Chapter 6
One of the unique problems the first Christians had was that this new faith was just that — new. The ancients were not as stupid as some moderns would have us believe. They wondered why a faith had come into the world that hadn't been present before. This new-fangled faith lacked the gravitas of the ages. Why should it be taken seriously by serious people if it was so novel?
Paul's response is that it isn't new. The roots of this faith go way, way back — all the way to the founder of faith.
Abraham, who appears in the first book of the Bible.
So also, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” (Galatians 3:6)
Abraham did not receive his righteousness by doing stuff. He received it in the same way Paul is preaching. He trusted God. He received it by faith. He didn't DO anything. It is exactly the same way the Galatians receive their righteousness. This faith is indeed founded in antiquity.
Understand, then, that those who have faith are sons of Abraham. (Galatians 3:7)
This raised a question: what about the people who are not "children of Abraham" — that is, non-Jews? The answer is that this faith has been opened up to all people, not just the physical descendants of Abraham, but people like those living in Galatia or anywhere else in the world. Non-Jews, Gentiles, can be brought into the fold. They can be included in the promise — the promise that God gave to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12.
The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and foretold the gospel to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” (Galatians 3:8)
Far from following a new and original faith, those who trust in Christ line up with Abraham — the great truster of God — and they are blessed just as Abraham was blessed. Instead of joining a new faith, the Galatians are the receivers of the promise given to the founder of faith all those many centuries ago. The message was announced not just by the Apostle Paul. It was announced to Abraham.
So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. (Galatians 3:9)
So, in summary thus far: Paul reminds them that they received the Spirit not by following the law but by trusting God, and in doing so, they line up with the Father of Faith, Abraham. What Paul's opponents argue — that the Galatians should obey the law — actually deviates from the example of Abraham and the weighty promise given to him.
So far, it is possible that Paul's opponents in Galatia may not have disagreed. Indeed, up to this point they may have nodded their heads along. "Sure, sure," they might have said. "The faith started in antiquity. Sure, it fulfils the promise. But Paul, you might not realise this, but we're actually talking about the same thing. Abraham came, and then later God's law was given. We now just need to work as hard as we can to obey God's law. We have agreement. Abraham, then the law. Get circumcised!"
So this is when Paul starts talking about the law.
To begin with, there is a correction he wishes to make — one that may have been as common in the ancient world as it is today. That is the tendency to think of God's law in the same way as our everyday laws in modern society.
No one can pick and choose what they wish to obey from any law. If I murdered someone but pleaded in my defence that I should be let off because I had kept the rest of the law, it wouldn't cut it. Despite keeping the rest of the law, I am still a lawbreaker, and I should suffer the consequences, whatever they may be. Despite pleading innocence in all other respects, I would still be guilty of murder.
But let's say I got a speeding ticket. Can I argue that, given the minor nature of the crime and the fact that I've generally been an upstanding person, I should just pay a fine to atone for what I have done and still regard myself as a law-abiding citizen? Living in this fallen world, I could do that. Of course, I'm comparing myself to all other sinful people, and a huge number of sinful people have, either wittingly or unwittingly, earned a speeding ticket — and we all think the same thing. Pay the fine, move on, and don't speed.
But we make a significant mistake if we think our laws are an exact metaphor for God's law. It makes things confusing. Many of us think that, just as with our human laws — where law-abiding citizens can get the odd speeding ticket and still be OK — so we can commit what we consider minor infractions of God's law and still consider ourselves worthy of God's general respect.
No, says Paul.
All who rely on works of the law are under a curse. For it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” (Galatians 3:10)
The emphasis, as you read this, is on the word "everything."
A better metaphor in this situation would be my home wifi. Sometimes very small things go wrong with my wifi — as small as a speeding fine — but instead of things "generally working," I simply no longer get internet access. It was a tiny thing that went wrong; some box was incorrectly ticked or unticked. Yet the "internet law" was broken, and now nothing works. I can get upset that it was a small thing, but I can't argue that it is unjust. That's how IT works.
So too with God's law. We cannot have any infractions — not even a speeding ticket. As Jesus asks us in the Sermon on the Mount: be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). One infraction means we are not perfect. This is the direction Jesus is heading when he says:
You have heard that it was said to the ancients, ‘Do not murder’ and ‘Anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. (Matthew 5:21–22)
The call to be perfect is a big ask. It's a tall order. Who can do it? The answer is no one. And the unfortunate truth is that we're not even remotely close.
