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THE GOOD NEWS OF GOD'S GRACE IS CONTAINED IN THE OLD TESTAMENTGalatians 4:21-31INTRODUCTION Paul addresses this final section of chapter 4 to “you who want to be under the law.” I want to examine two questions as we begin this morning. First, what does Paul mean by this phrase in this letter? Second, what are the characteristics of those who want to be under the law? I want us to think about whether or not we are people who want to be under the law. What does Paul mean by this phrase in the historical context of this letter? A person who wants to be under the law is a person who believes that in order for God to accept me as righteous in his sight I must obey the laws he gave to Israel as recorded in the OT. In order for me to be loved by God, to please God, to be warmly welcomed by God into heaven at the resurrection I must keep the laws of the OT. The false teachers in Galatia and those who were beginning to follow them were convinced that God would only accept those who followed the laws regarding clean and unclean food, circumcision, Sabbath regulations and other laws regarding the various holy days and feasts. Paul has mentioned the adherence of these false teachers to these specific laws but has generalized beyond just these. Anyone who believes that God’s acceptance of them and his including them among his people is determined by their obedience or lack of obedience to the variety of laws contained in the OT is a person who wants to be under the law. Most of us are not tempted to believe that God will love us and take us to heaven based upon whether or not we are eating kosher food or observing the three annual feasts of the Jewish calendar. However, as we saw two weeks ago when we studied the verses preceding this morning’s text, Paul understands that all humans and all human religious systems, whether based on the OT or the Koran or the Hindu Sanskrit have this in common: a belief that humans by their observing religious laws and rituals can gain the favor of God. Therefore, the temptation to be “under law” is not reserved for just Jewish people or people who know the OT. Here are some signs that you may be a person who “wants to be under the law.” You are more impressed with what you do than with what Christ has done. You cannot believe that God can ever love you or forgive you because of what you’ve done. You can’t understand how anyone could ever be addicted to drugs or sex or overeating or TV watching. You feel contempt in your heart for homosexuals, divorced people, liberals, conservatives, abortionists or criminals. You feel more acceptable to God after reading the Bible or going to church than you do before doing these things. You have a hard time praying when you haven’t read your bible for a week. You say things (or think them) like, “I don’t deserve to be treated like this. Can you believe that anyone would act like that? I would never say that/do that.” You can’t think of any reason why God would be angry with you or send you to hell. You don’t believe you’ve ever hated God. You believe that God prefers a certain race of people. You are convinced that God loves you more when you do certain things and that he loves you less when you don’t do these things. You’re afraid God will send you to hell because you haven’t been a “good enough” Christian. The people Paul is dealing with are in danger of believing God’s love for them is conditioned upon their obedience to the OT laws. We also live under that danger. We believe the Bible is God’s word and so we are in danger of believing that God’s acceptance of us is proportional to our keeping or not keeping of his laws as recorded in the Bible. This morning as Paul concludes his main argument in this letter to the Galatians we are going to see that… MAIN POINT Obedience to OT law (or any other law) cannot be the ground of our acceptance with God because…I. The entire OT reveals the gospel of grace (vv. 21-23) Those who want to be under the law root their argument in the OT. They would argue that God doesn’t change and how he relates to men doesn’t change either. God does not contradict himself. What God says in the OT is that he chose Abraham and his descendants to be his people. After God chose Abraham he commanded Abraham to circumcise his male descendants. Then God gave to Abraham’s descendants, after he rescued them from slavery in Egypt, through Moses, the law: the 10 commandments, the sacrificial system, the cleanliness laws, the temple worship, the priesthood, etc. God didn’t give the law to anyone but the descendants of Abraham. God said over and over again that he would bless all those Israelites who obeyed his law but that he would curse all those who disobeyed. They would say that the OT is full of examples of how God blessed his obedient people and destroyed those who were disobedient. In addition, the OT is very clear that God was opposed to all those people who were not Jewish. He commanded that Gentiles be destroyed for their wicked, law breaking lifestyles and that the Jewish people have nothing to do with those Gentile nations that surrounded them. Therefore, if you, a Gentile, want to be belong to the people of God you must not only believe in the Messiah, Jesus, but also obey the OT laws, beginning with being circumcised, just like Abraham and his sons. Paul asks a question