A Family of Faith

The Setting of Galatians 2 and the Antioch Conflict

If you guys will grab your Bibles or your device that has a Bible on it and turn to Galatians 2. Also if you can hold a place, I really want you to turn to Romans 2 also and hold that place because it's going to be really important that you follow along with me when we look at Romans 2.

So I'm going to read our text this morning. It is Galatians 2 verses 15 through 21. This is what the word of the Lord says. Is Christ then a minister of sin? May it never be. For if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor.

For through the law, I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives.

In me.

And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me. I do not set aside the grace of God. For if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly.

Let's pray. Lord, what a hope that you've given us that we are justified by faith that you've given. Lord, and that faith is in your Son, Jesus Christ. He who knew no sin became sin so that we might have the righteousness of God.

We who were dead in the law, dead in our trespasses, have been given the perfect righteousness of your Son through his substitutionary death on the cross. And Lord, we walk in confidence today knowing that that sacrifice has been accepted because Christ rose again.

And that is the great hope of the Christian, is that you have risen from the dead and you are the first fruits of that resurrection, and that that's going to bring a huge harvest. So Lord, we place our trust in you this morning, and we pray that you would give us ears to hear, and that you would soften our hearts with what you have for us today.

It's in your name I pray these things, amen. Little bit different on my intro today, I think it's very important for us to see where we are in Galatians here. And I think it's easy, much easier than a lot of texts that we've read, to miss the point of this passage.

So where we looked at last week, Paul has been defending his ministry. There has been a group of people who's come into the church that have said that the Gentiles or the people who were not born Jews needed to be circumcised in order to be in the faith.

And so this has caused a lot of confusion in the church. And what Paul has done is he has gone on a discourse talking to the Gentiles about how you do not have to follow the Jewish ceremonial laws that set you apart as Jews to be in Christ.

And this argument's gone on for quite a while now. We've been preaching on it for a couple of months. And it came to a head last week as we saw at the church of Antioch that Paul tells a story about how he confronted Peter to his face because Peter, when he saw these teachers come in who wanted to, they were called the circumcision, where they were demanding that the Gentiles be circumcised, Peter felt the pressure and he went to eat at the table of the Jews so that he would not be at the table of the Gentiles and draw the ire and draw the anger of these people who had come from Judea and James' church.

And so Paul calls out Peter for his hypocrisy in confusing families and in saying, well, when you sat with the Jews over here, then you made the Gentiles be divided off and you caused great confusion because the Gentiles now have a misunderstanding of the law and this could cause a church blow up.

And today, I believe pretty firmly that what we get is Paul's justification for what he said to Peter to his face because what he's going to do is he's going to argue a theological point and this is where the rub is.

This text, when you read it, if you've been a Christian for a long time and if you are well acquainted with the Bible, you can read this text and what you'll see is, well, this is about salvation by justification and this text is really about the great theology of how Jesus has given us saving faith.

That is true, but that's not the point of the text. The point of the text here is to show the importance of table fellowship within the church, how important it is that the people of God are able to fellowship with each other and have unity and so the salvation is the object of the unity.

So what happens in this text is basically communion and our fellowship with one another is so important that Paul invokes the greatest theology of the whole New Testament and of the whole Bible, the whole story of the Bible.

He invokes that as the basis for how we should not separate from each other at the table. So in a way, what happens here is we have a very small focused argument with huge grandiose statements to make the point of the argument.

In a way of speaking, in my old Archie tongue, it would almost be like it seems like what Paul has done here is he's killed a gnat with a bazooka, right? And so what he does is he brings in the big guns here.

So the point here is what is true Christian fellowship and what is it based on? And the central proposition of this text is that our fellowship is ultimately found in our unity being justified through Christ and we have to have table fellowship with all who meet that description.

So that's the point this morning and the sermon is called The Family of Faith. And so we're going to look at three avenues that faith informs us as a family and the first point this morning is from the first couple of verses and that is that faith creates the family.