Elsewhere in the New Testament it is clear that our infractions can hardly be likened to clicking the wrong box on a computer, or to a traffic offence. The more we look at our own lives, the more we realise how fallen we actually are. In reality we are so far from God's law that the only honest appraisal of ourselves is "depraved." Jesus actually describes us human beings as evil — even as he reminds us that we still know how to love our own (Matthew 7:11).
Our common depravity deceives us into thinking we're not that bad, and into supposing that God can wink at our continual breaking of the injunctions given in the Sermon on the Mount.
This is a remarkably common view, one that has permeated all the way into our culture: the idea that we human beings are not that bad. Of course — so the thinking goes — there are always a few rotten eggs, but most of us are reasonable people. Breaking God's law is really only a minor infraction, as long as we didn't hurt anyone. In fact, I've heard people say that because God is love, he shouldn't get upset about infractions at all. He shouldn't punish us. Why? Because we're simply trying our best, and God should be "big enough" to cope with these trivialities.
This idea, or some variant of it, is so engrained in our culture that people find Paul's perspective hard to swallow. If people are trying hard to obey the law, the Apostle's view may seem unreasonable. "There are people out there who are trying their level best," some may say. "Good people who wouldn't harm a fly. They are obeying (a variant of) the law as best they can — and you're saying they're cursed?"
He's saying that people, despite knowing how to give good gifts to their children, have in the very depths of their being missed the mark. They are unable to have a relationship with a perfect God no matter how hard they try to obey the law, because they can't obey "everything." They are cursed, and remain cursed even when they're trying their very best.
And to be clear, we are talking about relying on those efforts — that is, thinking they might secure a person a place in God's kingdom on their own hard work. This is not to say that trying to follow God's law is wrong in itself. It is always a noble and upright aspiration to follow Jesus' ethics. Good is always good, no matter who does it. But to rely on that as some kind of ticket to salvation — or even to hope that it might be — is badly mistaken.
Relying on the law for salvation is a literal dead-end. It is like spending a lot of time and energy organising the photos on your computer in the hope that the internet will come back online.
So trusting God for salvation and trying to obey God's law for salvation are not two equal options for folks to choose between. They are not two pathways to the same end. They are not two different ways "up to the mountain top." One of those ways leads to eternal life, and the other leads to misery and judgment.
All who rely on works of the law are under a curse.
But Paul adds something else. The Scriptures themselves — the Old Testament — testify that a right relationship with God comes by faith, not by the law.
Now it is clear that no one is justified before God by the law, because, “The righteous will live by faith.” (Galatians 3:11)
The Old Testament underlines that right relationship with God comes by faith, not by works of the law.
This goes against a view held by some Christians about the Old and New Testaments. The view goes something like this. The Old Testament was a trial of living by works. God's people tried to live by works, but they couldn't do it. They kept going and kept failing, and God kept punishing them. So God scrapped that plan — Plan A — and started Plan B, which was sending Jesus and having his people live by faith. Or, to put it another way: God told people how to live in the Old Testament, and over the centuries they learnt that they couldn't do it. So then God sent Jesus.
The trouble with that view is that it goes against what the Old Testament itself says about right relationship with God. Look at the story of Abraham in Genesis. On occasions in the story, the great patriarch was not the best role model when it came to doing the right thing. Yet he was considered righteous before God. How?
Abram believed the LORD, and it was credited to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:6)
The answer is, "the righteous will live by faith."
These words are taken from the tiny book of Habakkuk, where the prophet is asked to trust God despite the alarming events that are about to happen all around him:
Look at the proud one; his soul is not upright — but the righteous will live by faith. (Habakkuk 2:4)
Habakkuk is a fellow who is pretty distressed about all the bad things that were happening, and that were going to happen. His cry is a particularly modern one. "Why do You tolerate wrongdoing?" he asks of God (Habakkuk 1:13). "How long, O LORD, must I call for help but You do not hear?" (Habakkuk 1:2). These two questions, or a form of them, come up in our modern world all the time — sometimes daily.
