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THE GOOD NEWS OF GOD'S GRACE IS RECEIVED BY FAITH ALONEGalatians 3:1-9INTRODUCTION Which of you parents have ever said to one of your children, “You foolish child?” What are some reasons a parent might preface a lecture to a child with this statement? When a child has harmed themselves or something or someone else by their behavior even though they have been clearly informed that this behavior would result in harm, then we might say to them, “You foolish child.” You tell your child on Sunday morning not to run in her good clothes or she will fall and get a hole in her tights. She runs, falls and gets a hole in her tights. You tell your son not to go barefoot in the alley because he will cut his foot on the broken glass that is there and he goes barefoot in the alley and cuts his foot. You tell your child not to ride her bike while she delivers papers because she isn’t strong enough to keep the bike from tipping over when she’s loaded down with papers. She comes home with her knee all cut up because she rode her bike while delivering papers. When this happens you say to your child, “You foolish child, didn’t I tell you this would happen? Why didn’t you listen to me?” All of these illustrations are simple and only mildly tragic. The tone of our voice when we say, “You foolish child,” is only gently stern. However, when children bring great harm to themselves or others due to their doing what they’ve been told not to do, then the tone of our voice becomes sterner and less sympathetic. We add words like, “How could you do this? What were you thinking? How many times have I told you not to do this? Don’t you have any brains?” If we are being good parents and not just getting mad because we don’t like being disrespected, or having our TV show interrupted, our sternness and language are aimed at correcting the child’s behavior. We want them to know how serious this is and how necessary it is for their own good to not do this again. We reprimand them and discipline them because we love them and want good for them. This is the emotion that Paul expresses in this passage and the aim he has in it. He says to the people in the churches of Galatia, “O you foolish Galatians.” In this statement we detect Paul’s zeal for the truth of the gospel and his compassion for these people. Paul is not being spiteful or insulting them because he is feeling rejected by them. Rather, it is out of his fatherly zeal for their well-being that he so strongly and sternly reprimands them. His strong language is born out of his passion for the glory of Christ and for their eternal well-being. As John Calvin says, “When we hear that the Son of God, with all his benefits, is rejected, that his death is esteemed as nothing, what pious mind would not break out into indignation?” He tells them that they are acting as though someone has put a spell upon them, as if they have been hypnotized so that they are obeying the commands of someone else. They are acting completely contrary to what he knows they know to be the truth. They are embracing a false gospel, which says that in addition to faith in Christ you must keep the law in order to be made right with God. It is this, which causes him to declare that they are acting like people who have taken leave of their senses, as if they don’t have a brain in their head, as if they are under the control of some supernatural force or person. Paul knows who it is that has deceived them and taken them captive to do his will. He says in several of his other letters that every false teacher is an agent of the devil. “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron…” (1 Timothy 4:1-2). Paul sees that while they are foolish, yet they are at the same time victims. They have been taken in and put under the spell of Satan by these false teachers. What Paul aims to do in these nine verses is to show them why their embracing the message that they must obey the Law as it is contained in the OT is so illogical. They know better than this and he is out to prove to them that they are fools to believe God will save them based upon what they do. He aims to prove to them that God does not give anyone any of the benefits of salvation based upon how they live their lives but on the basis of their faith in Christ. MAIN POINT All the benefits of God’s salvation are given to those who believe without any regard to how they live because… I. Christ died to secure these benefits for believers only (v.1) The first evidence that Paul puts forward to show the Galatians their foolishness, their being under the control of a supernatural power is that he clearly portrayed the crucified Christ to them by his preaching. The word he uses here is a very expressive one. It carries the idea of an artist painting a picture and putting it on public display. He described Christ’s crucifixion so clearly it was as though they were actually present when he died. That is what Paul says that he did by his preaching. The heart of the gospel is Jesus Christ and him crucified. It is the message of the cross. What Paul did in his preaching was to show that the crucified Christ is the only Savior of sinners. The mission of Jesus Christ was completed in his death. He said the reason he was born was so that he could die. It was at his death that he declared, “it is finished.” It was by his death that he said that he would be glorified and his Father would be glorified in him. In other words, he says that his death is the most noteworthy thing about him, the thing that most shows off his greatness and the greatness of his Father. Paul says that he did everything in his power to portray the death of Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the law and the only hope of salvation. He bent all of his efforts to persuade them that the main event in the history of the universe is the death of Jesus Christ on a Roman cross. The point of reminding them that the crucified Christ is the heart of his