Faith Creates the Family Through Justification by Faith

Faith creates the family. We pick it up in verses 15 through 16. Remember what Paul had said at the end of last week's sermon is he had said, you are a Jew and you're making, you're not acting like a Jew and now you're making the Gentiles act like Jews.

So in other words, Peter, you're trying to be something else and then you're telling the people that you're trying to be like that they have to be like what you used to be like. Why would you do that?

It's confusing.

It's confusing to even say it. I probably confused you just doing that. The idea here though is that Peter has taken on something else, that all of us in Christ have become a new thing and that's why we read the passage in the call to worship this morning because we are all new creatures.

So let's pick up the argument in verse 15. It says, we are Jews by nature. He's talking to Peter. We are Jews by nature and not sinners from among the Gentiles. So let's stop there. Remember from last week, there was these two classes of people that were developed in this controversy.

You had the Jews and then you had the sinners and to the Jewish mind, those were the only two categories, is that you were a Jew, you were the people of God or you were a Gentile and therefore you are a sinner.

And the word sinner there is not talking about your individual sins like, hey, I lied to my mom last week. We're not talking about that. What we're talking about is you are by birthright a sinner because you don't have the oracles of God.

You've never been called by God. So you're a class of people that's just called the sinners. And so what Paul says is that, what he's going to say is that him and Peter have actually by Christ become sinners.

So you follow me. The language is really important. Defining the word sinners here is very important. He's talking about a class of people and the circumcision had a different class. So we go on. Nevertheless, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, since by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified.

What Paul does here with Peter is he grabs him by the gospel. He says, Peter, I know that you know the gospel. I know that you understand that it's not by your works that you've been saved, but it's by the work of Christ that you've been saved.

And so why are you confusing people by going back to your own works to say that that's how we're pious and that's how we're holy and that's how we've been saved. And so we get Paul's introduction to how he views salvation.

And we're going to see that it's a very God-centric salvation. God does the saving because I want you to see it as we follow in the text here that all of the things that Paul is talking about are things that you cannot do.

You cannot decide to do them. Can you decide to be justified by faith? No way, because you're not the judge. You can't justify yourself. You cannot work through the law, because we know from Scripture that one who is guilty of one aspect of the law has broken the whole law, and we know that the wages of breaking the law is death.

That is the problem that we have. And so what Paul is doing here is he's not really expressing the gospel per se. What he's saying is, Peter, we have a common point here. Remember what's happened. Remember who we are.

You are being confused right now. I know it's because of the pressure, and there is intense political pressure on you, Peter, to act like a Jew right now, because the Jews have all the power. They are the power brokers, and they can make life really difficult for you.

I understand that, because Peter's going to have to go back to Judea from Antioch, and he's going to have to look at the people in this church in the eye, and he's going to have to tell them, like, hey, I was eating unclean meats with the Gentiles.

And there's going to be people in Judea that are mad about that. I might dare say there might be some people in Judea who are hopping mad about that. And so Peter feels the pressure. And the real pressure comes from this, is that the circumcision, these guys are false teachers, these are not brothers, because Paul said that what they had done is they had spied out our Christian liberty.

They had infiltrated the church with their legalism and their Judaizing, and they had disrupted families by giving a false gospel. This false gospel being by, through your ceremonial works, you can make yourself right, that you can add to the work of Jesus by circumcision and by your dietary restrictions.

So they set up three kinds of people. They set up Jews, Christian Gentiles who needed to be Jews, and Gentiles. These are the three groups of the circumcision. What Paul does is he takes those three groups down, and he makes them the two.

There are only two groups, and I know that Barth's going there pretty hard next week. There's two groups of people after the justification by faith, and that is this. There are those who have faith, and there are those who have no faith.

Those are the only two types of people. Those who have faith, those who have no faith. So this birthright in the circumcision's mind was that they were making this argument. If you eat with these sinners, if you don't observe the Jewish tradition, then what you've done is you've become a sinner yourself, and you're bringing disgrace onto God.

