WWUTT 1771 Children of God By Faith, Part 2 (Galatians 3:21-29)

Before Jesus Christ came and we put our faith in him, the law was a tutor or a guardian for us. It showed us our sin and need for a savior, and Christ is that savior when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible study in the word of God that we may comprehend with all the saints how wide, how high, and how deep is the love of Christ. Tell all your friends about our ministry at www .tt .com.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Reading Galatians 3:21-29

Thank you, Becky. We come back to a sermon that I started last week out of Galatians 3, verses 21 to 29. I'm gonna begin by reading our text and then we'll continue on with part two today. Galatians 3, starting in verse 21.

Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? May it never be, for if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed be by law. But the scripture has shut up everyone under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

But before faith came, we were held in custody under the law, being shut up for the coming faith to be revealed. Therefore, the law has become our tutor unto Christ so that we may be justified by faith.

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor for you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who are baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek.

There is neither slave nor free man. There is no male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to promise. Here is part two of the sermon, children of God by faith.

The Law as a Guide to Holiness

God's righteousness is given to the believer so that we may live in righteousness for all who believe. And like I said, those who then know the gospel desire the law. The law makes us want grace. Grace makes us want the law.

How then may I live in such a way that is pleasing unto God? Well, the answer to that is quantified in what we call the 10 commandments, the Decalogue. All of the laws of God summarized there in those 10 commands.

You'll love the Lord your God. You'll have no other gods. You will not raise up a graven image. You will not take the Lord's name in vain. You will honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. You will, children, obey your parents and the Lord for this is right.

You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. You shall not covet. Those 10 commandments summarize the law of God for his people. And we can even summarize those 10 commandments even further down than that because those 10 commandments are separated into two tables referred to as the first table of the law and the second table of the law.

The first table of the law are those first four commands. They're vertical commands dealing with our relationship with God. And the first table of the law can be summarized this way. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.

The second table of the law are horizontal commands. They deal with our relationship with one another, our fellow man, our brothers and sisters. And those six commandments can be summarized this way. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love God, love people is not the gospel.

That's the law.

But it's because we know the gospel that we are saved by faith in Christ that what is awakened in us is a desire to love God, love people. What does that look like? That's what we find in the commands of God.

And with every negative command, there is a positive. There is a positive implied. What do I mean by that? We'll say, for example, the commandment says to us, do not murder.

That's the negative.

What would be the positive implication? Love one another, show charity and kindness to each other. Philippians chapter two, consider other's needs ahead of your own. Do you understand that when Paul says that, by the Holy Spirit of God that is within him, of course, as he's talking to the Philippians.

But when he says to the Philippians, do not consider yourselves more highly than you ought to think, but consider other's needs ahead of your own. When he says that, what he's repeating is the command, do not murder, but giving the positive affirmation of it rather than the negative affirmation.

Another commandment that we have is do not covet. That's the negative. What would be the positive? Be thankful for everything that God has given you. Be lacking in nothing, but know that he is supplied for your every need in Christ Jesus.

Paul, again, with the Philippians saying, I know what it's like to have plenty and I know what it's like to be in need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. You know what another way is of saying that?

Paul's saying, in Christ, I do not covet because I am fully satisfied in my Savior Christ. Paul even appeals to the 10 commandments directly when he gives instructions to the churches. In Ephesians chapter six, he says, children obey your parents to the Lord for this is right.

And he says, this is the first commandment with a promise. So he's even repeating it as it was given to the Israelites in Exodus chapter 20 and repeated again in Deuteronomy. The 10 commandments have not been nullified.

It's not that they don't exist for us anymore, but rather what they give us is a guide for what it means to live in such a way that is pleasing unto our Lord. How do we grow in holiness? How do we live as Christ lived?

We find it in the law. Jesus said in Matthew five, I did not come to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them. If Christ loved the law, and if he fulfilled the law, and if we are believers and followers of Christ, then how much are we also obligated to keep it and fulfill it as he did?

Now, he fulfilled a ceremonial law that we cannot fulfill. That was all the laws that pertain to sacrifices and whatnot. That has been paid for by Christ. Thankfully, we no longer have to sacrifice goats and rams and turtle doves, et cetera, et cetera.

Amen, praise the Lord, glory, hallelujah. As we have been going through the Old Testament in my Old Testament study on Thursday night, one of the things that we noticed from Exodus on, is just how bloody it all is.

Even when you get to Joshua and Judges and 1st and 2nd Kings and 1st and 2nd Chronicles, all the sacrifices that are offered. Sometimes thousands and thousands of bulls and goats or sheep, when there's some sort of revival in the land, there are a lot of animals that die.

