Promises Promises

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Don Filcek, Off the Chain: Finding Freedom in Galatians; Galatians 3:15-29 Promises Promises

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.
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We're currently studying Galatians in a series called Off the Chain, Finding Freedom in Galatians.
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Here's Pastor Don Filsack. Well, good morning.
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Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here, and I want to just start off by saying welcome. I'm glad that you're here.
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A couple of things that you received when you walked in, you got a worship folder there. There's some announcements and different activities that are going on in the church, and so you can take advantage of that and read it.
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But then also you received a connection card that was in there. If you'd be willing to fill that out and turn that in, there's a black box right back here on the corner of this desk that you can use to turn those in.
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If it's your first time with us, and you're willing to share that information with us and turn that in, I'd ask that you please also take a free coffee mug.
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It's on the other end of that desk, but just our way of saying thank you. We're glad that you're here, and we're glad that you trust us with your information.
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We won't sell it. We won't farm it out to other people or give it away. We do send out a weekly email, however.
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You can unsubscribe from that if it fills up your inbox or you're not reading it or taking advantage of it, but it's got all kinds of interactive links on it and things like that, so we send that out every
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Wednesday. If you give us your information, give us an email address, then you'll get those in your inbox as well.
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The last thing that you received when you walked in was an offering envelope. We don't pass an offering plate here. We don't want anybody to give out of there's a plate here in front of me.
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What am I supposed to do with this? I guess I have to give something. We want it to be because you acknowledge that God has blessed you and you want to give back to him out of the abundance of what he has blessed you with, and so again, those go in the black box back there as well if you would choose to give this morning.
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Otherwise, I would ask if you do us a favor, there's a white basket right next to that black box where you can recycle things.
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I'd ask that you recycle those envelopes, and we can reuse those next week if you're not going to use that to give.
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So, those are all the announcements out of the way. I like to start off on Sunday mornings by talking through a little bit, giving us an idea of where we're going with the text this week, reading it, and then the band will come and lead us in worship, and then we'll jump into the sermon after that.
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So this morning, we're going to be diving back into the book of Galatians. We've been going through that book here at Recast.
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We value God's word, and I believe that the best way, at least the way that God has laid on my heart to preach it, is go right straight through a book.
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We went through Acts. We've gone through Jonah. We've gone through Joshua. Now, we're halfway through the book of Galatians right now, and that way you don't hear my pet peeves or my soapbox.
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You hear what God's word has to say, and I even have to preach the text that I might not normally pick.
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So, we're in the book of Galatians, and we are still right in the middle of the heart of Paul's theological defense of the gospel.
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He's saying that salvation comes to us by grace. It is a gift. It is not anything that we can earn.
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We can't keep rules and laws and regulations enough to be saved, and the reason that he's giving this defense is you got to back up a little bit in history.
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A few years before he wrote the letter of Galatians, he was actually traveling throughout modern -day
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Turkey, that country that's there in the Middle East, and he was traveling through an area called
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Galatia. It's a Roman province, and in Galatia, he planted five different churches while he was there, and he was going around a church planner, talking about the gospel, proclaiming the gospel, going into the public forums, going into the synagogue, sharing the gospel.
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People believed, and churches were started there. Now, shortly after he left, he was kind of chased out of town in most of those cities where he planted churches.
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People rose up against him. Some people threw stones at him and tried to kill him and all kinds of things, so he fled out of there kind of like in the night sometimes, like emergency evacuation kind of thing.
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They're going to kill you, Paul, if you don't leave, and so he was kind of hurrying out of there, and after he left that area, some people followed up to kind of mop up his ministry afterwards, and they said, you know,
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Paul gave you a good start. He told you about the gospel. He told you about Jesus Christ. That's great, but here's what you really need.
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You really need law. You really need to become like a Jew. You really need to follow the
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Old Testament carefully to be acceptable to God, to be pleasing to God, and so that's kind of what he's writing the book of Galatians to correct is these people who came in behind him, denying his authority, saying he didn't really know the full story.
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He didn't know everything. What you really need is laws and rules and regulations for your life. Sure, the gospel is okay, but you need more, and he's denying that.
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He's saying that's false, and all of this is argumentation against that notion. In reality, our only hope is that God is merciful to us to make us clean.
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Have any of you been down the road of attempting to please God by laws and rules and regulations, trying to make your life spotless so that God pays attention to you?
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Have any of you been there? That can be, it's like a hamster wheel, a lot of work, but not going anywhere, and if you're anything like me, you come to the end of yourself pretty quick and trying to clean yourself up, and I think part of the problem is how honest are we introspectively?
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How honestly do we deal with our own hearts? Sometimes when we look in the mirror and we look at our own hearts, it's kind of like,
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I don't want to see that anymore. Have you been to that place? I don't like the crud that I see in my life and my own inability to clean things up, and it can be tiring and exhausting to try to follow and keep laws and rules and regulations.
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In the Christian life though, the way that we are to live now, Paul talked about earlier in Galatians, is as if our old self, driven by laws, driven by rules, driven by sins, has died.
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We've been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us.
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If you have accepted Christ as Savior, that is, if you've acknowledged that He is Lord and trusted
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Him that His death on the cross covers you and asked Him to save you, then you are in Christ, and the promises and the blessings that are offered to Christ in the
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New Testament are now yours, and you are an heir, you are an inheritor with Him, and that's what we're going to look at here in the text.
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We saw a couple weeks ago that for everyone who has heard the message of Jesus, has believed it and trusted it by faith, they now have the
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Holy Spirit residing in them. If any of you ever experienced the conviction of the Holy Spirit, you're about to do something wrong, and there's like that pull in your heart that says, this is not good, this is not right, this is not acceptable to God.
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The Spirit of God alive in you, driving you away from sin and towards holiness. Now, we need more of that, don't we?
