Not by Works of the Law

Galatians 2: Justification by Faith and Not Works of the Law

Alright, open up your Bibles, Galatians chapter 2, Galatians 2. Now I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and I think I said it again last week, this is what I consider to be by far the most important paragraph of the book.

Possibly one of the most important paragraphs in the whole Bible. So that's why we're not in a hurry. We're going to spend time with it. We've already looked at it for two weeks. We're going to look at it at least for another two weeks because of the language that it uses and the importance of it.

So we're going to read beginning at verse 15. Remember this is picking up on the end of Peter's and Paul's interaction where Paul has challenged Peter about stepping away from the Gentiles.

When the Jews come.

He didn't want to be seen as eating with them. And Paul says you're a hypocrite by doing so. You're pretending that you don't want to be with the Gentiles when you really do. And you're doing that for the sake of the Jews, and that's bad.

That's a type of hypocrisy. And so following that up, we have verse 15. We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law because by works of the law, no one will be justified. Let's pray. Father, I thank You for this opportunity to study Your Word.

Lord, as we seek to dive in and go deeper into the meaning of these three important phrases, Lord, justification, faith, and works of the law, and we understand the relationship between the three of them, I pray, Lord, first that You would keep me from error.

For God, I am a fallible man. I am incapable of preaching error, and I don't want to for the sake of Your great name and for the sake of my conscience and for the sake of these men. And I pray, Lord, also that You would open the hearts of these men.

Lord, for those who are believers, that they would have greater insight into Your Word. And Lord, for those who have yet to bow the knee to Jesus Christ, that today would be to them a day of reckoning.

Lord, that they would see themselves as sinners before a holy God and that they would understand the necessity of faith in Jesus Christ to mend that relationship which has been broken by sin. And I pray, Lord, all this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

I want to begin with a little bit of a confession. Last week, I made a mistake. Shame of shames, I made an error. I am human. I am not a robot. I was telling you about Martin Luther, and I said that Martin Luther had added the word alone in Galatians chapter 2.

Well, I was wrong. He did it in Romans chapter 3. So I was off, but I want to show you why I made this mistake. We just read Galatians 2. I want you for a moment to jump to Romans. Hold your place in Galatians and jump to Romans 3.

Now remember, Romans is also written by Paul. Written later than Galatians, but I want you to look with me at verse 28. Romans 3, verse 28.

It says,.

For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Now, does that not sound exactly like what he says in Galatians 2, 15 and 16?

It does.

And that's part of why I was confused, because I simply missed the reference. But if you look here in Romans 3, he is referring to the same subject. He's referring to justification, faith, and works of the law.

So it sounds almost the same. It comes off almost the same. That's why I made the mistake. But I want to also clarify something else that I said. One of my elders listened to the sermon, and he mentioned, he said, well, you might want to clarify this, and I appreciate that.

My goal in life as a preacher is to be absolutely clear if I can. When I said I disagreed with Luther including the word alone in the text, I wasn't saying I disagreed that that's what it means, because I do agree that that's what it means.

Faith and nothing else. And so what I was saying is we ought to be careful including anything that's not there. However, there is something in translation that we call dynamic equivalency. Dynamic equivalency is when you take a phrase, and you translate it into another language, and you translate it for the purpose of making it clearer to the new audience.

For instance, in German there is a phrase, I don't know it in German, but I know the words in English. In English it's translated, morning hours have gold in their mouths. Morning hours have gold in their mouths.

Now if I said that to you, you probably would not understand what it means. But if I said, the early bird catches the worm, you know what that means. That is the dynamic equivalent. That translates the idea, not the words.

And sometimes that happens in the Bible. I'll give you an example from the King James Bible. In Romans chapter 6, Paul asks the question, Shall we continue to sin so that grace may abound? What does the King James Bible say?

God forbid. But in Greek, let me tell you a secret. There ain't no word for God in that sentence. And really the word forbid is not really the word forbid. What the word is, is maygenoita in Greek. May is the adversative, means the negative.

And genoita is from the word gene, which means to exist or to be. And so maygenoita means may it never be. So, shall we continue to sin so that grace can abound? Paul is saying, may it never be. May you never think that way.

May that thought never come into your mind. That's Paul's meaning. Well, when the translators of the King James Bible were trying to emphasize what Paul was saying, instead of translating it, may it never be, they translated God forbid!