That's a lot of blood spilled for the forgiveness of sins, to make atonement, to make peace with God. And one drop of Christ's blood is more powerful than all the thousands of oxen that were ever slaughtered in His name.

By the blood of Christ, our sins are forgiven. And we have peace with God and He fulfilled all that ceremonial commandment. That no longer applies. When we read that now in the Old Testament, it just makes us all the more thankful for what Christ fulfilled with His death on the cross.

But His death does not nullify, does not nullify those moral commandments that we have been given. For Paul even says in Romans 2, the moral commandments have been written on the heart of every man. You know, as I said to you earlier, in order to know that the gospel is good news, you have to hear the bad news first.

You have to hear that you have transgressed the law and it is only by faith in Christ that you're forgiven of your sins and you're saved. And as I've said that before, you've heard me preach on that before, you might say to yourself, well, nobody ever preached the law to me.

I never heard the law before I heard the gospel. But see, God was gracious to you in that you had the law on your heart already. It's called your conscience. God had given you a conscience. And when you heard the gospel, the guilt that you felt was in knowing in your heart, even though you had not heard the law, you had transgressed against God.

And you needed a savior and you needed to believe in Christ in order to be saved. That was the grace of God that did that in your heart, even though the soil may not have been tilled by the preaching of the law so that you would understand your sinfulness and need for a savior.

You get what I'm saying? So God so graciously has revealed his son to us, whether or not the person who evangelized us did it the right way, but yet it's by the grace of God that anybody's been saved anyway.

And this by faith in Jesus Christ, the promise. And it's through faith in Christ then that our desire is to please our maker and the law is not contrary to the promises of God, but rather reveals them all the more clearly for us.

The Law Cannot Give Life

Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Mignoita, certainly not. For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. Did you know that if you could keep the law perfectly, you would have eternal life?

Where do I get that from? Well, Jesus said so himself. In Luke chapter 10, there's a lawyer that comes to Jesus and says, good teacher, what must I do to have eternal life? And Jesus says, what does the law say?

How do you read it? And the lawyer gave the twofold summary of the law. Love the Lord, your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus replied to him, you have answered correctly.

Do this and you shall live. If we could keep the law perfectly, we would have eternal life, but we can't. And the law was given not so we would follow it and have eternal life, but to reveal the transgression that we have committed against God so that we would know we need a Savior who did keep the law perfectly and became that perfect sacrifice for us with his death on the cross.

Romans 6 .23, I've said to you already this morning, for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, the wages of sin is death. We have sinned, we deserve death.

Now, wait a second. Jesus didn't sin and he died. So how does that apply? Well, it's because he became sin for us. 2 Corinthians 5 .21, he became sin who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness of God.

He kept the law perfectly, and in so doing shows his eternal life that he has with the Father. And so all of us who believe in Christ, therefore receive that eternal life. We could not keep the law, he did.

He became sin for us, died for us, rose again from the grave. God raised him from the grave to show that he received the sacrifice of his son. So now that by faith in Jesus, we are rescued from the wages of sin.

The wages have been paid in Christ. Though the body will still die, our spirit will be with the Lord forever. And even a day will come when our bodies will be raised from the grave. And all of this by the power of God who fulfilled these things through his son.

The Law as a Guardian Until Christ

I mentioned to you that as I was studying through this section of Galatians chapter three, I was studying from Dr. Stephen Lawson, one of the ministers that I listened to preaching on this particular section.

And one of the things that Dr. Lawson said was that every city needs two things. Every city needs the law, right? Every city need the law. Can you think of how chaos Junction City would be if there was no law?

Like the law is a blessing, the law is a keeper. As Paul will go on and articulate here. The law keeps us in line. How chaotic would society be if everybody was just in anarchy? Everybody was disobeying the law.

Everybody was a law unto themselves. So this is why in Romans chapter 13, Paul says we need to be subject to the governing authorities because every authority has been established by God. God has given us government to keep civility.

So every city needs a law. That's one thing. Dr. Lawson goes on to say, every city needs a law and every city needs the church. Because what's going to happen is the people in that city are not going to keep the law and they need to hear the gospel.

So every city needs a law. Every city needs the church. The law has not been nullified. The law still applies. The law is still necessary. And you know that and you believe that. You don't think that the law no longer applies to believers in a new covenant today.

The law applies to absolutely everyone. But it is only those who are in Christ who can keep the law in a way that is pleasing to God. Paul goes on to explain the purpose of the law. The scripture imprisoned everything under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

Now, before faith came, and this could be applied two ways. Before faith came. Before your faith came, your personal faith, or before the Christian faith came altogether. Christ preaching the gospel and all those who believe in Him would enter into the Christian faith.