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We need more of the Spirit every day in our lives, and to pray that the Holy Spirit would continue to resound loudly in our minds, because there's a lot of voices in our heads, right?
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There's a lot of voices out there that would tell us to do this, do this, do this, this is going to make you happy, this is going to make you happy, this is going to make you happy.
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I pray often that the Holy Spirit's voice is loudest in our lives, that we hear Him first, and we hear
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Him often. As we come to worship this morning then, let's rejoice that God Himself is now with us, even in us, living through us, convicting us, guiding us, and directing us.
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Let's worship that God who is fashioning our lives and pushing us along towards holiness and righteousness.
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Let's come before His throne and worship the One who has done for us what the law could never accomplish for us.
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That is our salvation. And as we dig into this text, I am praying that we will be challenged to think of God correctly.
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I think that this text particularly has the power to transform the way that we view
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God Himself. That this God that we worship, that we're going to sing about this morning, that we're going to sing to this morning, works in human history, not primarily as a law giver, but He works primarily as a promise keeper, the
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One who keeps promises. And there is a very different way to relate to a law giver than the way that we relate to someone who has promised us blessing and good things.
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So, let's open our Bibles, please, to Galatians chapter 3. We'll read this together.
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Galatians 3, 15 through 29. If you take the Bible in the seat back in front of you, easy way to find it is turn it to 833.
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So, we're going to be reading. I really encourage everybody to open the Bible and turn it to 833 and read together as we dive into God's Word.
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I'll read the entire portion, Galatians 3, 15 through 29. To give a human example, brothers, even with a man -made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it's been ratified.
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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
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Christ. This is what I mean. The law which came 430 years afterwards does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God so as to make the promise void.
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For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise, but God gave it to Abraham by a promise.
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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.
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Now, an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one. Is the law then contrary to the promises of God?
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Certainly not. For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law.
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But the scriptures imprisoned everything under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.
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Now, before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.
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So then the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith.
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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.
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For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek.
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There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
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And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for this promise.
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We're going to study a promise versus a law. And I thank you that you are a God who gives promises.
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You are a God who has issued this promise to Abraham centuries ago, a few millennia ago.
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And yet that promise has dramatic impacts on our lives here, where we live. The promise that you gave to Abraham of an offspring of a seed, one of his descendants who would bless all peoples and would be a blessing to all nations.
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And that's us here in Matawan, Michigan in the United States in 2012. I praise you for your far -reaching plan that goes back through the centuries and that we have an opportunity to be swept up and caught up in your plan and in your history, this awesome scope of what you're doing.
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Father, I pray that the praise that we offer you of singing these songs would come from hearts of gratitude, recognizing the awesome sacrifice and the awesome forgiveness that we have by grace through faith, not by works of the law.
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I praise you for this in Jesus' name. Amen. You can go ahead and be seated.
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I want to just say thanks to the band for leading us. And I want to point out their desires to lead us in worship and songs.
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And that's an awesome thing. But it's my prayer and my desire that as a church, that we go out from this place worshiping
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God all week. And it's not just through singing. How many of you are glad that it's not just through singing? Maybe that's not your gift or your talent, but there's other things that you do throughout the week that can be worship.
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As a matter of fact, anything that we do can be done if it's done with a heart to God for worship. So jumping into this text again, we're on page 833 in that Bible, Galatians 3, 15 through 29, in case you walked in late.
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I'll open up to that. I'd love everybody to be open to that passage just as we walk through it, because we're going to just take that.
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That's our text for the morning. But a question as we get started here, how many of you have wrestled with obedience to the
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Old Testament law this past week? Like in this sense. Like you had a few times this past week and you were thinking, man
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I sinned and I need to take a lamb to church to slaughter it for my sins. Like I need to make a sacrifice.
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Okay, did that thought cross your mind? Nobody brought sheep this morning? Okay, good.
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Because I wouldn't know what to do with it. I mean I wouldn't know how to offer a sacrifice anyways, and I really wouldn't do that for you.
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Or like you were eating breakfast this past week and you had some nice crispy bacon. By the way, bacon was made to be crispy.
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Okay, you got to make it crispy. But you had some nice crispy bacon and you had a twinge of guilt that was like, oh
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I'm breaking the dietary laws of the Old Testament. Like nobody? Okay, everybody's right there.
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So what we talk about this morning is this promise versus the law that was given in the
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Old Testament. It might be something that at first glance seems far removed from your everyday life. Would you confess that?
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That as we talk about Old Testament law. But then there's some other Old Testament laws that we kind of relate to a little bit more like thou shalt not steal and some of those things that maybe are a little bit of the things that we might wrestle with day in and day out.
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And if we think about the spirit of those laws, then it gets a little bit even tighter, right?
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A little bit tougher for us to obey the spirit of some of them. But my goal by the end of this morning is that we would all realize how intensely important and practical this text really is.
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Because Paul is shooting for nothing other than shifting, attempting to shift our understanding of God himself.
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I want to challenge you that every time you come to the word of God, whether it's through the preaching of the word on Sunday morning or your own personal study, we need to be open to let this change this.
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Now, how many of you know you all walk through the door with a view of God? Would you agree with that? We have various views.
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We have various understandings, various levels of education, various levels of knowing the word, right? But no matter where we're at in life, we need to be ready for this to change us.
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Would you agree with that? And so that's my prayer this morning is that those of us who maybe have a skewed view of God, and I would say that we all do to some degree, that by the end of this morning we're more conformed to what the scriptures say about God.
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And that's the way it should be every time we come in contact with the word. So, here's one of the things.
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Here's kind of the primary issue of how I believe that Paul is trying to change us. You see, most people down through the ages have viewed
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God primarily as a lawgiver, right? Would you agree with that? That's been the primary way that most people have viewed
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God. He is the great lawgiver. And I think that's reasonable. How many of you have read at least a portion of the
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Old Testament? Maybe some of you read the whole Old Testament, some of you parts of it. Okay, like 70 % of that document is laws and rules and regulations, right?