and demands an answer from these people who are so sure that God’s law demands obedience to be accepted. He is doing exactly what Jesus did in his many arguments with the Jewish religious leaders. He is accusing them of a selective reading of the OT. He, by this question is saying that they, just like the religious leaders that Jesus confronted, are not paying attention to the whole law but only to the parts to which they want to pay attention. He agrees with them that God cannot contradict himself. However, Paul says what the OT teaches is that no one is made right with God by obeying the law. People are only made right with God by an act of his grace, in accordance with his promise. Paul’s argument is that the false teachers are the ones who are making God contradict himself by claiming that obedience to the OT laws are the grounds of acceptance with God. Paul shows the correct way to read the OT and demonstrates that the gospel of God’s grace given through his only Son is not just a NT message but is what the entire OT teaches as well. Salvation has always been by grace through faith in Christ. It has never been by works of the law. Paul aims to prove his point by going back to the story of Abraham for the third time in this letter. He reminds them that Abraham had two sons born of two mothers. His oldest boy, Ishmael, was born of the slave girl, Hagar while his younger son, Isaac, was born of his freeborn wife, Sarah. Then, in v. 23 he tells us that Ishmael, the son of the slave woman Hagar was born, “according to the flesh” (NIV: in the ordinary way) while Isaac, the son of the free woman, Sarah, was born, “through a promise” (NIV: as the result of a promise). Some of you will remember this story while many of you may not know it at all. I need to summarize the basic outline of the story so that you can make sense out of Paul’s argument. Abraham was 75 years old and Sarah his wife was 65 when God chose Abraham and told him that he was going to make him into a great nation and bless all the nations of the world through him. At that time God told him to leave Haran, the place he was living and to go to the place that God would show him. God led him to the land of Canaan and told him that he was going to give this land to his Seed. So Abraham and Sarah lived in the land of Canaan in tents, as in a foreign land. Sometime during those first 10 years of living there Abraham complained to God that God had not done what he promised. How could he become a great nation when he did not have even one son? He had no son and therefore his name would end when he died and all of his property would go to one of his servants. It was at that time that God told Abraham that he was going to have a son, from his own body and that his descendants, through this son, would be as many as the stars in the heavens. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. After God made this promise to Abraham, when he was 85 years old and Sarah, his wife, was 75 years old, Sarah came to Abraham and told him, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave girl, Hagar, perhaps I can have a son through her.” Abraham listened to his wife and had sexual relations with Sarah’s Egyptian slave girl and she conceived and gave birth to a son whom Abraham named Ishmael. There are two things about Ishmael to which Paul calls our attention. First, he was born of a slave woman and therefore, he is a slave. The second thing is that Ishmael was born “according to the flesh.” While this obviously means that there was nothing out of the ordinary about Ishmael’s birth, i.e. he was born as the result of a man and woman having sexual intercourse, that isn’t the main thing that Paul is pointing towards. Rather, the emphasis is that Sarah and Abraham aimed to obtain the promises of God by a plan of their own devising and through their effort. Ishmael’s birth was a purely human event. It was the result of human thinking and human work. Abraham and Sarah were trusting in their word, not God’s word for God had said nothing about taking a second wife or that he would give Abraham a son through the slave girl. Thirteen years after the birth of Ishmael, when Abraham was 99 years old and Sarah was 89 years old, the Lord visited Abraham and Sarah personally. At that time he promised that in one year Sarah would bear a son to Abraham. Just as God promised, when Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah was 90 years old, both well past the age of bearing children, Isaac was born. Paul makes two points about Isaac’s birth. First, as he is born of a free woman, then he is a freeborn son and not a slave. He is Abraham’s heir and thus the heir of God’s promises because his mother is not a slave but a free woman. Second, Isaac’s birth was the result of God’s promise and God’s work. There was no human way for Isaac to come into existence. God spoke and then God acted through Abraham and Sarah to produce a son who would be the heir. The birth of Isaac therefore stands as an example of the way that God’s salvation comes to humans. It is through a promise, by his work. Salvation is always a work of grace and never the result of human effort. Abraham and Sarah could never have had a child except by the promise and power of God. He didn’t make this promise or perform this miracle in response to anything in them. They were powerless and they were sinners, as