Because that is an equivalent to what Paul was saying. So, I don't think that Luther is wrong for using an equivalent. Because I do believe that faith alone is the idea. What I was saying is we have to be careful.

With dynamic equivalent.

Because the more we try to manipulate or add to or take away in our translation, the further we get away from the original. We have to be careful with that. That's why I don't like the New Living translation or the Message Bible, even though I think they functionally can be okay, especially for new believers, just to get an idea of what the Bible is saying.

If I'm studying the Word of God, I want to know what the original said. So I want to have either to be reading the original language, or I want to be reading a translation that is as close to the original as I can get.

So, I'm clarifying what I said last week. If you weren't here, I don't mean to have spent this time confusing you. Hopefully you understand what I'm saying. But if you were here, one, I was wrong, it wasn't Galatians, it was Romans.

Number two, I'm not saying Luther was necessarily wrong, I'm saying that we have to consider why he did it. And he did it because he was giving a dynamic equivalent to what was being said. Alright, having said that, let's move on with our lesson.

That was my preface to today's lesson. Alright, so going back to Galatians 2. We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. I believe this is Paul still speaking to Peter. Because he's still speaking as in the first person, we.

He's speaking about himself and Peter. And he says we're Jews by birth, we're not Gentile sinners. Yet, we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. Last week, I talked about what it means when we use the word faith.

And because repetition is the key to learning, and the key to learning is repetition, we're going to go over what I talked about last week just for a moment. Some of you weren't here, but even if you were, you need to hear this again.

When we talk about faith, faith is used three different ways. And I'm going to use three different Latin terms just to remind you. Gnosis, assensus, and fiducia.

Alright?

Gnosis means that you know something. You know the claim. That is having an understanding or knowledge of something. You know the claim. Assensus, you agree with the claim.

Okay?

So, I explained it like this last week for those who weren't here, and even if you were, you can hear it again. If somebody told me, this is how a parachute works.

Jump out of an airplane,.

The parachute deploys, it expands to a large surface area, it catches the air, it uses that air to drop my acceleration rate down to a slow enough point to where it stops me from being injured when I hit the ground.

That's functionally how a parachute works. And I know it. That's knowing the claim. Assensus, I agree with the claim because I've seen it happen. I've seen people jump out of airplanes. And I've seen the parachute deploy.

And I've seen it rapidly decrease their rate of travel. And I've seen them delivered safely to the ground. Well, yeah, it doesn't always happen. But I know what the claim is and I agree with the claim.

If everything goes as it should, this will work. But I ain't jumping out of no plane.

That's fiducia.

Fiducia means trust. And it takes trust to hurl your body out of a perfectly good airplane with nothing between the ground and you but a piece of government plastic. I mean, all the savings is a big piece of plastic.

No, I'm good. One, I don't like airplanes anyway, but either way. The point is that when we talk about faith, if I say to you, do you believe in Jesus Christ? And you say, yeah, I know who He is. I know who He claimed to be.

And I know what the Bible says. That's not faith. That's knowledge. That's gnosis. You can know what the Bible says. You can know what He said. You can know what His claims were. That ain't faith. And if I said, do you agree that what He said is true?

You can say, yes, and it still not be faith. This is the hard part. Because you might agree it's all true and yet still not submit yourself to Him and trust in Him. Submission and trust is what faith is about.

Not just knowing and not even agreeing. Because I point you to James 2 where in James 2, James says, you say you believe that God is one and you do well, but even demons believe that and shudder. I would say the first two are the faith of demons.

I mean, in a sense. You have gnosis. Demons know. Demons agree, but demons don't trust. They're not putting their faith and their confidence in the saving grace of God because God has not extended that grace to them.

Demons don't have the opportunity for salvation. In fact, I believe, this is off the subject, but just because we're here, I believe it's one of the reasons why the devil hates us so much. He does not have the opportunity for salvation.

He does not have the opportunity. Not that he would take it if it was offered because he hates God. But I think he hates, number one, that we are the crowning achievement of God's creative plan. The Bible says we are made in the image of God,.

Not angels.

We are the crowning achievement of God's creative plan and we were given the grace of God and mercy. And I don't think Satan likes that very much.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

And I'll give you whatever answer I can.

I got a question.

Hold on, he was first. Go ahead. Oh, it must.

Yeah.

Fiducia includes the other two. You can't have trust without knowing what you... That's why I say a lot of people think they believe in Jesus, but they don't know anything about it. So all three of these are necessary because if you say, I believe in Jesus,.