So before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. We were in prison here. This is personification that Paul is using here. Kind of making the law as being like a jailer or a warden of a prison.

So the law keeps us imprisoned, keeps us bound, keeps us restrained from doing worse evil than we could have been doing until the coming faith would be revealed. Now that applied in a pre-New Testament time, and it also applies to us now.

Before we come to faith in Christ, there's still a law that exists that keeps us from falling into worse evil than we are currently in. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith.

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. Now, some of you may have a translation that instead of the word guardian,.

It says tutor.

And when you've heard this section preached, that may have been the way that you've heard it preached, taught to you before, that before Christ came, we were under a tutor. Now, what's a tutor? We all kind of know what a tutor is, right?

When I was in college, I even worked as a tutor. Some friends of mine and I, in order to make some cash, we were tutors. We'd have some high school students, usually somebody who was involved in extracurricular activities.

They needed some assistance to keep their grades up so they could keep their eligibility. So they would hire a tutor. And then we would help them with math, science, you know, whatever else. Maybe you've had a tutor before.

Maybe you've been a tutor. That's typically what we think of regarding that word. But you got to think of this in terms of a first century Greco-Roman aspect. A tutor was actually a slave. And a slave who was hired by a rich master to take care of his son.

And each child that the master had would have their own tutor. And this tutor or guardian, as Paul puts it here, would follow this person around. It could be that because of the way that we consider tutor today, that the English standard version translators decided guardian was a more appropriate word since we don't think of tutor the same way anymore.

But as a guardian or this kind of tutor in the Greco-Roman aspect, the tutor would have been given to the master's son starting at age six and would have stayed with them until the age of 16. And this guardian had all the authority and power of the master.

They not only taught the child, they also punished the child, disciplined the child. They would make sure the child got to their studies on time and would make sure that they would get back home. That child never went anywhere without the guardian or the tutor.

And then once the child reached the age of 16, this slave who worked for the master would no longer be that child's guardian, but they would have considered to have entered into adulthood at that point and would no longer be under the guardian.

But this is the comparison that Paul makes, again, as he's personifying the law, that we're under a guardian, someone who would have the authority to punish us should we disobey the master. But now that faith has come, we're no longer under a guardian.

For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith. We're no longer under the guardian. There's not like a middleman between our father and us, but rather we now are in relationship with the father.

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. We are as much sons of God now as Christ is the son of God. We have been adopted into his family through who is referred to as our elder brother in Romans 8, 29.

Through faith in Christ, we have all become sons and daughters of God. And so Paul says, there's now no distinction. There's nothing that separates us one from another. In God, we are all received by the same love under the same grace, recipients of the same promise will enter into the same kingdom.

We all have the same reward. There is no one who receives more favor than another. So we get to this point in verse 28, where Paul says, there is neither Jew nor Greek. Now, the reason why he starts with those two in particular is because the Jews thought they were better than Greeks since they had been given the law in the first place.

The Greeks thought that they were better than the Jews because the Jews had transgressed the law, but the Greeks didn't even have the law to transgress it. And now we've been given faith. So look, I'm better than you are.

So there was this separation between Jews and Greeks. But as we read in Romans 3, 22, there is no distinction for all have sinned, Jew or Greek. But in Christ, there's no distinction between the two. There's no favoritism being placed on one or the other.

God is not loving one less than the other. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is not slave nor free, another class separation that existed in the Roman Empire. Slaves had less rights than free people did.

But in the kingdom of God, everyone's gonna receive the same reward, whether you are slave or free. There is no male and female, another class distinction that existed in the Roman Empire. Men had more authority than women did.

A man's testimony in court was admissible, a woman's was not. There were certain jobs, tasks, government authority given to men that women could not have. But in the kingdom of God, both men and women receive that reward equally.

Beware the way people use this verse, by the way, for there are some in our trans loving culture today who are wanting to take this verse where it says there is no male and female, say, see, sexual distinctions don't matter to God.

It's not what's being said. As long as we live in these bodies, there are still gonna be certain responsibilities for men, certain responsibilities for women. Just to give you an example of that, go to Titus 2, and you see the instructions that are given for men and women of the church respectively.

So as long as we live in these bodies, there are going to be different gifts, different callings for different people. But ultimately the reward is the same for everybody. Peter even said in 1 Peter 3, husbands love your wives for they are fellow heirs of the kingdom of God with you.

So don't look down on your wife. But men and women receive the kingdom of God together. There is no male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

We're all one.

We're one body, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of us all, one spirit who lives in all. One Lord in Christ who has saved us and whom we serve. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.

Thank you for listening to When We Understand The Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com and click on the give tab in the top right corner of the page.

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