That's the argument of the circumcision. But that's a misunderstanding of the law, it's a misunderstanding of Christ, it's a misunderstanding of grace, and it's a misunderstanding of mercy and justification.

They get it all wrong. That's the problem. Whenever we add works to the gospel, we get it all wrong, because what we do functionally is we make ourselves God. And we say, if I, by my works, can please God, then I am God, because I've set myself up as the judge who judges my own works to be righteous, and so God must accept my works.

That's what we do, and that's the danger of a false gospel. And all the false gospels really do boil down to something about us doing some works. They all do. They're cloaked in different packages, and this is the first one, and it happens in the very early history of the church.

So now I want you to flip to Romans 2. We're going to look at four verses there, actually five verses, I need to count. We're going to look at verses 4 through 8, and I want you to follow the argument.

I'm going to try to draw it out here. Paul writes in Romans 2, verses 4 through 8,. Or do you think lightly of the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God, highlight that, the kindness of God, leads you to repentance?

So what leads you to repentance? Your self-will? Your determination? Your righteousness?

No.

Repentance is given by the kindness of God. He carries on. But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart, he's talking to the Jews here, you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will repay to each according to his works.

Catch that. You will be repaid by God according to your works. Does that sound inconsistent with what I just said? Well, let's go on. To those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor in immortality, eternal life.

How do you do that? What does it mean to seek glory and honor and immortality in eternal life? Can you seek that rationally in your own self? Can you seek immortality? Look, that's what crazy people do.

Okay?

Crazy people set up cults, and they say that they're going to transcend the human condition and become immortal, right? And they make little statues, and they do just like the Judaizers did, and they make a bunch of cleanliness laws that usually apply for thee, not for me.

And that's the way it works. So what Paul is saying here in his argument is only those who persevere, who stay seeking glory and honor in immortality, those are the ones who God's going to repay according to their works.

So what are those works? Where does immortality come from? We know that. It comes through faith in Christ. And so we will be repaid by our works, those of us who have faith in Christ, because our works are Christ's works.

That's the only works we have to offer. But to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath, and anger. Remember, he's talking to Jews. So you're either in Christ or you're outside of Christ.

Everyone is going to be judged according to his works. But when you're hidden in Christ, when you're hidden in Christ, when you go up before the judgment seat, what's going to happen is God's going to open the book, and he's going to see your name, and Jesus will say, I paid for all of those.

These are the works you need to look at. And the works that are looked at are all of Christ's righteousness. That's how judgment happens. But for those who are not in Christ, who think that they are going to make God owe them something, God is going to open up the book, and he's going to look at every time they transgress the law.

And every time that even with their good works, they thought to themselves, with my good works, I'm making myself a good person, and I'm going to please God with these good works. And God will look at that, and he will say, depart from me, you workers of iniquity.

I never knew you. Because even those good works were done in wickedness to present to a holy God to say, see God, you owe me. And God owes us nothing.

Nothing.

Would you want to serve a God that owes you something? How weak is that God? God transcends us. He's totally other from us. He's holy and set apart. So the heart of the problem in Antioch, and what Paul is getting at Peter about, is that the Jews believed that the right standing with God was possible through works of the.

Law.

They took all that and they said, yeah, that's really good stuff, the Jesus stuff. He was really great. But you still got to get circumcised. And Paul says, no way. That's not the way this works. Because the kindness of God is his benevolence.

The reason that you repent of your sins is because God has shown you kindness to give you the fruits of repentance. Did you know that repentance is a gift? Did you know that no human being walks around on this earth and in their natural thought thinks, you know what, I've really been sinning against God.

I think I'm going to turn towards God in their own thought. No, when we have that thought, that's because God has given us saving faith. That he's given us that heart to turn around. And what we do and what the Judaizers did here, what the circumcision did, is they recoiled from this idea.

Because grace is probably the most offensive thing that we can think of as human beings. Because grace says this, you deserve nothing and you're given everything. And we think, yeah, but I owe you something now.

