Sometimes when doctors have done their very best for a patient suffering with great injuries or the painful outcome of invasive surgery, the patient seems to experience a cascade of crises, so that doctors just get one crisis resolved with medication or therapy, when the thing that resolves the previous crisis triggers another worse crisis. And so it goes. Those who seek to become right in the sight of God by the law face the same series of cascading crises. Just when they think they have this or that law well under control several others are found to be transgressed. For example, when we are trying to battle gluttony and take control of our eating habits, we may establish the rule that we cannot snack, but may eat only at specific meal times. How easily, however, we manage to be just as glutinous, packing away extra food at regular meal times. Our inability to snack may also make us irritable and uncooperative with others, and so we find that we are transgressing the boundaries of civil and pleasant behavior. Worst of all, if we manage to keep one little law at least externally, such as "thou shalt not snack" we have the deluded opinion that we have managed to get the law under our control. However, finally we may fall into pride over against God, annihilating the first commandment, because we have made ourselves our own god.

The law is like the manure pit that was on my parent's poultry farm. It was an enormous concrete swimming pool in which no one would desire to swim. It could fill up with chicken manure for months, but sooner or later it had to be emptied. It required a never ending cycle of spreading manure. The job was never done. So it is that the law is a never ending task. The manure tank is never permanently emptied. We often feel that way, as we should, that the law puts us in a never ending battle. Luther, of course, is much classier, not to mention cleaner, in his description of the impossibility of fulfilling the law, referring as he does to the stories of classical literature from Homer and Horace. The Roman author, Horace, paints the picture of carrying water in a sieve as an illustration of futility.