Before Christ came, all men had was the law. Yes you could still believe God and have it counted for righteousness but the law itself offered little in the way of hope. It was an unkeepable list of rules and every time you broke a rule, you had to offer sacrifice to atone for the rule being broken. The law could not be kept. The Jews undoubtedly looked at the law and felt so inferior. In a sense that was the point: to show the Jews they could not meet God’s standard on their own. However, with the impossible comes a lack of hope. The hope of all the earth….is Christ.