evidenced by the episode with Hagar. God brings Isaac into existence when there was no possible way for Isaac to come into existence. What the story of Abraham’s two sons reveals is the fatal flaw in the reasoning of those who want to be under the law. The only way you can read the OT and assume that it requires obedience to the law to be made right with God is to believe, like Sarah and Abraham did in pursuing a son through Hagar, that you have the ability to obtain God’s salvation by your own effort and in your own way. Men and women who believe that God will accept them into heaven because of their work do not view themselves as powerless or as sinful. The only way you can read the 10 commandments and believe God will accept you based upon your obedience to them is to not see yourself as a sinner. Humans delight to devise all sorts of systems and explanations for obtaining the blessing of God by human effort because we are unwilling to acknowledge what is actually true: we love to sin and we have no ability to do what is right. All of our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. No one is righteous, no one does good, no one seeks God. Therefore, salvation must be a work of God, by his grace, just like the birth of Isaac. This is the message of the OT as well as the NT. Obedience to OT law (or any other law) cannot be the ground of our acceptance with God because…
II. The entire OT reveals the futility of human effort (vv. 24-27) The next thing that Paul does is take these two women and the birth of these two sons and show how they are an illustration of two covenants. A covenant is an arrangement that a greater person or nation makes with a lesser nation or person to govern their relationship with one another. In a covenant the greater person promises to do something for the lesser person who, in turn, fulfills certain obligations towards the greater person. The U.S. made an agreement with Japan after WWII. We told Japan that we would provide military security for them if they would agree to never build an army and if they would allow us to put a huge military base on Okinawa. Paul says that Hagar and the means by which her son Ishmael was born represent the covenant God made with the nation Israel at Mt. Sinai when he gave them the 10 commandments. In addition, she represents all Jewish people who lived under the rules of the covenant that at the time Paul wrote this letter had its center in Jerusalem. It was in Jerusalem that the temple worship and the teaching of the Old Covenant had its fullest expression. Just like the birth of Ishmael was the result of human effort, so the fulfillment of the obligations of the covenant God made with Israel on Mt. Sinai depends upon human effort. God does say to Israel, through Moses, that if you obey I will bless and if you disobey I will curse. The Law of Moses depends upon human ability just like the birth of Ishmael depended entirely upon human work. All those who live under that covenant are slaves and not heirs, just like Ishmael was a slave and not an heir. He was born of a slave and therefore there was nothing he could do to change his status. The Old Covenant is a covenant that is “according to the flesh”, that is dependent upon human ability and it only produces slavery. The Old Covenant cannot create divine life. It cannot make free born sons, because it is based upon human work. Everyone who approaches God on the basis of law keeping, like all those “obedient” Jews living in Jerusalem in Paul’s day are slaves and not sons, despite all claims to the contrary. Paul has already spelled out the slavery of that Old Covenant relationship earlier. The law does not set men free from sin it only reveals to us that we are sinners. In addition, the law does not decrease sin, it provokes sin. Thus the law does not deliver us from our slavery to sin but merely convicts us and sentences us to wait on death row until the day of God’s judgment when he will punish us for breaking his law. Everyone who seeks to live under the stipulations of the law is a slave to sin and death and not a son because human beings can never obey the law, as it requires. The law requires perfect obedience, not partial obedience. As Paul said earlier, quoting the law, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to everything written in the law.” It was given to prepare us for the coming of the Messiah who would set us free from our slavery to sin and law and death. Therefore, to remain under the law is to voluntarily remain a slave when the offer of freedom is given to you. It is the height of human pride to believe that I am able to do things that will obligate God to love me and to care for me. To live under the law is to live in complete denial of who and what you really are. The law is a constant reminder of your powerlessness and your sinfulness, therefore, when you act as though your keeping of the law determines God’s opinion of you, you are denying the reality you are living in. It is just like Sarah dreaming that she was going to obtain a son through telling her husband to have sex with her slave girl. It doesn’t matter how much she wanted it or how convinced she was that this was the way to get what God promised, she could not get the blessing of God through her own plans and efforts. The only way that Sarah and Abraham could obtain the blessing of God was