And I say, well, who is Jesus?

And you say, I don't know.

Yeah, all three.

That's why I say faith includes all three, but you can't be absent any one of them.

I have a question about faith.

Yes.

Oh, absolutely. Well, there's a couple that I would point to. I don't know of any passage that says that your faith comes as a gift. The passages I would think of, right off it, I'm going to give you a few at a shot.

Number one is John 6, 44 and 65. And what they say, Jesus says, no one comes to Me unless he's drawn by the Father. That's verse 44. And then later He says,.

No one comes to Me.

Unless the Father grants it to him. That's verse 65. So that's telling me that for me to be able to come in faith, God has to do something. Romans 12 says that we operate on the faith that has been assigned by God.

And I don't remember what verse it is, but you can look through Romans 12, and it says particularly that we have faith...

Huh?

I read something somewhere.

Yeah, yeah, it's Romans 12 and it talks about the fact, it's talking about spiritual gifts, and it says each man ought to use his gift in the faith that God has given or faith that God has assigned. 12?

3.

12. 3? Read it for me, brother.

For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of themselves more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

Yeah, right there. So God has assigned faith. That's a gift from God. Another passage which is, there's a linguistic argument that can be made here, and I could break down the Greek,.

And maybe we should,.

But it's Ephesians 2 .8 where it says, For by grace are you saved through faith, and that is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. And the issue there is people say, well, what's the gift? Is it the saving?

Is it the grace? Or is it the faith? From a linguistic perspective, it's all of it. All of it. Grace, faith, and salvation is all a gift from God. And so if somebody says, how do you know your faith is a gift from God?

My first, in general, is Ephesians 2 .8, but then I look at John 6 .44 -65. I look at Romans 12. And there's also a passage in Timothy which I'll have to look up which says that the reason why we are gracious when we share the Gospel is because God might grant repentance to the person.

And I don't remember which verse that is, but that always tells me that not only is faith a gift, but even repentance is something that God has to enable us or give us the ability to do. And faith and repentance are two sides of the same coin because we repent and believe, or we believe in repentance.

It's part of coming to Christ. Is that helpful? Are those passages?

Okay.

Did somebody else have a question?

Yes, sir. Yes.

You were dead.

You couldn't do anything. Oh, well, you're original.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You become an actual believer.

He gives us our first birth, and then He gives us our new birth. And the new birth is how we come to know Him. And that's how we believe. It's through the new birth. Jesus said no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he be born again.

And that doesn't just mean seeing it physically. It means actually understanding it and all of that. Alright, so are we good?

Can we move on? Did you have a question too?

Go ahead.

No, I'm just saying, alright, so, you know the truth, right? You agree with it, you have Jesus as God. I said, do you understand that Jesus died for God and my sin is upon Him for good? And He says, it's what He says, that He'll give me His Holy Spirit, He'll come back, He'll bestow on me, He'll take me to Heaven, I will arise again.

You're believing in that, something that hasn't happened yet. But is that where the trust comes in? You're in Him alone, not on your own, because you did.

You just believe in Him when He gave you the promise.

That He says. That's trust.

That's a...

Yeah, where it becomes trust, I think in the simple sense is what you just said. Trust is that I am no longer looking to myself for salvation. I'm no longer looking to anything I have done to justify me.

But I'm placing my whole life, like the parachute, I place my whole life in its grasp. I'm placing my whole self into Christ. When somebody asks me, why do you think you're going to Heaven? You're so arrogant, you think you're going to Heaven.

And other people...

I say it's not arrogance because I don't think I did anything. I didn't do anything for my salvation except provide the sin that made it necessary.

That's it.

All I did was say,.

Here's my sin. God sent His Son. God's Son died.

God's Son provided the atonement and the blood of Christ has been placed on me by God and covers my sin. Not anything I've done. There's no arrogance in that. Arrogance is somebody who says, you know what, when I face God and God says, why should I let you into Heaven?

My answer is going to be, well, God, I'm a good person. That's arrogance. Because there's no goodness in me. The only good in me is Jesus Christ. And that's my only hope. There's a song. Depth of mercy, can there be?

Mercy still reserved for me? God of love, Your wrath forbear. Me the chief of sinners spare. You're my only hope. My only hope.

That's it.

I don't have any other hope but Christ. If Jesus Christ be not who He said, I am lost.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

2 Timothy 2 .25, that's the passage on repentance. You're my man today. I appreciate you. You're hooking me up. Alright, now, this was last week.

