WWUTT 1766 The Promise Made by God, Part 1 (Galatians 3:15-20)

When God gave the law, he did not give a way to salvation. Galatians 3 .19 says that the law was added because of transgression. The way of salvation is through the promise, who is Christ, when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible commentary that we may be equipped for every good work in Jesus Christ our Lord. Please tell others about our ministry at www .utt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky, and greetings all. We come back to our series in the book of Galatians from a sermon series that I preached a few years ago. Today we're in Galatians 3 .15 -20. Now this sermon is going to be broken up into two parts.

We'll listen to part one today and part two tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a little bit longer, but hopefully you'll be blessed by this message where Paul talks about the promises of God and why he gave the law.

The Promise to Abraham and the Law Added Because of Transgression

So let's begin by reading our section out of the English Standard Bible. This is Galatians 3 .15 -20 in a sermon entitled Promises Made by God. The Apostle Paul writes,. To give a human example, brothers, even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified.

Now, the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your offspring, who is Christ. This is what I mean. The law which came 430 years afterward does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.

For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise, but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary.

Now, an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one. Let us pray. Our Lord, as we come to your scriptures this morning, I pray that Your Word would speak loudly to us, and however complicated the things might be to us as we're looking at them when we open up our Bible and begin to read it, may Your Spirit discern for us these things which are spiritually discerned, so that our mind may be conformed to Christ's, have the mind of Christ as Paul instructed in Philippians 2 .5, but also that we may know how great a God You are, how wonderful the blessings are that You have given to us through Your Son, that we have received the promises, the promise of eternal life, the promise of a paradise that is to come, the promise of a promised land that is better than anything here on this earth, but is a heavenly kingdom that we look forward to.

All of these promises have been given to us through Jesus Christ, which we receive by faith, and we're reminded of those things once again as we come to this text today. In the Lord Jesus' name we pray, and all God's people said, Amen.

Thank you. You may be seated. Keeping in context with what we just read, let me continue to keep reading. I'm going to start in verse 21 and go to the end of the chapter. Paul writes,. Is the law then contrary to the promises of God?

Certainly not. For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek.

There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. Now the things that we've read here in Galatians 3 verses 15 through 29, these things are complicated.

And you might even be looking at that going, I don't really quite know what this means. I'm curious to know where Gabe is going to go with this. And furthermore, how we're going to break this up into two weeks and talk about these things over two Sundays as well.

One of the things that I said that we come to understand principally through Paul's letter to the Galatians is that we are saved by faith, justified before God by faith in Christ alone and no other way.

Some Judaizers had come into the churches of Galatia and had tried to tell the Galatian Christians, hey, it's great if you follow Jesus, we believe in him too. But Jesus was a Jew. And in order to be saved, you have to not only believe in Jesus, but you have to do all these works of the law.

And the apostle Paul says, no, if that's what someone comes to you preaching, then they are teaching a different gospel and they are accursed. It is not by works of the law that we are saved. It's not even a combination of faith and works of the law.

It is by faith alone in Christ that we come to salvation. My friends, I've taught this doctrine to you as long as I have stood in this pulpit from the very first Sunday that I ever delivered a message in these walls, I have said to you that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone and no other way.

But it is through this study of Galatians that I have come to understand even more deeply that we are justified by faith alone. I've believed it for many years. I've preached it to you for years. And yet I have come to an understanding of this more firmly because of this study in Galatians than any other book of the Bible that I have studied.

Furthermore, I have said to you that salvation by grace through faith is not just a New Testament concept. It's also Old Testament. Whether we're talking about a person in the Old Testament or we're talking about a person in the New Testament, we have always been saved by grace through faith.

That has never been different. Even in the giving of the law in the Old Testament, salvation did not come by the keeping of the law. It was still by grace through faith. It was by the grace of God through faith in a coming promise, a Messiah that was to come.

Whereas we on this side of the cross, we're looking back on the promise that has been given and been fulfilled through Jesus Christ. So on this side of the cross, we're looking back at what's been accomplished through Christ.