You gave me everything and it makes us profoundly uncomfortable, doesn't it? If someone gives you a lavish gift, if they show up at your house and somebody gives you a $10 ,000 diamond ring or a brand new 2024 Toyota Tacoma, and you will think to yourself one of two things.

You'll think, what does this person want from me? Or you'll think, man, I really feel like I'm in debt to this person, right? That's because grace is offensive to us. But what God has done is he said, I see all of your rebellion and all your sin.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that sin and I'm going to put it all on my beloved son who never did a single thing. And I'm going to crush him for your iniquity. And I'm going to pierce him.

And I'm going to put him on the cross at the hands of murderous men. And he's going to take all of your sins on himself. He's going to wipe them away. And you know what? It doesn't stop there. Now that I've given you faith in this son, I'm going to lavish all the gifts of heaven on you for all of eternity.

And we sit here in our natural self and we say, I mean, I probably need to add something to that. And that's the problem. Because what we do is we recoil from this grace and we start to set up barriers between each other.

And that's where the argument flows in here is because when we can't accept grace, what we have to do is build up things that we need to accomplish and that we need to do. And when we think that we need to do it, I think what I need to do is the most important thing in the world.

And so if you don't think that that's very important, now I set up a dividing wall between us and I say, well, you may be a Christian, but you don't understand the Bible the way I do. And so therefore we need to separate off.

And that is the breaking of table fellowship. Because we know that there was a ministry to the circumcision that Peter was doing and a ministry to the uncircumcised that Paul was doing. And the problem is that these waters were not mixing and they had to mix.

Because when we set up walls against each other who have the confession, then we are rebuilding something that ought not be rebuilt. So what does Paul say about that? Let's move on. So if faith creates the family, faith also protects the family.

Faith Protects the Family from Rebuilding the Wall of Hostility

Look at verse 17. But if while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners. Is Christ then a minister of sin? May it never be. For if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor.

For through the law, I died to the law so that I might live to God. Understand, very important with the terminology here. What is being said, the argument is, hey, Paul, you and Peter, you've actually lost your status as a Jews and you've become a sinner.

And so Christ must be the deacon of sin. That's the idea, right? Because the Gentiles were dirty dogs and you had the holiness of God over here as a Jew. And what you did is you gave all of that up so that you could come sit with the dogs and eat their unclean meat and tell them dangerous things like they don't need to be circumcised and that they don't need to follow the ceremonial laws that our people have followed for millennia.

You're disrupting them. And what Paul says is what you're doing here is you're saying that Christ has become a minister or a deacon, a servant of sin, but it's not. Because remember the false distinction, right?

The distinction is the idea that there's Gentiles who need to become Jews, and that's a false distinction because there's only two kinds of people. Because Jesus is the true vine, Jesus is the true Israel.

And because Jesus is the true Israel, it's faith in Jesus that makes you a Jew. Everyone is a sinner. Got that? Everyone. Everyone is in the class of people that is a sinner. What God does through Christ, he's not a minister of sin.

We know from 2 Corinthians 5, we know that he is a minister of reconciliation. Understand the difference. We want to build up walls. We want to say that there's these classes of Christians. There's the crazy charismatic guys, and then there's the run-of-the-mill Southern Baptist guys who are baptizing down a fire engine sled.

And then we've got these kind of weird Methodist people, and then we've got these super weird Reformed Presbyterians, and then we've got these even weirder Reformed Baptists. All of these people. And we look at them and we say, man, we can't fellowship with those people, we're just far too different.

We're far too different. But what Paul says here is you're building new classes of people, and this makes us profoundly uncomfortable as Reformed people. Profoundly uncomfortable. Jesus is not the minister of sin, he's the minister of reconciliation.

Because what Jesus has done is exactly the opposite. He's not saved you into becoming a sinner, he's saved you into becoming righteous. That's what he's done. He ministered reconciliation. So how does this work?

Let's indulge for just a second and say, this is confusing and this is probably the last time I'll do this. Why do they know? How do they know you don't have to eat the right foods and you don't have to get circumcised?

