Breaking the Law

“For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” James 2:10
This is the primary reason why it’s impossible for us to be saved through keeping the Law: we have to keep all of it, all the time. The Law is like a chain, made of many links. Imagine you’re suspended by that chain over a cliff. How many links need to be broken for you to fall? Only one. In fact, it doesn’t matter if two, or five, or ten, or a hundred links are broken – just one is the difference between life and death. The Law is God’s standard of perfection, and none of us can live up to it. (This is in fact the very purpose of the Law: to show us our own inability to reach God’s righteous standard, so that we would reach out in faith for the righteousness provided for us by Jesus Christ – see Rom. 3:20, Gal. 3:24). Paul points out in the epistle to the Romans that the fault lies not with the Law, but with our own sin nature.
The word translated ‘sin’ means ‘to miss the mark’. It’s as if we have a number of arrows, and are shooting them at a target. Whether you miss the target one time out of a hundred, or a hundred times out of a hundred, you are a ‘sinner’. It might not be deliberate, but that doesn’t matter. We have failed to keep God’s Law perfectly.
What this means is that we can’t pick and choose which commandments to keep, and hope to be saved by it (e.g. by our good deeds outweighing our bad). We have two choices: to keep the Law perfectly (which no-one is able to do), or to accept by faith the righteousness God has provided through His Son.