majority of believing Jews the Torah was a kind of moral and legal code that had to be accepted and fulfilled unconditionally. It was taken for granted that this code was fulfillable. And at the level to which the religious majority limited itself, there were indeed no unsolvable problems with fulfilling the Torah. Of course, it required effort, but sincerely religious people usually do not spare such effort. Having made the effort and, as it seemed to them, fulfilled the Torah to the end, such people naturally considered themselves righteous.
Indeed, from their own point of view, the point of view of a religious person, they had nothing for which to reproach themselves. What else could God demand of them? He had set out His demands in the Torah, and they had fulfilled it. Yet in those days there was also another view of the Torah and spiritual life, a view already, in essence, going beyond traditional Jewish religiosity and beyond any religiosity in general. In this case the issue was the inner Torah, the Torah perceived not as a legal or moral code, but as revelation of God's will.
God's will in the most literal sense. In the sense of God's intentions directed toward the human being. Intentions that must determine a person's whole spiritual life, and his whole life in general. They must become the spiritual core that alone can make a person righteous, if it determines his life wholly. Speaking of the Torah, Paul often contrasts the inner Torah with the outer. The matter is not that he is a principled opponent of every religiosity. He simply knows too well from his own experience that religion has never made anyone righteous, and cannot do so.
A religious person can do much for God. But in spiritual life the main thing is not to do, but to be. What is needed is not a set of good and pious deeds, but a qualitative change of life. Here religion proves powerless, for it changes a person from the outside, through the norms and rules it offers. True changes always happen from within. Here the inner Torah is needed, but this is exactly what fallen man is unable to bring to fullness.
Original sin gets in the way. And the apostle also understands this perfectly: he himself tried to live this way and suffered complete failure, which he himself describes quite openly in the Letter to the Romans. Only hope remains in that breath of God, the breath of the Kingdom, which alone can make a person righteous. Of course, this is an admission of one's own spiritual insufficiency. But it is better to admit the obvious and acquire the fullness of the life of the Kingdom than to put a good face on a bad game and lose everything.