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So, would it be reasonable then to kind of assume that God is primarily a lawgiver?
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Would that be a reasonable assumption? Is he a lawgiver? Yeah, yeah, he has given us law.
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Is the primary way that we approach him a lawgiver? That's something that's a different question.
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Are you hearing what I'm saying? So, in one sense, yes, he has given us law, but is that the primary way he wants us to interact with him?
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And Paul is going to show us through some solid argumentation here in this text that we have thought incorrectly about God if we think of him primarily as lawgiver.
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And even the Jews, he's going to say, have misunderstood the central point of God's dealing with human history.
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The center point of the Old Testament is not the giving of the law. Paul is going to point to another center point, a different place where the center of God's focus in the
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Old Testament is, and that is a promise given to a man named Abraham. That is going to be the key to understanding the
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Old Testament and the flow and the scope of the way that God was working in Old Testament history. The law is a parentheses in human history, and that's what he's going to tell us.
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So, in verse 15, if you look down at the text and we're going to dive in, Paul starts, he says, I'm going to give you a human example, something you guys can relate to, something that kind of brings it down to where we live.
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He says, he starts with a man -made covenant. Now, I think the best way for us to understand this, now it's a chintzy illustration, it doesn't work at all levels, but if you think about a lease agreement, how many of you have rented an apartment before or you've signed a lease agreement or you've rented a house or something?
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So, you kind of have a little bit of an understanding. Now, some of you in the room are like me, like you get to the end -user licensing agreement at the end of your software and you click accept and you don't read any of it, okay?
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A few of you, some of you, raise your hand if you read the whole, some of you read the whole thing, amazing, awesome, good.
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If you're signing a lease, you should read the whole thing because what if like article 26 says, when you move out,
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I keep all your stuff. Now, that would be a bad, that would be a bum agreement, wouldn't it? Like, I mean, you didn't read it, you signed it and then you leave and they're like, wait, locking the doors, this is my stuff and they're having like an estate sale when you leave and it's like, oh, this is...
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So, knowing the terms of the agreement are important, would you agree to that? When you have a covenant and he says, when someone, ultimately in verse 15, he's saying, nobody annuls it once it's been signed, once the two parties have agreed, they've signed the document, it is now legally binding.
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Saying, you've now agreed, nobody annuls it or changes it. Now, you could try to change it, like the landlord could come to you and say,
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I need more rent. Well, I paid what the agreement was. Here, I can produce the document that says, here's what was required, right?
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And you don't owe him any more money because, hey, I met the lease agreement. You can annul it by moving out, but you're going to be bound to the terms of even breaking the lease.
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You're still under the lease, even in attempting to get out of it. Are you getting what I'm saying? So, it does break down at some degree, but he's just giving us a human illustration of what a covenant looks like.
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Once a covenant is enacted, once it's ratified, it's in effect. You don't change it, you don't annul it.
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And so, Paul says that this type of covenant was the type of covenant of promise that God made to Abraham back before the giving of the law, before the law even came on the scene.
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As a matter of fact, 430 years, we're going to see here in a minute, before the law came on the scene. So, if you're taking notes, jot this reference down,
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Genesis chapters 12 through 17. I'd encourage you all at some point during this series on the book of Galatians to read those few chapters, because those are the core of the giving of the covenant to Abraham, which is so central to Paul's arguments here.
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And I can't read it all, I can't expound on it all, but go read it on your own. It's an awesome, awesome story about God reaching down into human history and giving some promises.
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And so, this covenant that God made in a promise, and how many of you know that if you're agreeing to something with God, it's not an equal, we're not talking about an equal covenant here.
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It's somewhat unilateral, like one has a little bit more power than the other. Like Abraham meets with God, and it's like Abraham's like,
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I got nothing to bring to the table. And God's like, well, I'll make some promises to you, and we'll call this even. Okay, so that's what we're talking about when we're talking about this covenant.
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Think really heavy on God's side, really light on Abraham's side. He's got nothing to bring.
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So, God makes three promises to Abraham, and this is the covenant, this is the agreement. He says, I'll bless you,
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I'm going to bless you with a lot of offspring. Now, you know, in the story, if you've studied it, or you've seen it in, you know,
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Sunday school class, or you're raised in the church, or whatever, Abraham was an old dude. Okay, he was old, and his wife was 99 years old when this promise is given to him that he's going to, that God's going to bless him with a lot of children.
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Like, and it says, actually, Sarah laughed. As a matter of fact, their first child's name was
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Isaac, which means laughter, because she laughed, she thought this was funny.
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Haha, we're going to have a kid? Are you serious? How are we going to become a multitude? How are we going to have a lot of offspring? This is crazy, but God said it.
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God said, I'm going to make you a great nation, Abraham. The second part of the promise was, I'm going to give you a great land.
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Now, we studied through the book of Joshua a couple, maybe a year ago, and when we went through the book of Joshua, we were seeing the fulfillment of this part of the covenant that God would give them a great land, and he fulfilled it.
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He made it happen through Joshua and through the conquest of the land, and so you can read about that in Joshua. You see, but here's the problem.
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The Jews, there were three parts of the promise, but the Jews have often through down through history have stopped there, and for good reason, because I think we can relate to why they stopped, because it kind of makes sense to us, because I think we might have a tendency to stop there too.
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God says, I'm going to make you great, and I'm going to give you good stuff. You seeing what might be the motivation to stop there?
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That's kind of a nice promise. I like this. I can camp. Now, I can camp on that. God likes me.
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He's going to bless me, and he's going to give me a land, a good property, and lots of food to eat, and descendants, and I'm going to be someone.