message is because of what he said in 2:21. If right standing with God is gained by obedience to the law then why in the world did Jesus Christ die? And, Paul would say, you know that he died because his death was the subject of my preaching to you. I painted the picture of his death by my preaching as clearly as is humanly possible because righteousness cannot come by law keeping but only by Christ’s death. If law-keeping is what saves you then that is what I would have talked about but I didn’t talk about the law or law-keeping because it is Christ’s death that makes us righteous, not obeying the law of Moses. When Paul says that he clearly portrayed Jesus Christ as crucified he is not saying that he just kept describing the physical torture and death of Jesus. He wasn’t out to make sure everyone understood all the gruesome details of Christ’s final hours like Mel Gibson did in his movie, “The Passion of Christ.” Rather, he showed how Christ’s death was the necessary fulfillment of the OT and the means by which all God’s promises are justly given to sinners. He described the crucifixion but also he sought to answer these kinds of questions, “why was it necessary for the Son of God to die on the cross? Why is it that God cannot forgive anyone without the bloody death of his only Son? How did Christ glorify his Father by his death? What does the death of Christ have to do with God’s plan to make a new heavens and a new earth? What are the ways that the crucified Christ has fulfilled, is fulfilling or will fulfill the OT? What does Jesus’ death have to do with the coming of the Holy Spirit?” Imagine belonging to a tribe of people living in a remote corner of the Amazon jungle. Some missionaries come to your tribe. They learn the language and the culture and then begin to explain the gospel of God’s grace to you. The main event in this “good news”, you discover, is that the founder and leader of the missionaries’ religion was betrayed and died. In fact, the missionaries assure you that the purpose of the life of their leader, Jesus, was his death. He was born to die. Isn’t that weird? Everyone dies but no one would say that the reason they were born was to die. There is no other religion in the world that says the main event is the death of the leader. It is the death of Jesus that sets Christianity apart from every other religion in the world. It is the crucified Jesus who is to be the object of our attention, our faith, our affection. The Galatians were busy thinking about the Law of Moses, their need to be circumcised, the kinds of food they ought to eat, who they could associate with and how they were going to keep the moral law. Paul tells them they are foolish when he was so clear in showing them that the cross of Christ was to be the center of their attention. They are not to be preoccupied with what they are doing but about what Christ has done for them by his substitutionary death. What occupies your attention? Jesus Christ was crucified so every believer could justly be given all the benefits of salvation. Therefore, his death and all that comes to us by it is to be our primary preoccupation. Again, we’re not just talking about spending our time thinking about Jesus hanging on the cross but upon all the ways his death is our salvation. He loved me and gave himself for me is what we are to be preoccupied with. Most of us spend way more time thinking about what we are doing than about what Christ has done for us. We are far more impressed with our obedience or lack thereof than we are with Christ’s once for all death. We are far more taken up with the trivial pleasures of this world than with the glorious, crucified Son of God, who died to obtain eternal pleasures at God’s right hand for us. All the benefits of God’s salvation are given to those who believe without any regard to how they live because…
II. The Holy Spirit is given to apply these benefits to believers only (vv. 2-5) In vv. 2-5 Paul moves from the objective facts of the gospel to their experience of the gospel. In other words, he changes the focus of his argument from the cross of Christ as the ground of salvation to the work of the Holy Spirit who applies the salvation won by Christ. The first thing to notice here is that every person who is justified, that is declared not guilty but perfectly righteous by faith in Christ also has received the Holy Spirit in all of his fullness. Those who would teach that the giving of the Holy Spirit is something separate from justification are shown to be false teachers by this text. Those who teach that there are two kinds of Christians, spiritual and carnal, Spirit baptized and non-Spirit baptized are wrong. There is only one kind of Christian, the justified, Spirit baptized and dependent kind. We know that because in v. 2 he uses exactly the same language as he used back in 2:16. We are not justified by observing the law but by faith in Christ and so here we receive the Holy Spirit, not by observing the law but by believing what we heard, Christ died for us. Paul tells us three things about the Holy Spirit’s work and relationship to those who believe. First, in v. 2, every believer receives the Holy Spirit as a gift from God. The Holy Spirit lives in us and thus by him we receive the very life of God himself. Jesus says in John 14 that the Holy Spirit will be another counselor just like him who lives in us. Then he says that he will not leave us as orphans but he will come to live in us. In other words, the Holy Spirit is Christ living in us. He is called the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ, so when we receive him we are receiving the eternal, Triune God to come to live within us. Second, in v. 3 Paul says that we have begun the Christian life by means of the Holy Spirit. This is a reference to what Jesus says in John 3 that we who were dead in our trespasses and sins have been made alive, born again, by the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. He is the one who