Before the cross, they were looking toward what was going to happen through Christ. But either way, salvation has still been by grace through faith. Now I've taught you that, but we haven't really gone through a particular text that illustrates that.

That salvation was by grace through faith even in an Old Testament covenant. And we're going to examine that today as we come to Galatians chapter 3, understanding that salvation is by grace through faith before the cross or after the cross.

That's the only way salvation has ever been. And Paul lays that principle out here with the Galatians. He shows to them, look guys, salvation's never been by the keeping of the law. Ever. It wasn't before Christ.

It isn't now, even after all of these things that Christ has accomplished. And he proves this to them by taking them back to the Old Testament and showing them the gospel as it was first preached to Abraham.

And we've already considered that even in our study of Galatians 3 here. In Galatians 3 verse 6, we read that Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. In verse 8, the scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying, in you shall all the nations be blessed.

Both of those references come from Genesis chapter 15, and we're going to go there here in just a moment. To see that Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, and the gospel was proclaimed to Abraham saying, in you shall all the nations be blessed.

Last week we looked at verses 10 through 14 and understanding that anyone who tries to earn righteousness by the keeping of the law is under a curse. And that actually applies to every single person who is not in Christ.

Everyone is trying to attain a righteousness by doing what they can do in order to be right before God, and everyone fails. For as we are told in James and in Deuteronomy, any point of the law that you fail at, you are guilty of breaking the whole thing.

So we know that we cannot keep the law in order to gain righteousness, and everybody who tries to do so is under a curse. But as we read, Christ became a curse for us so that we might be redeemed of the curse of the law.

So that in Christ Jesus, verse 14, the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles so that we might receive the promised spirit through faith. Abraham is our example in this. Paul's made several references to Abraham already over the course of chapter 3.

And so then he gives a human example of what he is talking about. Grace through faith, not by works of the law. Verse 15, to give a human example, brothers. Now that word might just seem to skip by us, of Paul referring to the Galatians here in these churches as brothers, because we're so used to Paul saying that in the other letters of Paul that we have studied.

To give a human example, brothers. Of course, he refers to everybody as brethren. He has not referred to the Galatians that way because he has struggled with the Galatians. He has labored for them. He feels under anxiety for them now because they have abandoned the true gospel and are following after a false one.

And so he opens the letter right up with rebuke. I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting him who died for you, who became a curse for you, and you're instead choosing to believe a different gospel.

Would it be so revealed that if they continue to follow after this different gospel that they were never truly in Christ in the first place? So Paul is very careful with this term, brothers, but nevertheless, he shows his compassion for them here in this particular section because Paul becomes a very great and astute and articulate teacher in this particular section of Galatians, midway through this letter.

But here to show his affection for them and his directness in the teaching that he is about to give, he calls them brothers. And he says, I give you an example, and he does this in teaching exhortation, going back to the Old Testament so that they may understand that even under the old covenant, it was still by grace through faith that a person was saved.

Even with a man-made covenant, Paul says, no one annuls it, cancels it, renders it void. No one annuls a covenant or adds to it once it has been ratified. In other words, officially valid. So when a covenant has been made, it is sealed, it is guaranteed, whatever was written in that covenant, those are the principles that apply.

You can't take away from it, you can't add to it. What were to happen if you were to do either one of those things? If you were to take away from the covenant or if you were to add to the covenant, you would change the covenant.

It would now be a different covenant. You would have to go through the process again of ratifying it, of going through all of the procedures and everything. This past week on the briefing, Al Mohler was talking about the Senate versus the House.

These two different pieces of Congress that we have, these sects of Congress, if you would consider them that way. The Senate is structured in such a way so that things move slowly, and the House is structured in such a way that things would move more quickly.

But things have changed in our government in recent years so that the Senate is actually trying to speed up their process and move things along more quickly when things were structured in Congress so that the Senate would move more slowly.

And so in order to change things the way the Senate is doing it, it's almost as if they have to work outside the structure of the Constitution and the way that it was made and the way these branches of government were defined.