And that's fine.

I'm glad we spent more time on it. There's three phrases in this verse I want to look at. Faith, justified, and works of the law. And I think that the best thing to do today would be to look at works of the law because that's what's being distinguished from faith.

We are justified, Paul says, not by this, but by this. And it's not by works of the law, but through faith in Christ. So there's a distinction. Before we get to what it means to be justified, maybe we'll do that next week, let's look today at what Paul means by works of the law.

Because this is actually, well, it's not super confusing, but it is one of the areas where there is debate in this particular conversation. So we're going to make our line. Okay, so you'll notice I put the word works up and I made a distinction between the phrase of the law, that's a prepositional phrase, this is works of the law, and, is everything okay?

Okay, I thought I said something that made you mad. Okay, alright. What does Paul mean when he says works of the law? Works of the law. That phrase actually comes up several times in the New Testament, but there are other phrases that come up that must also be considered.

Because the phrase, ergon nomu, it's the works of the law, that phrase is said just that way several times, but there are other times where you just see the word works. For instance, I already mentioned this, Ephesians 2 .8, For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourself, it is the gift of God, not of works.

It doesn't say works of the law. It just says works. So we have to immediately begin to ask the question, is there a distinction in the mind of Paul between works of the law and just works in general?

I think that there is, but I don't think it's as strong a distinction as many people think, but I'm going to explain what we're referring to and why this is important because ultimately this is the issue.

Whatever Paul is saying doesn't justify what the Jews were holding to for their justification because that's the issue. Paul's talking to Peter and he's saying, look, you know that we are justified by faith, not by works of the law, which indicates that he's discussing with Peter what people might think they're justified by.

Now I know this. If I know anything about humankind, people believe they are justified by what they do. It's just a belief in people. This week starts a ten day evangelism event. Our church hosts every year.

We go out to the Callahan Fair. We put up a booth and for ten days we hand out Gospel tracts and have conversations and we have some of the most amazing Gospel conversations throughout the whole year.

This is one ten days I look forward to out of the whole year is to have these conversations. But almost every year, and I think it's our sixth year out there, and almost every time, there are people who want to proclaim their own goodness.

If you know it, there's a verse in Proverbs that says almost every man will proclaim his own goodness. Now again, I don't know the verse right off. I'd have to get my buddy over here who's the magic man to find it.

I'm just kidding.

You don't have to go look for it.

But it says almost every person will proclaim his own goodness. And if you don't believe that's true, you just go ask some folks. You think you're a good person? Absolutely. I'm a Boy Scout leader. I'm a church deacon.

I'm a this or that or the other. I'm a good person. People have a natural tendency to see themselves as righteous and to see other people as wicked. This is why people gossip. What is the inherent motivation for gossip?

I want to tell you how bad somebody else is and it ultimately makes me feel better about myself because I'm not the one whose child is acting a fool, or I'm not the one who's got the drunken husband, or I'm not the one who's got the philandering wife,.

Or whatever.

And so we tell this story to make ourselves feel better and it ultimately increases our sense of justification, our sense of uplifting. Pride, very much. So when Paul says works in this passage, he says works of the law, and by doing so he's distinguishing a very specific category.

Let's do this. I want to use a Venn diagram. So if we say this circle represents all the works, I messed up there, sorry, all the works that we'll ever do. And some of that's good, some of that's bad, so we'll make a smaller circle here and we'll say this is our good works.

Right?

Well, I'm just being, yeah, he said a lot of good works.

He's not lying.

Within those good works are what we could say are works of the law. He said, well, what then is Paul talking about when he says works of the law? If he's not talking about all good works. Well, this is where the argument comes in.

Some people believe that what Paul is talking about here is only the three boundary markers that separated the Jews from the Gentiles.

And I don't know if you remember what those are,.

But just in case you don't, I've talked about them before. The first one is Sabbath keeping. The second one is dietary restrictions. And the third one is circumcision.

Huh?

Oh yeah, it's still the boundary markers of the Jews.

If you go to Israel,.

There are Sabbath neighborhoods where you can't buy land unless you're a Sabbath keeper because everybody in that neighborhood there's no work on Saturday. They're religious. They're the Orthodox. They're the very specifically minded.

And you can't live there. If you're going to have parties and whatnots on Saturday, they're not going to let you stay there. You've got to sign a covenant, agree that you're going to live according to that restriction for the Sabbath.