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So, can you see how maybe the Jews have camped on that, and even some of the world events that we see, like the whole land of Israel and all that stuff, and I don't want to get into politics right now, but you can see how that's even playing out still today, right?
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This camping on this promise, but there was a third part of the promise that Paul's going to drive down into and say, this is the key.
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This is a key to the entire understanding of the Old Testament. To Abraham, the first person that God really relates to on a promise kind of way in relationship with.
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Now, there was Noah, right, but we don't see a covenant necessarily with Noah, so to speak, but a promise to Abraham that is about salvation, about the future, about all of these things that are going to come to pass, and he says, one of your descendants is going to bless all the nations.
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Now, you can tell that the Jews missed a little bit of that because they became very insular. They didn't like the other nations.
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They were very critical of the other nations. They separated themselves from the Gentiles, who the third part of the promise went to.
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One of your descendants, one of your seed, Abraham, one of these, I'm telling you, I'm going to make you a great nation.
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I'm going to give you land, and I'm going to protect you. We saw that in the book of Esther, the protection so that the seed could come through the same people that he promised to, right?
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That was what Esther was all about, was the protection of a people for God's name, and he says,
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I promise I'm going to bless one of your seeds. Now, offspring in English can be collective, right?
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So, it's a little bit confusing here. He starts to get into some strange logic, especially if you don't understand
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Hebrew or Greek. He says, it does not say, and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one.
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Did you ever use the word offsprings with an S on the end of it? No, because it's a collective plural noun, even in singular form.
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It implies many or more than one, and so, I don't refer to my children as my offsprings.
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I have offspring, Adam, Luke, and Leah, right? And you have, if you have children, you have offspring. So, we use it in a singular way, but scholars who understand
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Hebrew, who understand Greek, there is a singular form of this. Another, a better way to translate it, maybe that makes more sense to us, is seed or seeds.
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And he says, one of your seeds, one of your descendants, and Jewish scholarship understood it this way.
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They weren't looking for messiahs. This is where they get the concept of messiah from, the chosen one, the anointed one of God, who is going to come and bless all people.
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And they didn't, they didn't totally ignore this part of the promise. They just didn't emphasize it. Are you getting what I'm saying? But he says, there's one.
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They were looking for a messiah, the offspring of Abraham, one who would come and would bless, would have the blessing of God on him and would be given the anointing and the freedom to bless others with the same blessing he had been given.
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You getting what I'm saying? Who is that? Anybody want to venture a guess, want to venture a name? Jesus Christ.
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Jesus Christ is the one. He is the messiah. And notice that the promise was not merely given to Abraham, but in a very real sense, the promise was made to Jesus as well.
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It says in verse 16, now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. Jesus was a recipient of that promise equally.
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Now think about it logically. If God said Abraham's offspring would be a blessing to all nations, then
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God is also promising to Jesus that he will be a blessing to all nations, right? Are you getting that?
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I mean, if he says one of your offspring is going to bless all nations, then that offspring is actually incorporated in that promise as well.
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But it isn't until verse 17 that the mud clears and we see why Paul's even going down this road. Well, why are you talking about unknowing covenants and all of this stuff?
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What's that have to do with this argument about living by faith versus living by law, living by the spirit versus trying to pull ourselves up and just try to behave and be better people and polish ourselves on the outside?
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What's all this have to do with it? Well, we see why Paul is going down the road in verse 17.
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He's clearly stated that the promise of God came first to Abraham. That happened first.
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And then 430 years after that age of promise came the beginning of the age of law under Moses.
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430 years. So there's 430 years of history where the only thing that people had in relationship to God was a promise, actually three promises.
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God was calling out a people for himself. He was going to give him a land and he was going to bless all the nations through one of his descendants.
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So for 430 years, that was the way that people related to God. That was it. Now, you get what I'm saying? I mean, the law hadn't been given yet.
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There was a law written on people's heart down through the ages. There's always been an understanding of right and wrong.
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Even if you don't have the Old Testament law, we still have a very good understanding of what moral behavior looks like even without a law.
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But therefore, that giving of the law 430 years later does not annul the previous promise.
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That's where he's going with this. Does that make sense? I made a promise to Abraham, you guys. I made a promise and I told him that one of his descendants, there's going to be a
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Messiah. There's going to be a Savior. There's going to be one who comes. And the giving of the law doesn't change any of that. It didn't change things because there's now the law.
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In other words, he didn't scrap the plan to send a Messiah because he now instituted the law.
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The law came later. The law came second. The promise came first and the promise was ratified by God himself.
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He said, I'm going to do it. I'm going to save you. Now, the law has a part to play in that and we're going to get there here in a minute.
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But it was by the promise that we are saved. The promise is the centerpiece of the
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Old Testament, not the law. The law is a parentheses in the scope of world history.
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The inheritance that's mentioned in verse 18. So if you're looking at the text in verse 18, there's this mention of inheritance.
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It's another way of speaking of the blessing that was promised to all people. That blessing is nothing short of our forgiveness in Christ, is nothing short of our inheritance of eternal life through faith in Jesus.
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And he's going to spell that out in detail. What is the blessing? What is the inheritance? It is that we can be brought back into a right relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, not through the law.
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The promise was given before the law. It is only by faith that we can be made right with God.
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If not, he says, if we come into our eternal inheritance by law, by scrubbing up the outsides, by keeping a bunch of rules and regulations, by doing good works, then the promise was of no value and pretty much unnecessary.
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This entire interaction that he had with Abraham, what's that all about? If the law is able to do it.
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Are you guys tracking with this? So the logical question then, does it sound like Paul is kind of getting down on the law a little bit here?
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Does it sound like that? The Old Testament law and kind of just saying, well, it's just, it's just a parenthesis. It's just kind of like a little thing that happened in the middle.
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So there's a logical question that comes out of this, the way he's talking. Look at verse 19.