What is God's answer? He does NOT say, "Look, Habakkuk, you need to honour me by closer adherence to the law," or "You need to show your devotion by going on a pilgrimage," or "I will give you an answer if you just spend all your time thinking and studying about it," or "It's up to you to make sure this community follows the law." He says none of these things. What he does say is, in effect: trust me. "The righteous will live by faith."
Justification by faith is in the Old Testament. It is not a new idea. It is all through the Bible. It starts at the very beginning, in Genesis.
This is how, when the Galatians become Christians, they line up with Abraham and Habakkuk and all the people of faith in the Old Testament.
And it is also why, Paul argues, no one who relies on the law is justified before God.
He goes on.
The law, however, is not based on faith; on the contrary, “The man who does these things will live by them.” (Galatians 3:12)
The law is not based on faith because it puts the recipient in control and gets them to try to achieve it. It is not based on trust. Let's say, for example, a college insists you need a certain mark to get into its halls of learning. Then all you have to do is get that mark or above. That's not faith. If I got my marks and then wasn't allowed in, I could show the authorities that, by their own criteria, I should be allowed in, and argue my case. I could argue that, by their own system, I have to be let in. That's how the law works.
That's how many people think about entry into God's kingdom. Either they think they have a case for entry, or they speak of it with the vague concern of a high-school exam: "I can only hope that I've done enough." All of that is law speak.
Paul, however, has pointed out that no one has got even remotely close to doing all the things the law requires. No one is justified by the law. We have nothing to argue with, nothing to stand on. We are all cursed. Each and every one of us. Me and you.
What's to be done? How could the Spirit descend to us when we are so depraved? When a person realises how far short we fall before the glory of God, the thought of receiving God's Spirit is not joyful — it's frightening.
When Jesus met a man filled with evil spirits, the man screamed at him:
What do You want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? (Mark 5:7)
Reading that story in Mark 5, one can sense the terror in the spirits as they plead with Jesus not to destroy them. It was like darkness screaming at light not to approach — for if it did, the darkness would no longer be darkness. It would be gone.
And we, though not possessed by a legion of evil spirits, are in a similar position. What has intense purity, glory, power and majesty got to do with grubby, self-absorbed, pathetic you and me? If God is light and in him there is no darkness at all, it would be impossible for his Spirit to dwell in us. If he did, we would no longer exist. We would be gone.
So this is God's problem. How does he approach us without destroying us? How does he show mercy to us AND deal with the darkness?
One solution that people have come up with is simply to wash the bad stuff away. Save us by getting rid of the darkness and keeping the good stuff in us. "Why doesn't God just forgive us?"
This question often belies a misunderstanding of two things.
The first misunderstanding is about how depraved we actually are. In my experience, people who hold this view have a vision of God forgiving them for specific wrongdoing — the way they spoke to a family member last September, say, or some other misdemeanour. Other than that, they think they have a pretty good scaffolding of goodness within them for God to work with. However, if God did actually "wash" away all the bad stuff, as people ask him to, there would be nothing left of the individual.
The second misunderstanding has to do with the justice of God. If God is light and in him there is no darkness at all, then he cannot be unjust. He cannot "wink" at wrongdoing. He cannot abandon calling evil people to account. Imagine how those who suffer under tyrants would feel if they knew God could say to the tyrant: "Look — I know you did a lot of evil things, and it's not OK, but I'm feeling in a forgiving mood, so I'll let you off the hook for your past crimes. But rest assured, everyone, I'm definitely going to punish those people worse than you." Those who suffered under the tyrant would have every moral right to wonder where the justice of the Almighty is.
To be just, someone's got to pay the price. To be the perfect Judge, a sentence has to be passed. And passing that sentence would mean our destruction. We would be gone. The wages of sin is death.
So what about God's mercy and love? How can a loving God pass such a sentence on us? How does the justice of God combine with the mercy of God? How do these things reconcile?
To many in the ancient world, this was too hard a nut to crack. Right the way through the Old Testament, the complaints to God are either about his apparent lack of justice or his apparent lack of mercy. "When I tried to understand all this, it was troublesome in my sight," says the psalmist when he sees the wicked getting away with outrage (Psalm 73:16). Or take the book of Job, where Job cries out to God because, unlike his friends, he believes he has done nothing to deserve the sufferings inflicted upon him. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes, after surveying the apparent inconsistencies of justice in this world, concludes:
A man is unable to comprehend the work that is done under the sun. Despite his efforts to search it out, he cannot find its meaning. (Ecclesiastes 8:17)
These writers look to the final destiny as the solution — the place where everything will be righted in the end. They trusted that God would sort it all out. But how God was going to sort it all out, how a solution could possibly be found, few imagined.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” (Galatians 3:13)
The solution was for God to come to earth himself, as a man, and to take upon himself the punishment of mankind.