makes us alive so that we want to trust Christ. Notice what he accuses the Galatian Christians of doing. He tells them that while they know they began the Christian life by the work of the Holy Spirit, they are, by seeking to obey the law acting as if they can finish living the Christian life without the Holy Spirit, by merely human effort and power, that is, by the flesh. The life of faith in Christ is the life of the Spirit and is exactly the opposite of the life lived in dependence upon human ability to keep the law. You don’t live the Christian life by concentrating on the law of God and trying to obey it. Rather we live by faith in Christ who loved me and gave himself for me or as he says here we live by means of the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, not by human effort. Let me see if I can make that more clear. There are two things that Paul says in v. 3. You don’t begin the Christian life by obeying the law but by the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. You don’t live and thus come to the end of your life as a Christian by obeying the law but by the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. The chief work of the Holy Spirit, according to Jesus in John 16:12-15 is to glorify the crucified Christ to us. He is at work in our lives showing us by his word the greatness of Jesus as our Savior and Lord, the one who loved us and died for us. What the Holy Spirit is doing in regards to Jesus is just like what Jeff Haines will do if you get him talking about goose hunting in Devils Lake, N.D. or what Ray Hutton will do if you get him talking about woodworking or what Jordan Swanson will do if you get him talking about the Univ. of Illinois basketball team or what I will do if you get me talking about my families’ cabin in Minong, WI. Each of us will seek to persuade you of the greatness of each of these things so that you admire them and want to enjoy them as much as we do. The reason you trust in Jesus Christ is because at the beginning of your Christian life the Holy Spirit glorified Christ to you so that you saw him as a great Savior. He continues to do this work of glorifying Christ throughout your Christian life and thus brings you to the end of your life trusting in this one you admire and whom you will admire forever. When you make keeping the law the grounds of justification and the means of growing as a Christian you have left the Holy Spirit behind because he is not out to glorify the law but to glorify the one who kept the law for you. He is not out to exalt your ability to obey the law but to exalt Christ’s ability to keep it and to bear God’s wrath against you for not keeping it. The third thing Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit does for every believer but not for those who are seeking to obey the law is he enables us to serve the body of Christ by giving us his gifts. God supplies us with the Holy Spirit and thus with his entire miracle working capability. These powerful works of the Holy Spirit are the gifts he distributes throughout his body for the manifestation of his presence to his people by our serving of one another. The Holy Spirit gives us the power and the will to work for the good of others in a vast variety of ways. He does this only for those who trust in Christ, not for those who depend on the keeping of the law to be made right with God. If keeping the law is what you are focused upon then you spend your time judging the performance of others rather than using the gifts of the Holy Spirit to serve the needs of others. Law keeping divides people from one another while the Holy Spirit unites people around the crucified Christ. You may notice that I skipped over v. 4. It doesn’t seem to fit. Paul’s entire argument in these verses has been to show that the Holy Spirit is given only to those who have faith in Christ, not to those who obey the law. What does suffering have to do with the giving of the Holy Spirit? In John 15 Jesus says that the non-Christian world will hate us because it hated him and we love him. How does the world know that we trust and love Jesus Christ? Well, when the Holy Spirit glorifies Christ to us and we discover him as our glorious Savior and Lord we cannot help but let others know about him. As Jesus told the disciples in Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses…” As we bear witness to Christ by our lives and words, while some believe and join us in worshipping Christ, many will hate us and cause us to suffer. This is what happened to the Galatian Christians at their conversion. Now Paul’s question to them is simply this: When you abandon faith in Christ and embrace law-keeping, then you are treating all of your suffering for the name of Christ at the beginning of your Christian life as if it were a waste of time. It’s like what we would say to the college student who tells us in the second semester of their senior year that they are going to drop out of school, “What, you’re going to waste all that work and time and money? How can you treat all that suffering as if it was for no purpose? How can you quit when you have already given up so much to get this far?” That is what Paul is saying to the Galatians. How can you throw away all that you have lost because of your bold witness for Christ enabled by the Holy Spirit? Keep going in the Spirit so that you can receive the reward for which you endured the loss of so much. That last little clause, “if indeed you have suffered for nothing,” is a statement of hope in the midst of despair. They appear to be ready to act as though all they have suffered for Christ means nothing but, their fate is not yet sealed. There yet is the hope that they may return to faith in Christ and abandon law-keeping. Their suffering may not have been in vain. All the benefits of God’s salvation are given to those who believe without any regard to how they live because…
