Galatians 1:7 (Galatians (NIGTC)): Paul himself had for long sought justification before God by his observance of the Jewish law, until his Damascus-road experience taught him the fruitlessness of such a quest and the bankruptcy of the way of law-keeping as a means of getting right with God. The assurance of ultimate acceptance by God, which could never be his while he lived under law, he received on the spot when he yielded submission to the risen Christ. On the spot, too, he realized that the law, to which he had devoted all his gifts and resources, had not been able to prevent him from pursuing the sinful course (as he now knew it to be) of persecuting the church of God (cf. v 13); the law had not been able to show him that the course was sinful. The law, he says later, ‘was added because of transgressions’ (3:19), i.e. to bring transgressions into the open and even to stimulate their commission; and in his personal experience this was true in a special sense: it was his devotion to the law that led him into the sin of sins—persecuting the followers of Christ. He himself knew the joyful sense of release from legal bondage when he placed his faith in Christ, and he desired the same release for his fellow-Jews; but the Gentiles, who had come to faith in Christ and experienced his saving grace without ever having lived under Jewish law, should now wish to assume the yoke of that law was a perversion of all reasonable order.
The New International Greek Commentary Galatians. A commentary on the Greek Text.