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Anybody else already asking the same question? Well, then what's the law for? Like if the promise was given to Abraham and that's the way that it was going to, that's the way that it was all going to come down and we were going to be saved through this
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Messiah. Why, why, why this period of the law? Why this time of like rules and regulations? Why Mount Sinai?
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Why any of that? Anybody thinking that that's a logical question? Well, I want you to hold on to your hat, buckle in tight because this is going to be a bumpy ride here from verses 19 through 25 because they're potentially the most offensive verses in all of scripture to anyone who has based their life on law.
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Paul's going to say you're wrong if you're basing your life on law. That is, think about it this way.
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There's a couple of different words that I want to define for you here. There's the word legalist. A legalist is someone who believes you can gain
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God's favor through keeping laws. Like if you do good enough, if you clean up this outside enough, if you act kind enough, if you don't do bad things and you do enough good things, then
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God likes you and that's how you get to heaven. That's a legalist, okay? And there may be somebody here who struggles with that or wrestles with that in your mind.
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The key implement, the key tool for a legalist, and this is a good diagnostic to test yourself, where are you at on this?
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The key way of relating to God is a scale, okay? So think about that. Have you heard of a scale before?
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A lot of people in our culture, a lot of people out there in society, a lot of co -workers. I've heard this tons of times.
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You heard of a scale? Do you know what I mean when I say the scale? On one side at the end, you're going to stand before God and on one side of the scale, he's going to put your good deeds, right?
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The good things that you've done. What goes on the other side of the scale? Your sins, your bad deeds, right?
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And what's your hope? I'm really hoping that this side, you know, this side's heavier than this side, right?
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And that totally and completely misunderstands the concept of covenant, right? That's kind of like saying,
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I've got this lease agreement. It's got 30 points. I've kept 15 of them. I mean,
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I kept 16 of them and 14 of them I've failed, so the lease agreement is still binding and standing and I've kept it.
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I've done okay. Is that the way your landlord's going to look at you? You've only kept, you've kept just a little bit more than half of the lease agreement, so you're in good standing.
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Now, the way that covenants work is to break a portion of the covenant is to be guilty of breaking the covenant.
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It's a fundamental misunderstanding about what our issue is with God. It's that we are not righteous like Him.
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We are not holy like Him. It's a lot more flawed than just, I do,
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I did some bad things one day, right? Is the issue in our heart more than that?
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Would you agree with me on that? So, the legalist looks at God and says, oh, I'm trying to do a bunch of good things and I'm trying to earn
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His favor and the more good that I do, the more I'm in with Him. But there's another problem.
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There's an equal problem that Paul addresses all throughout the book of Galatians. It's a, it's a problem called gnomism.
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Not worshiping lawn gnomes, not having too many lawn gnomes in your yard. That's not what we're talking about here.
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This is a word that comes from the Greek word for law, nom, gnom, N -O -M.
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That doesn't even have a G in the front of it. A gnomist is somebody, have you ever heard that word?
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It's probably a brand new word for a lot of us. It means somebody who basically lives their life in such a way.
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So, you might actually, a gnomist could be a person who's actually prayed and asked Jesus Christ to save them.
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Has actually entered into a relationship based on the cross and said, God has brought my account to zero. But now what a gnomist does is goes about assuming that their favor in God's eyes is maintained by law.
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You're getting what I'm saying? So, as I get up at 4 .30 every morning and pray more and read my
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Bible more, God likes me more. And as I do bad things, like I watched that movie last night or I did this or that,
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God likes me less. And so it basically becomes a performance mentality towards your relationship with God, keeping in his good graces by doing good things and getting in his bad graces.
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But any of you know that that kind of a lifestyle ends up being like a roller coaster, doesn't it? It's like ups and downs.
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And I think that it's, I want to say impossible, but maybe that's just because of my bent or my thoughts, but I think it's nearly impossible for a person to live a gnomistic lifestyle, to pattern your life after God likes me better when this happens and God likes me less when this happens, to not then in turn put the things that you think
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God is pleased with you about over onto others. So it becomes a comparison game, doesn't it?
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And I think it's almost impossible for it to not become a comparison game because I got up at 4 .30,
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right? But somebody else came to me and said, I got up at four. So now I got to get up at four and then they're getting up at 3 .30,
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right? Because what ends up happening is as long as I'm better than the average person, I think
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I'm doing okay. Anybody tracking with this, this concept of gnomism, this concept of God likes me better because I do good things?
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Let me just be straight up honest with you. God likes you for one reason alone and that is because the blood of Christ has covered your sins.
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That's it. That is the only basis upon which we are approachable by God and that we can approach
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God is through the blood of Jesus. I get chills at the thought that he loves me, he likes me, and he knows me?
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Like that's crazy. Anybody else like just, he knows my heart, he knows the thoughts that I've had in the last 24 hours, he knows the things that I've seen, he knows the things that I've done and he still likes me?
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Yes. But not because I've pleased him, not because I've done such great things and grandiose things for his name, because Jesus died for me and I am now his son as we're going to see in this text.
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You see it says in the text, there was a reason for the law. The law was added because of transgressions, because of sins.
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Sinful people, that is transgressors like us, like us, we benefit a couple of ways from the giving of the law.
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There's a few different reasons for the law, a couple of them here. One is the diagnostic role and I mentioned that a couple weeks ago, bear with me as I reiterate that.
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The concept of an MRI machine, like the law is like an MRI that identifies whether or not you have an injury to your knee or to your joint or whatever and so you're able to go in and get a test, you're able to be diagnosed.
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The law is diagnostic in that way, it shows you, yes, you have a torn ACL, oh bummer, you know, that's the way that it works, like an
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MRI machine showing us what is wrong with us. Have any of you experienced that level of the law where the law has identified your failure, your shortcoming?