Well, Hebrews 8 tells us, right off the heels of the great high priest Melchizedek in chapter 7, Hebrews 8 tells us how these things have faded away. It says, now if he, meaning Jesus, if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all since there are those who offer the gifts according to the law.

There are already priests on earth. They were already sacrificing animals, they were already making you get circumcised, and they were already making you eat clean meats. He says those priests, they serve as a copy and a shadow of the heavenly things.

Just as Moses was warned by God when he was about to erect the tabernacle, for see, he says that you make all things according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain. God is holy and he was separate from us.

But now, verse 6, but now he has obtained a more excellent ministry by as much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant which has been enacted on better promises. And what are these better promises?

The better promises are that God has come to live among his people forever, that God has made a way. He has mediated. There is one mediator between us and God, and that is Jesus Christ. So what Jesus did was this tabernacle that showed the separation of God that only the great high priests could go into, Jesus tore that veil that had the cherubim that promised death to anyone who entered the holy of holies.

What happens today is that Jesus has made a way where he makes a temple where living stones with a temple inside of us. The church is the temple. Christ lives with us. There is no separation now between us and the great high priest.

Do you understand what that means? David longed to see that day. Jeremiah the prophet looked into it, gazing, trying hard to understand this mystery. And the mystery has been made revealed that we have a new covenant with a better priest who has better promises, and it's a better ministry.

Why would you go back to the other ministry? Why would we go back to our silly self-righteousness? And for the Jews, why would you go back to the shadow that's not the real thing? Because the substance is here.

No one wants to look at a shadow. We want to look at the substance. I don't get satisfied by watching commercials of huge cheeseburgers. I get satisfied by eating huge cheeseburgers. Why would we want the shadow when we have the substance?

Christ is the substance. And so then comes the question. And I think it really does fuel the message here. What would Paul rebuild that he had once destroyed? That would be this reliance on looking like a Jew.

Do you understand this? The law is not abrogated. We still can't murder people. That's still God's law. We still can't commit adultery. We still cannot make idols, and we still cannot blaspheme God. Those laws are not gone.

But the laws that are gone is because in the Old Testament, God gave a system of laws to make the Jews separate from the other people and to look like Jews. He pulled these people out, and he gave them cleanliness and ritual laws so that they could be clean in God's forbearance, that they could come to him, that they would look different from the other people.

That was important in the Old Testament. But do you understand this now? With a better covenant and a new covenant, what Jesus has done is he has made us into his people. We don't look like his people.

We are his people. Because what he did was he doesn't change the way we look at our appearance. He doesn't care about the way we have hair growing on our temples, or whether we're circumcised or not, or whether we eat bacon or not, because we don't have to separate based on outer appearances, because what's happened is he has separated us by giving us a new heart that has completely different desires than what we had when we were dirty dog Gentiles.

That's what's happened. So Paul says, why would I rebuild what I've destroyed? If I did that, it would be sin. It would be sin. To rebuild it is to rebuild the wall of hostility that ought not be rebuilt.

To rebuild it is to rebuild the shadow and to trust the shadow when the substance has.

Come.

In other words, it's stupid. Why would you go back to that? Stupid. No hope. No hope. And yet, and yet, in our rebellion and in our self-righteousness, we constantly try to reenact laws that make us look different from other people so that we would be seen as being more holy.

I'm not talking about modesty. I'm not talking about that kind of stuff. What I am talking about is we like to make our own traditions, and we like to hold them with a very tight hand so that we can exclude people out.

And us Reformed people are the absolute worst about this. We're the worst. Because what we'll do is we'll say, you must be saved by faith alone, through grace alone. But what we really mean by that is that you must be saved by believing that.

That's the problem. Then belief becomes a work. So for us, we really get uncomfortable when we see people doing things that are kind of outside our tradition. And what we like to do as Reformed people, who are so doctrinally astute, is we try to put the same doctrinal acuity and acumen on every single person.

And that makes our churches very cold and very unwelcoming, because we say, you've got to reach a certain bar of doctrinal knowledge before you can even really feel good about coming to the table. Does it shake you even a little bit that Jesus gave communion to Judas?