for God to promise and then for God to fulfill his promise apart from their work. That’s the point Paul goes on to make in vv. 26-27. Sarah is compared to the Jerusalem that is above who is free in contrast to the present Jerusalem who lives according to the flesh and who therefore is a slave. The present Jerusalem, living under the Old Covenant is a slave and all of the children she bears are slaves as well. However, the Jerusalem that is above, that is the Jerusalem that has its origin in heaven is free and she is the mother of all of us, the freeborn sons of God who are heirs. Who or what is this free “ Jerusalem that is above” who is our mother? The most likely entity that Paul has in mind is that collection of human beings who are living under the new covenant rather than under the Old Covenant. In other words, it is the church of Jesus. God has promised that it will be through his church as it preaches the gospel of Christ that he will gather together all of his scattered children. We together are the Jerusalem that is born from above and as we faithfully live out and proclaim the gospel of God’s grace more free sons are born by God working to fulfill his promise. The reason I think Paul is thinking of the church is due to his quoting Isaiah 54:1. Please turn over to Isaiah 54 so I can show you this. The first thing to note is that Isaiah 54:1 follows Isaiah 53, which describes the death of the Messiah for the sins of God’s people. It is not accidental that Paul quotes a verse following this great chapter. God then uses a metaphor very similar to that which Paul has been using with Hagar and Sarah. He commands the barren woman, the woman who has never experienced labor pains, who is desolate to shout for joy because she is going to have more children than the woman who has a husband. In v. 11 we find out that the metaphor refers to the city of Jerusalem. Isaiah is describing the condition of Jerusalem after it is destroyed by God through the Babylonians in about 500 B.C. As vv. 4-6 God says, Jerusalem after its destruction is like a widow or like a divorced woman with no husband or children. There is no hope for her and no way for her to have children. She is desolate and barren, like Sarah at age 89 with a husband who is 99. However, God says that he will become her husband and he will make sure that she has more children than the woman who has a husband. Look at v. 2. “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities.” Here is Jerusalem, a pile of rubble with no one living in her and yet God says that by his promise and through his work that the descendants of Jerusalem will take over the world. This widowed woman who has no husband will have more children than the woman who has a husband. In the metaphor, the woman with the husband, is Hagar. It is the people gathered together under the banner of human effort, seeking to obtain God’s favor by law keeping; all those who are convinced that God will love them because they are lovable. Desolate, rejected, destroyed, barren Jerusalem is the church. We are weak and flawed and have no ability to impart divine life to anyone else. We appear to be very ordinary and flawed people. Yet, our existence, indeed the existence of every Christian congregation in the world is a miracle, like the miracle of Isaac’s birth. We exist by God’s promise and his work through Christ to fulfill that promise. We are not in the church because we have obeyed the law but because God, for the sake of Christ, gave us new hearts that believe the promise that we are forgiven through the life and death of Christ. Christ has fulfilled the obligations of the covenant for us and so we are counted righteous for his sake. This new covenant is based upon his obedience, not our obedience. We are not a place where the law is preached and men and women are commanded to obey the law in order to obtain the blessing of God. We are a place that exalts the promise of God and the power of God and the grace of God. We talk about his work, not our work. We worship him, not the work of our own hands. We trust in him, not our own efforts. As we live in and proclaim this free promise and the futility of humans trying to obey the law, more sons of God will be born through us. It is inevitable that where the powerlessness and sinfulness of men and the free grace of God given through Christ is lived and preached that God will add more children, just as it was inevitable that Sarah would bear Isaac nine months after the promise was made. The birth of more sons of God is not due to our competence or our effort but it is due to the promise of God and the power of God through the gospel of Christ. The success of our church or of any church has nothing to do with what kind of music we sing or what kinds of programs we have or what kind of building we meet in. The success of a church is determined by one thing: are we living in and proclaiming the gospel of God’s grace in Christ and not a man-centered, law keeping, human strength magnifying message. Obedience to OT law (or any other law) cannot be the ground of our acceptance with God because…