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Especially like as Jesus interprets the law and goes through and says, not, no, no, no, no, no, not don't murder, but don't hate.
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Do not call that guy fool when he cuts you off in traffic. Don't even, don't even pay attention, don't, don't worry about that.
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Diagnostic, the law shows our sickness and our need for healing, but equally the law shows us the character of God, so there's two faces to the law.
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We see in the law both the glory of God, so in that way it's not like an MRI machine, because no
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MRI machine ever shows you, it doesn't tell you, there's nothing about an MRI machine that says a healthy knee looks like this, right?
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All it does is it identifies, it just takes pictures, tells you what is real. But the law does a step further, it actually shows us what is right, what is good, what does a healthy person look like?
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What is God's standard for us? And I think it's out of that mode that the Old Testament authors like David in Psalm 119 or Psalm 19 or in some of these passages where he's extolling the glory of the law, it's because it shows him the character of God.
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He sees the way that God is through the law. Are you seeing what I'm saying? And that makes it glorious, but it also makes it terrifying.
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Have you experienced those dual points of the law? God, you are so much higher than me, you are so holy, and your law is righteous and true and good, and I am not righteous and true and good.
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So the law can both be in our hearts a glorious thing that shows us who God is, and simultaneously a devastating thing to see how far we fall short in our lives from it.
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Would you agree with that? And so that's what he's saying, it's because of transgressions, it's because of the weakness of our flesh, because of our sins that the law was added.
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The purpose of the law is to drive us towards the promise, towards the Savior. But notice in the middle of verse 19, why then the law was added because of transgressions until, a key word in this passage, until the offspring should come.
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This is the first sign that the law was to serve a temporary purpose in the world scene.
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Until, as far as eras and epics go, there was an era of law and when the offspring showed up, things changed.
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Things are different now, we live in a different era. The end of verse 19 and 20 are difficult to, end of verse 19 and then all of 20, are difficult to interpret.
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And one ancient scholar jokingly said there were 430 different interpretations for verse 20 alone.
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I think he was exaggerating a little bit, I think, as a matter of fact, he probably borrowed 430 because we saw that same number in here earlier.
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But in humility, I'm going to tell you what I think verses 19 and 20 are saying and then you can balance that and read umpteen different interpretations yourself.
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I happen to think that what I'm going to say makes sense. But part of the difficulty is that at the end of verse 19 it talks about the law being put in place by angels and an intermediary.
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Now, the intermediary, that title mediator or intermediary is actually a title given to Moses multiple times in scripture.
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So he's called the intermediary or an intermediary. And so we're pretty confident, most scholars all are unanimous that that's
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Moses that we're talking about there. The one who went up on the mountain to receive the law from God and then disseminated it to the people.
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So he was the mediator of the law, if you will. But that's not where the basic problem of the text lies, but it's this obscure reference to the angels being involved in putting into place the law.
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And the problem is we only have one passage in the entirety of the Old Testament that even indicates anything about angels and law together.
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And it's just this obscure passage, Deuteronomy 33 .2. It's in the middle of a poetic section and it says something about God coming down on the mountain with his holy ones.
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And that's it. Like, I mean, is that a lot of fuel for thought on how God used the angels to put in place the law?
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It's not very clear. But because the text here says it, because scripture says that God put the law into place through angels and an intermediary,
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I'm just going to believe it. I'm just going to believe that that's the case. I don't, the Old Testament doesn't make it clear.
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And for whatever reason, God didn't spell it out what the angels role was on Mount Sinai. I don't know what that was, but apparently they had some role in the law.
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But that's really not Paul's point. I want you to know that sometimes, particularly in theology, I think that theology gets a bad rap because it often comes down to thinking about, we think of people like in dusty rooms with dusty scrolls arguing about minutia like this, right?
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Like a little deal, well, what were the angels doing there? And this is that and the other, and it can kind of get, you know, a bad rap.
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But that's really not Paul's point in the text. His point is one more jab at the inferiority of the law to the promise.
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The law came through angels and through Moses, but the promise came through the one in verse 20.
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God is one. No intermediaries in the promise. And remember that he's comparing the law and the promise all throughout this text.
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And so that's what I think he's doing here. And although it's a minor point, Paul reasonably says it's better to get a promise straight from God than a two -sided contract enacted by a mediator and some angels going between those two parties.
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Do you see what he's saying? It's better, it's better that we just get it straight from God like Abraham did. And so Paul has done such a good job pointing out the supremacy of the promise over the law that he now fears he might send the pendulum into an against the law kind of stance.
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Like he's been basically saying the promise is better than the law, the promise is better than the law, the promise isn't better than the law, so now he's afraid you're going to throw out the law and you're just going to ignore that.
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You're getting what I'm saying? And that's our human tendency, isn't it? So he's going to backtrack on that.
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There was a man named Marcion in the early church who actually did go too far and ended up cutting out the entire
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Old Testament and even snipped out some of the references to the Old Testament in the New Testament because he said
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Christ annuls the law, which is exactly the opposite.
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Apparently he didn't read Galatians 3 very well because he's going to literally say here, is the law then contrary, verse 21, to the promises of God?
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Certainly not. He's going to say that the law and the promise both are important and they actually interact hand in hand.
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Although the promise is the primary operating factor of our lives, it's the primary way that God is interacting and the primary thing that God has set about to do to bring a messiah, to bring his son.
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That's the first and foremost thing that he's been doing, but the law also has a role to play in all of this.
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In verse 22, he highlights that the law imprisons all areas of our lives under sin. That's the part of the law's part here because the all -encompassing law is broken at multiple levels by all people on a daily basis.
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Would you agree with that? The law is broken by all of us in multiple ways, in multiple times, and that's one of the things that's so,
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I think, comprehensive about the law. That's one of the reasons it takes up such a large portion of the Old Testament, as it is a very comprehensive law.