III. God the Father promised these benefits to believers only (vv. 6-9) Paul has sought to motivate them to change direction by recounting the facts of the gospel and their personal experience with the Holy Spirit. Now he goes to the heart of the matter by looking back at the OT and particularly at the father of the Jewish race, Abraham. Since Genesis 17 every male descendant of Abraham has been circumcised in obedience to God’s command to do so. Therefore, it is the argument of the false teachers that if a Gentile wants to share in the blessings that God has promised to Abraham and his descendants then he must be circumcised. If you want the salvation that God has promised to the Jews then become like a Jew by being circumcised. However, Paul goes back before God’s command to Abraham to circumcise all the males in his household in Genesis 17 to what God said to Abraham in Genesis 15. Look at the argument he makes between vv. 5 and 6. He asks the rhetorical question, “Does God supply you with his Spirit and work miracles among you because you obey the law or because you believe what you heard?” The expected answer is, “because we believe what we heard.” Then he follows this answer with “Just as Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.” In other words, their believing the gospel and thus receiving the Holy Spirit is exactly the same as when Abraham believed God’s promise in Genesis 15 that he, a childless, 80 year old man with a barren, 70 year old wife was going to have as many descendants as the stars in heaven and on the basis of his faith, apart from any works, God counted him as righteous. God declared Abraham righteous, not because he did anything but because he believed God’s promise. This is the same thing God does when he gives the Holy Spirit and his miracle working power to Christians on the basis of their faith in Christ, not because they have done something. Then he makes one of the most astounding assertions in the Bible in v.7. He says that those who believe God’s promise, like Abraham believed God’s promise, are Abraham’s true sons and daughters. It is not those who are physically circumcised or racially descended from Abraham or who obey the law of Moses who are his children. This is exactly the opposite of what the false teachers have been telling them. They have been saying that if a Gentile wants to inherit all the blessings promised to Abraham, then they must be circumcised and keep the laws God gave to Abraham’s children through Moses. That’s why he commands them at the beginning of v. 7 to “understand” that only those who trust in the promise of God, like Abraham, are the sons and daughters of Abraham. You might be saying, well who cares if I am a child of Abraham? Verses 9-10 tell us why it is that we should care whether or not we are descendants of Abraham. Paul goes back to Genesis 12, to the beginning of the Jewish nation when God chose an idol worshipping Aramean, named Abram. He promised this man, without any condition or stipulation that he was going to make him into a great nation and that, as Paul quotes here, “In him and with him all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” Genesis 1-11 is a description of the chaos that has come into the world as a result of human sin and of God’s graciously continuing to sustain human beings in spite of sin. Genesis 12:1-3 is the turning point in the story. Here we discover God beginning his plan to bring his people back to himself, into a state of blessing, back to the Garden of Eden. Abraham stands as the representative of those God redeems. He declares that it is through Abraham and his descendants that God’s salvation will come to all the peoples of the world. This promise of blessing in, with and through Abraham is the promise of the coming of Christ as the Redeemer of God’s people and the promise that redemption will be given to those who believe, like Abraham. The only people who belong to the people of God, the only people who are going to return to the renewed Garden of Eden, the new heavens and the new earth are those who believe God’s promise, like Abraham did. In Genesis 12:3 the Scriptures are declaring the means by which both Jews and Gentiles will be included in the people of God. Jews and Gentiles are included in the company of those going to heaven by their faith in Christ, not because they have done something. These and these alone are declared not guilty but perfectly righteous, just like Abraham, the man of faith. You did not choose to be born into this world. You did not create this world. You did not and are not writing the story of this world. You have entered into God’s story. He placed you in this story at the precise moment he wanted to do so. He alone is the author of the story of this world. For thousands of years he has been at work to save his people out of the misery of sin and death by means of his Savior, the descendant of Abraham, Jesus Christ. His plan has always been to make unrighteous, unholy people perfectly righteous and acceptable to him on the basis of their faith in this Lord Jesus Christ. He has never counted anyone righteous on the basis of his or her obedience to the law. He showed this at the beginning of the story in Abraham and this has been his pattern throughout the millennium. Therefore, I urge you to not try to write a different story. There is no other way to join into the happy ending of this story than by trusting in Jesus Christ. To reject Christ and to depend upon your own goodness and ability is to say to God you have no interest in being a part of the happy ending promised to Abraham and his descendants. It is to cut yourself off from the blessing of God and to inherit the curse promised to all who are enemies of Abraham, the man of faith. So be blessed with all the blessings of belonging to God’s people by trusting Christ, not by depending upon yourself. All the benefits of God’s salvation are given to those who believe without any regard to how they live because…
© Copyright
2005 John Swanson.
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