III. The entire OT reveals the eternal hostility between God and unregenerate sinners (vv. 28-31) These final verses begin (v. 28) and end (v. 31) with the declaration that every Christian, like Isaac, is born through the word of God, by the Spirit of God and therefore are free men, not slaves to sin, law and death. However, the middle two verses, vv. 29-30, describe a perpetual reality. In v. 29 Paul recalls an incident recorded in Genesis 21. When Isaac was probably about three years old and was weaned from his mother’s milk, Abraham and Sarah, according to ancient custom, threw a party for their growing son. At that party Ishmael, the thirteen-year-old son of Hagar, mocked the toddler Isaac. It would not be hard to imagine the human drama going on in Abraham’s house after the birth of Isaac. Both Hagar and her son would have known that Isaac was going to be Abraham’s heir. Ishmael lived for at least a decade believing he would be the heir. Therefore, he would not be happy about Isaac’s birth and any reminder of his favored status would be a bitter potion in Ishmael’s mouth. He expressed his jealousy and his anger and his contempt by mocking the toddler in some way. Paul views this hostility of the son of the slave woman as a precursor and type of the persecution that was going to be perpetrated by those who believe God accepts people based upon religious and moral performance against those who know that God accepts only on the basis of faith in his promise in Christ. In particular Paul sees Ishmael’s persecution of Isaac as an example of the persecution of the Jewish people of Jesus and the church. The amazing thing to consider here is that Paul would have thought of himself, prior to his conversion, as being represented by Ishmael. His persecution of the church was driven by the same jealous rage that motivated Ishmael. At that time he knew there was no way that God would accept his people on the basis of a crucified Messiah apart from observing the law. Thus he approved of Stephen’s death and made it his goal to destroy the church. Paul also sees the animosity of the false teachers against himself and their aim to destroy the faith of the Galatian Christians in Christ as being of the same sort of persecution. Throughout the history of the church the most violent and aggressive persecution has come from religious people, from Jews, to pagan Romans, to the apostate Roman church, to apostate protestant denominations to Moslems, to Hindus, to dogmatic Marxists. As most of you know I spent 20 years preaching the gospel on university campuses with Campus Crusade for Christ. Those who were most opposed to what we were trying to do were not the atheists but the pastors of various liberal mainline Protestant and Catholic campus churches. There was a professor on one campus who founded and taught in the Religious Studies program. He destroyed the faith of countless students in the sufficiency of Christ. He was an ordained pastor and regularly claimed to be a believing Christian. Yet he rejected any notion that Christ was necessary for the salvation of anyone. It was the pastor of one of the mainline protestant campus churches that regularly spoke on the campus public speaking platform and mocked those who claimed that humans were sinners and needed a Savior. The gospel and those who preach it will always be opposed and mocked by those who believe that men have it within their grasp to gain salvation by their own effort. In v. 30 Paul tells what happened following Ishmael’s mocking of Isaac. Sarah observed the son of the slave girl mocking her son and she demanded that Abraham, “Throw out the slave girl and her son for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son, Isaac.” Abraham was grieved and did not want to do this until the Lord spoke to him and told him to listen to his wife because “it was through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” The point Paul is making here is that while in this life the sons of the slave woman will persecute God’s people, yet there is a day coming when they will be thrown out, into the outer darkness. Those who trust in their own goodness or performance of religious rituals to gain acceptance with God will not be welcomed by God into heaven but will be cast into hell. This is the same thing that Jesus says in at least a dozen parables where law keeping Jewish people are shut out of God’s eternal kingdom while law breaking sinners are welcomed in by grace. This is the language of the OT prophets and of the Revelation where those who oppose God are thrown into the lake of fire, where what you have done will be done to you. Paul says it this way in 2 Thess. 1, “God is just, he will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled…” God is eternally opposed to all who believe they can be made right with him by their own efforts because he opposes the proud and only gives grace to the humble. That is the fundamental problem of those who want to be under law, they believe they are good and that they have the ability to obligate God to be good to them by their work. They do not believe what God says about them, that they are sinners who deserve hell. It is the universal opinion of all human beings apart from the grace of God to believe that they are good enough for God and that whatever they think about God is good enough. Only those who submit to God’s estimation of them and to his command to trust in Christ are sons of the free woman. Obedience to OT law (or any other law) cannot be the ground of our acceptance with God because…
© Copyright
2005 John Swanson.
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