And so once you start changing things, then you're going outside what was originally drafted. Now, we're talking about the Constitution in this case, which is not the same thing as a covenant, but nevertheless, the principle still applies.

Once you start changing it, it becomes something different than it originally was. And you have to go through a different process of ratification. So Paul says, to give a human example, brothers, even with a man-made covenant, no one knows it or adds to it once it has been ratified, lest it becomes something different.

So what Paul is meaning to illustrate here is the covenant as it was originally given applies the same way now as it did when it was first given, when it was first given to our father Abraham. The covenant as it was first made still applies to us now as it did to him then.

And we are his children. We who are in Christ Jesus, who is the offspring of Abraham. Verse 16, now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one and to your offspring, who is Christ, the Messiah who is going to come through Abraham.

And then all who are in Christ receive the promises that were given to Abraham and to his offspring. For it is through Christ that we are adopted into the family of God and become his children. And all of this by that same covenant that was first given to Abraham.

God's Covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15

Let's consider that. Genesis chapter 15. Turn with me there to Genesis 15. Fifteen chapters into the study of the Bible and you would come to this narrative, God's covenant with Abraham in Genesis chapter 15.

And we're going to consider the whole chapter here as we think about this covenant that is consistent even now to this very age, the permanence of the promise of God. Genesis chapter 15, starting in verse one.

After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Abram being Abraham, his name would later be changed. Fear not, Abram, I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great. But Abram said, Oh, Lord God, what will you give me?

For I continue childless and the heir of my house is Eleazar of Damascus. Abraham had no children of his own at this particular time and was well advanced in years and the way of women, it says of Sarah, was no longer with her.

So she could not have children either. Abraham is asking, How are you going to give me what you promised when I don't even have an heir? And Abraham said this, verse three, Behold, you have given me no offspring and a member of my household will be my heir.

Verse four, And behold, the word of the Lord came to him. This man shall not be your heir. Eleazar of Damascus will not be your heir. Your very own son shall be your heir. God brought his own son, Jesus Christ, God incarnate, through a virgin, conceived of the Holy Spirit.

So we know that if God could do that, he could certainly give a woman whom the way of women is no longer with a child to be an heir of the promise that God is giving to Abraham. Verse five, God brought him outside.

He brought Abraham outside and said, Look toward heaven and number the stars. If you are able to number them, then he said to him, So shall your offspring be. Abraham, who doesn't even have a child, and yet God is saying to him, I'm going to give you so many children, there will be more than the number of stars that you can count in the sky.

Verse six, And Abraham believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness. Abraham was received righteousness by faith, exactly what we just read in Galatians chapter three. There's a song that was written by Rich Mullins called Sometimes by Step.

The chorus goes, Oh God, you are my God and I will ever praise you. We've sung that several times here in our church as well. The longer version of that song contains some very poetic verses, and in one of those verses, Rich Mullins says, Sometimes I think of Abraham and how one star he saw had been lit for me.

You think about Abraham being taken under the canopy of heaven and looking up at the stars, and God says, Are you able to number these stars? Can you even count them all? You will have more children than you can even count stars in the sky.

And Abraham was looking up and he was seeing represented in the stars, not just the children of Israel who were going to come from Isaac and Jacob, but he was also seeing the number of Gentiles that would be added to the kingdom of God for all who would have faith in Christ, the descendant of Abraham and heir to the promise.

My friends, that's you and I, believers in Christ Jesus, whom God had even set in the heavens by his preordained plan before you and I even came to be. How wonderful a God we serve. And this promise that has been given through this written word that we read about and recall these things as they had first been spoken to our father Abraham.

Verse seven, God said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess. Later on, God will say to the people Israel, I am the Lord who brought you out of slavery in Egypt to give you this land to possess.

See the consistency of God in his promises to his people. But he said, Abraham said, Oh, Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?

Closing Exhortation and Ministry Sign-off

Thank you for listening to when we understand the text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com and click on the gift tab in the top right corner of the page.

Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study when we understand the text.