According to the law, anyone hung on a pole (or a cross) and left there was cursed by God. Not blessed by God — cursed by God. Why did Jesus, the Son of God, put himself in that position? God becomes cursed. Why?
Many think the reason was that, when Jesus was in Jerusalem at that critical Passover, things just tragically got out of hand. "Jesus was the greatest man who ever lived, and look what happened to him" is one way of expressing this view. Others think he did it to be an example for us to live by: "Jesus gave his life as an example to follow, so we should live ascetic, sacrificial lives."
What Paul says is that he became a curse for nothing less than redemption. Redemption for Paul, for the Galatians, and for us. Redeeming us by becoming a curse for us. Jesus paid the price. The bad stuff within us is not magically washed away — it is dealt with. But we are not destroyed. Instead, Jesus was.
We are in no position to redeem ourselves, despite many people down through history, and in the present day, trying very hard to do so. The Pharisees were right to point out, in Mark 2:
Who can forgive sins but God alone? (Mark 2:7)
The only individual who could actually redeem us is God himself.
And so, incredibly, it proved to be. Jesus, being in very nature God, became a curse for us to redeem us — so that by trusting in this sacrificial payment, by faith, we receive the promise of the Spirit. The blessing given to Abraham all those years ago came through what Jesus has done.
For some, the explanation of this transaction can be confusing, challenging, too brutal and base. Some people get tripped into thinking that a third party is involved — that is, we human beings sin, God demands justice before he can relate to us, and in comes Jesus as an innocent third party to redeem us by his death. Thus the blasphemous idea of God as a "child abuser" is born. It is the idea that God's son is like Isaac in Genesis 22. In the story, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham takes Isaac to Moriah and prepares for the sacrifice. Isaac is no fool, and speaks up:
“My father!” “Here I am, my son,” he replied. “The fire and the wood are here,” said Isaac, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham answered, “God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” (Genesis 22:7–8)
Some have taken Jesus to be like Isaac — in the first half of the story, not the second. An innocent third party, willing to go along with his Father without fully understanding what is going on in the big picture.
On one occasion, when I was discussing this issue, someone tried to close the discussion with a series of venomous questions: "Why did God send Jesus to atone for sins? What did Jesus do to deserve this? Why didn't God do it himself?"
But that is exactly what Paul is saying.
Incredibly, wonderfully, God did do it himself. In a manner of speaking, God sent himself. The flaw in the reasoning is to view Jesus as somehow less than God. But Jesus says, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). He is described as the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his nature, upholding all things by his powerful word (Hebrews 1:3). Paul says in another letter that he is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15).
There is no third party. This is all of God. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
Jesus himself was the decision-maker. And he didn't do it begrudgingly. For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame (Hebrews 12:2).
I can imagine Paul, pacing while dictating to his scribe, now stopping and standing still. He stares at his scribe as if looking through him, in be-wonderment. In many ways Paul was permanently awe-struck. He is constantly in awe of God. To ask what we need to do is to ask the wrong question. It isn't about what we need to do — it's about what God has done for us through Jesus.
The long-awaited blessing, the blessing promised to Abraham, becomes fulfilled.
And, as a promised blessing, it comes to non-Jews — all nations — who, by faith, line up with Abraham, so that God can dwell in them by his Spirit. And this is done without making them terrified of judgment, like the demons, and without destroying all the bad in them. That has already been done in Christ. Justice and mercy have both been fulfilled. God found a way to do the impossible, as the Old Testament writers knew he would.
He redeemed us in order that the blessing promised to Abraham would come to the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit. (Galatians 3:14)
This is the message that so captivated Paul — the message that has captivated millions of people from all backgrounds, walks of life and cultures, right down through history to our present day. The promise given to Abraham's seed, that all nations will be blessed through him, has indeed been fulfilled, and continues to be so.