Yes the law was to demonstrate that people needed the Messiah

Whatever else you can say about the Lord, He's a marketing genius. "I'll impose all these arbitrary rules on you, specifically aimed at making it impossible to follow them all, and then I'll offer you a new faith-based product in which following these rules is not the prerequisite for salvation." That's right up there with "New Windows 95 doesn't restrict you to 8.3 filenames" in the arena of selling solutions to problems the seller created in the first place.

Peter