We talk about fencing the table. And Jesus, knowing that Judas was about to betray him, not only let him sit at the table, but gave him the wine and the bread. How do we make sense of that? Look, I'm not talking about how high-handed rebellion gets you fenced from communion table.

We know that from 1 Corinthians. If you're in unrepentant adultery, if your sins are public and obvious and they are bringing disgrace to the church, we bar you from the table for a time before you walk in repentance.

But we do not do holiness tests about your profession before we invite you to the table. Because it's not our table to fence. Bart and I are not the head of the table. Jesus is the head of the table. And what Jesus has done is he has said, come all who I've brought.

So what happens is really, to quote Doug Wilson, is the table fences us. The table fences us. Because to come and eat at the table is to come and claim the name of Christ. You've been baptized into Christ.

And when you come and eat of the elements, what you're saying is, I have taken on the body and the blood, and I trust in him for my sustenance, and I know that I've examined myself, and I've found that I truly have faith in Christ.

And when you do that, then you are sustained. And we have fellowship one with another. So let's get to the coffee mug verse. How do we do this? We have a contradiction. There's a point here, and it is this.

We cannot keep the law. But we must keep the law. So how can we remove the hostility that plagues our churches? And look, in America, we are scattered, divided, and leaderless, absolutely. We walk around hating the other buildings around, thinking they don't quite have the right set of theological conclusions, and we accomplish nothing.

And like I said last week, we have people leave the church.

Why?

Because the church is irrelevant. Who can blame them? Do you want to wake up early on a Sunday morning to come in here and then just be irrelevant? There are better social clubs out there. There's more fun things you can be doing if the power of Christ is not enough to make your heart demand that we worship him.

That's the difference. So how do we get rid of this stuff? Well, it's easy. How do we have communion with our Creator? We have to die. We must die. And death is the thing that scares human beings more than anything else.

We're terrified of death. So last point, faith fuels the family. Coffee mug verse, I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. In the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.

I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly. There's questions that must be answered from this text. First of all, I hope you can see how this text gets pulled out of context all the time.

What is he talking about? How can we love each other and sit at the same table as Christians who disagree with one another?

How?

Because we've all been crucified in Christ, and it's not us who lives. It's Christ who lives. Is Christ divided from himself?

No.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. We don't have different degrees of Christ based on our doctrine. We either have Christ, or we don't. We've either died and risen again, or we don't. And that is spiritual today, but it will be consummated physically on the day that we die, and when Christ comes back into his own, we will rise up, and all that was dead will be embodied again in glorified bodies that last forever, that do not have any stain of the curse or sin.

And Christians, if that doesn't make you excited, I don't know what will. God has made these promises. So what are the questions that must be answered from these verses? Question number one, let's get really basic.

What did the death and resurrection of Jesus accomplish? Anybody ever try to be crucified with Christ? That's the thing, if you're doing some street evangelism, I might hold that one out. Hey, what are you talking about?

Well, you have to be crucified with Christ, because they're going to say, just like Nicodemus does, what does that mean? How can I do that? So let's talk about it. What did the death and resurrection of Christ accomplish?

Number one, Jesus died and he gave us righteousness. If you have your faith in him, his death accomplished your righteousness, because the penalty for your sin has been paid. You owe nothing. You have no guilt and no shame.

It's gone. Jesus took it all. As a priest, we know that this righteousness has been acceptable, because Jesus is the first sacrifice who ever came back to life. Can you think of the many thousands and thousands of bulls and goats and doves that were pulled apart in the temple, split in half, cut open, stabbed in the jugular, blood flowing freely everywhere, it stunk, and none of those came back to life, because we know from Hebrews that the blood of bulls and sheep is not enough to cover your sin, but Jesus' blood is enough, because Jesus is not a sheep or a bull.

Jesus is the divine son of God. So Jesus died and he gives righteousness to all who believe, and we know and we can bank on its effectiveness.