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Finance, sexuality, relationships, family life, employment relationships, pets, sacrifices, animals, you know, your animal goring a neighbor.
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How do you handle that when that happens? You don't own an animal that could gore somebody, do you? But all of these things, the law of God in the
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Old Testament points out how busted up we are in all of these areas of life.
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You see what I'm saying? In essence, the law shows us we are in prison, and yet we can receive the life through faith in the promise.
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Two halves of this coin. The law driving us to grace. The law driving us to the promise.
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The law confining us in a tight space of sin until we become so disgusted with our own filth that we cry out to God for freedom, and we cry out for the promise, and we cry out to the one, we cry out to the offspring, the one who has saved us.
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Verse 23 explicitly states what Paul has been implying.
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Before the era of faith in Jesus came, humanity was imprisoned by the law until the coming of faith was revealed.
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This is not to say that someone could not be saved by faith under the Old Covenant. You need to hear this carefully.
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Abraham himself was saved by trust and belief and faith in the gospel even before Jesus showed up on the scene.
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We saw that earlier in Galatians. But here Paul is saying that an era, an epic, a time of faith has now been ushered in.
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A stage of spiritual history was inaugurated with the coming of Jesus Christ where we now approach
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God by faith. And prior to this era, the law served as our guardian.
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The law served as our tutor. In Roman culture, most homes had a tutor.
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The word here is pedagogue, a teacher of children. And their primary role was to educate, to discipline, and to protect the children up to a certain age.
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And that's the very word that's used here for the law. The law was our tutor, our guardian, our nanny, if you will.
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So prior to Christ, the law was confining us, educating us, protecting us by a degree of keeping before us the standard of God, that we could see it.
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And I think that this is something that is recapitulated in our lives. Now we're talking about epics and eras and world history and all of that.
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But I think this is something that happens in our own lives. We come to the end of ourselves where we recognize that we are up against the law and the law is still there.
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Even in this era, it's still there for us to see the standard of God and our moral failure, right?
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It's there for an unbeliever. It serves that function for our world and for our society and for those around us.
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And they see where they fall short. And yet for most of us,
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I think our story is that we came to the end of ourselves at some point, right? Where finally the misery of living for ourselves drove us to the promise.
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And we came under the umbrella of the promise to Abraham that one would come who would bless all people.
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And we said, we believe that and we want that blessing. And the only avenue for that blessing is through faith in Jesus Christ.
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And so the law served that purpose. But just like an MRI shows the problem.
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So say you've got a torn ACL. You go get an MRI. It comes back positive. Yes, you've torn your
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ACL. You're going to need surgery. It'd be foolish to then go out and say, great, now I know the problem. I think
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I'll sign up for a 5k next weekend. Now that I got the problem, I got it figured out.
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I know exactly what's wrong. So I'm going to go run a 5k. How's that going to work for you? You see what I'm saying? The point of the diagnosis is to drive you someplace, is to move you to a place.
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The point of seeing yourself in the mirror of the law reflected in our unholiness is to then bring us to the offspring, the one who can save us.
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And so the end of verse 24 says, we were placed under the guardian to lead us to justification by faith.
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You see, everything about the law vigorously, fervently points towards our need for a savior.
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And here comes the most direct statement about the way a follower of Jesus Christ relates to Old Testament law.
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Now that faith has come, now that we are under faith, we are no longer under the guardian, the law.
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We are no longer servants or slaves under the law anymore. Why? The text tells us why.
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Because in Christ, we are now all sons of God through faith. We are not slaves of God any longer.
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We are not primarily to think of ourselves as servants of God, although should we serve God? Yeah, but that's not the primary operating factor for us.
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The primary way we relate to God is as sons, as heirs of the promise, as inheritors if we are in Christ.
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And I say to you, recast directly the words of Paul, I want you to listen as if Paul is speaking directly to you.
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As many of you as were baptized into Christ, you have put on Christ.
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If you were, if you've given your life over to him, you are clothed with Christ.
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He is in you, living through you. He is on the outside, clothing you.
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He is what you breathe in, he is what you breathe out. He is all around you.
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You have been baptized. Baptized is a word that means immersed. You've been immersed in Christ.
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You've put him on. Now, I want to point out that baptism, as you see it in this text, sometimes we get a little skittish because it sounds like it's very tightly woven to salvation, right?
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If you've been baptized, it's kind of the way that he's saying it. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ, have put on Christ.
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And it sounds an awful lot like baptism is a requirement for salvation there. Would you agree with me just at face value? That's what it sounds like.
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So what's going on here? Well, baptism to Paul, and to Luke, and to Peter, and to John, and all of the New Testament church was a way that a person expressed faith in God.
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Actually, I would, that's too soft. It was the way that a person expressed their faith in God.
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They already had faith, but the way they showed it, the way they demonstrated it, so that what we've done in the church, and often in evangelical circles, and in churches today, and conservative circles, and all different, is come down front and pray a prayer, or repeat after me this prayer.
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Have you ever heard that before? Like Billy Graham does that, and I mean, I'm not disparaging him. My goodness, the man has just done an awesome ministry in this world for Christ.
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But that notion is very different than Paul's notion. It was like, you believe in Jesus Christ, and you tell me you have faith?
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Let's go get some water. Let's go get baptized. Like that was the, that was the logical step in the early church, so that Paul would have had no notion of somebody who was a believer in Jesus Christ, and had not been baptized by faith.
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Are you getting what I'm saying? That would have been the understanding in the early church. Now the problem with this is, we live in West Michigan, and we are very confused about baptism, right?
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I mean, isn't our culture, and church culture, very confused about baptism? Would you agree with me on that? So that baptism is applied in multiple different ways.
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In our community, just within a 10 -mile radius, they baptize babies, they baptize adults, they baptize just everybody, right?