Remember for the Jews, the Sabbath is Saturday. Because that is the Sabbath. That's the seventh day. And so for them, those boundary markers... And some people think that these boundary markers is all Paul is referring to here.

That is referred to, and I hope this doesn't confuse you or take a tangent. There's something called the New Perspective on Paul. This is a theological debate and argument which basically says that Paul is writing in a very narrow frame of history.

He's writing during something called Second Temple Judaism. And Second Temple Judaism was not a legalistic society. It was a society that believed in grace and that keeping the law was an act of living out that grace life.

And so they were covenant nomists or covenant nomos, which means they believed they were in covenant with God, therefore they should keep His law. And as a result of that, you had these boundary markers that separated law keepers from everyone else.

Right?

And the boundary markers were, we keep the Sabbath, we keep our diet straight, we circumcise our children. That's the boundary markers. Now my question is, for the New Perspective people, and I know you might not even care about this, but it matters to me.

Because my question for this is is that all Paul is talking about? Because the New Perspective would say that's really all Paul is worried about. He's worried about these three things. Therefore, he limits works of the law to what we would call the boundary markers.

Now here's where the issue comes in. People who take the New Perspective, and by the way, I'm very suspicious of anything new. Because I believe in theology, generally, if it's new, it ain't true. Let me say that again.

In theology, generally, if it's new, it ain't true. You say why? Because the church has held a pretty consistent faith for 2 ,000 years and somebody comes along and says, oh, everything you believed up until now was wrong.

Here's something new. That makes me question, that's kind of like what the Mormons did. That's a lot like what the Jehovah Witnesses did. Everything that was believed up until the time of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society was wrong.

And we have the revelation from God to tell you why it was wrong. That's crazy. You say, well, what about the Reformation, Pastor? Let me explain why I think the Reformation is good. The Reformation did not look at the Roman Catholic Church and say everything you believed is wrong.

What the Reformation did is said that you have skewed and strayed away from justification by faith, which is the Gospel. And they showed how this was the faith of the historic church. And it wasn't the Reformers who were turning away, but that the church had taken this turn and they were going back.

That's what the word Reformation means. To go back to the original. So that's the difference. So again, I hope I'm not losing you all. The point is this, for someone to say that the works of the law only include Sabbath, only include dietary restrictions, only include circumcision, I think that limits it too much.

And the people who take this perspective would go on to say that this really doesn't have anything to do with salvation. This has to do with membership in the covenant community. So they take justification not to mean justification before God, but rather to be welcomed into the covenant community.

I reject that. I think Paul is very clearly referring here to justification before God. And next week when we talk about justification, we're going to talk about that. But the point of the matter is, I think this is included, but I don't think everything else is excluded.

So, does the works of the law include Sabbath, dietary restrictions, circumcision?

Yes.

But I believe it includes everything else. So I would say it includes the whole law. So it would be everything. Or rather, I meant the whole of the law. The works of the law would include the whole law.

Because here's the thing, no one is justified by any part of the law because none of us have kept any part of the law. Do I need to, and I've done this before, do I need to walk through the Ten Commandments one at a time and show you that you haven't kept even one?

This is a fun thing at the fair. I say let's walk through the Ten Commandments and show that you have not kept even one of the commandments. The first commandments, have no other gods before Me. You've never, ever had an idol in your life.

Absolutely you have. Jesus said, or rather, the next commandment says the first commandment, have no other gods before Me. What's the second commandment? Do not make any graven image. Do not call anything else God.

He said what's the difference between that and the first one? The first one says you can have more than one God. Don't have any other gods besides Me. The second one is you take something and you call it God like you create an idol.

Now a lot of people don't do that physically anymore. I mean, if you go to India, you'll see a lot of carved gods. But like in America, you don't usually see somebody with a carved totem sitting on top of their television.

That's good, Ed.

That's actually a good point. But what I was going to say is what John Calvin said was this. He said the mind is a factory of idols. We create idols in our own mind. Anytime you've ever heard somebody say this, my God wouldn't send somebody to hell.

You know what they're saying? I believe in an idol because I've created a God that's different than the God who exists. He exists in my mind, but He's an idol. So every person is an idolater. What's the third commandment?

Do you all know the third commandment? There's actually a trick to remember these. The third commandment is do not use the Lord's name in vain.

Do you understand what I'm doing though?