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I mean, there's all different kinds of views and thoughts about it, and so we want to be careful to be understanding of where people are coming from, but at the same time, recognizing that if you have not been baptized, that is a step of faith.
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It's not for salvation. You're not gaining any brownie points. Again, isn't that the point of the book of Galatians? There's not, there's no, there's no more hoops to jump through.
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It's by faith alone, but you demonstrate that faith by baptism, and we're having a baptism service next week.
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If you're here, and you haven't been baptized by your own choice after, as a sign, as a way of showing others that you've been saved, come and talk with me.
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It's not too late. We're going to have a service at six o 'clock out at Miracle Camp, just south of here in Lawton.
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Six o 'clock, and encourage everybody to come, and if you are interested in baptism, come and talk with me after the service.
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It just happened to be that baptism showed up in my text this week. I didn't plan that, but come and hear what
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God has done in people's lives, and then testify of God's goodness to them. And I say to you, you have, if you are in Christ, you have put on Christ, and therefore show that in your life.
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If you believed and trusted Jesus, the status of a believer, the status of you, is amazing according to Galatians so far.
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We are crucified with Christ. That is, the old self has been put to death. Christ lives in us.
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Our lives are lived out by faith in Christ, and here we have clothed ourselves, or put on Christ.
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The life of a believer is a life that exhibits, displays, and makes known the life of Jesus Christ, not by law, but by his power at work within us.
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And all of us who belong to Christ are Abraham's offspring, and heirs according to the promise, regardless of race, regardless of status, or gender.
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Look at verse 28. We're wrapping this thing up, coming in for a landing. All of us.
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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.
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Paul isn't making a point about gender roles here. Paul isn't making a comment about the abolition of slavery.
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He's not talking about feminism, he's not talking about cultural elitism, as much as what he wants to communicate to us is that the power of the promise of God is to call out a diverse people for himself.
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In essence, what he's saying is Jesus Christ is an equal opportunity savior. I praise
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God for that. He brings people from all kinds of backgrounds, regardless of gender, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of social standing.
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He will save anyone. You see, God has got a promise, and I fear that an innocent reading,
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I mean an incorrect reading of the Old Testament, that is a reading that places Moses in the center, has skewed or at least confused our understanding of the story of God.
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He has been planning redemption through his chosen offspring long before the law was ever given.
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Before the law ever showed up on the scene, he was planning to save us through his son.
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The law was a temporary grace given to us to steer us towards that promise.
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And consider the way that we respond to a promise giver as opposed to a law giver. I asked you to do that earlier.
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We approach a law giver with fear. We approach a law giver with trembling. We approach a law giver with trepidation.
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Law givers are to be obeyed. But now consider your response to someone who promises you something good, to someone who has promised you a blessing.
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What is your response? How do we respond to promises? Only a few ways we can really respond to them.
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We hope that they come to pass, right? We hope that the promise is fulfilled. Somebody promises you a hundred dollars.
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You hoping that they give you a hundred dollars? You hoping that, right? That's a good thing. You trust it.
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You believe it, right? Isn't that how you respond to promises? Well, we should, but I'm sure that all of us could get up and share a story of a broken promise.
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How many of you had a broken promise given to you? So we don't relate to this illustration. If you're honest, how many of you have broken a promise before?
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Same hands go up. A promise is only as good as the one who issues it, right?
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We all know what that's like. If you've ever received a promise from somebody you just don't trust, you're just not going to believe that until you see it.
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Promise a hundred dollars, right. And that is what makes this promise so awesome.
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Who gave this promise? God himself. The creator of the universe has given us a promise that he has chosen the one.
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He has chosen the offspring. He made it happen. He brought him in and he was the sacrifice for us.
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He's the one. And would you bow your knee before Jesus Christ and say, you're the one.
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You're the one that I need. God gave you the blessing and is in turn, given you the right to bless all.
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And I want in. I want a part of that. I want to be in with Christ. We're called to live a life therefore based on trust and faith in the promise, not a law of trust and faith.
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I mean, a life of law of trust and faith in law. You're getting what I'm saying? That's what
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Paul's argument has been all along. He's a good God and he enacted the promise to bless us.
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And he did so by making his own son a curse for us, that he might be imprisoned, that Jesus Christ might be set about on every side by the law and by sin, so that we are now set free in him who died the curse that we deserve to die.
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As we come to communion this morning, I'm going to just ask you to do something. I'm going to ask you to contemplate and consider your own personal relationship with God in regards to law and promise.
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Have you come into a relationship with God through the promise? Or are you still trying to strive and struggle to please
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God by laws and rules and regulations? I encourage you to think about that as you sit in your seat. There's a table set up in the back and a table set up in the front.
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And if you want to throw that slide up there, Kyle made this fandangled thing that just basically, if you look at it this way, we're going to rotate this way as we go through to the table.
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So just come up the middle aisle and around to the back and there's a table back there. It just makes the flow a little bit easier.
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So that's Kyle. I don't mean to ruin the moment here for you with the technical stuff, but if you're in Christ, I encourage you at any time during the song, get up and take communion.
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If you're not, you kind of say, I'm still in this law thing. I'm trying to figure out who Jesus Christ is. And I encourage you to sit down and just contemplate and promise that's been given to you.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for the promise. I am a beneficiary of a promise made to a man centuries ago.
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And yet I stand here in 2012. And just the, the way that your revelation fits together,
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Loctite is just amazing. I'm in awe that here we see Paul expositing and explaining this promise from centuries, even before him.
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And now we look back at Paul centuries ago, and it still makes sense today. I rejoice in this promise.
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And I ask that you would help us to spread this glorious promise of blessing to this community, that you desire for people to be made whole and complete through your son.
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I ask that you would help us to reflect on this as we take the bread and think of the body of Christ broken for us and the blood that was shed for us.