Paul’s argument at this point in the Letter to the Galatians may seem to be a long way from Cambridge in the year 2000. Perhaps those early verses of our passage could have been in Sanskrit for all the sense they made to you as they were read just now. But Paul is discussing the basis on which a human being relates to God. If God at times seems unreal to us, or unreal to our friends, it may be because we are failing to understand the basis on which a human being can relate to the Creator God. In Paul’s terms, if we are trying to relate to God by keeping moral laws (what he calls the Law), we will never have a living relationship with God: because that relationship can only be based on promise. So you will see the first point from these verses is the power of the promise.
(1) The Power of the Promise (vv. 15-18)
Look again at verses 15 & 16 if you would: ‘Brothers, let me take an example from everyday life. Just as no-one can set aside or add to a human covenant [agreement] that has been duly established, so it is in this case. The promises were spoken to Abraham and his seed. The Scripture does not say “and to seeds”, meaning many people, but “and to your seed”, meaning one person, who is Christ.’ The promises were spoken to Abraham and his seed. God gave Abraham, all those thousands of years ago, a promise: a promise that will never be broken because of the nature of the One who gave it. It was far more reliable than any human covenant or agreement. And that promise pointed directly to Jesus Christ: ‘The promises were spoken directly to Abraham and his seed. The Scripture does not say “and to seeds”, meaning many people, but “and to your seed”, meaning one person, who is Christ’ (v. 16).
Let us look again at a little diagram that we used last week to try to understand the first half of the chapter. It may be worth having it at the back of our minds as we look at this passage too.
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Imagine a modern fairy tale:
Once upon a time two children grew up together in Cambridge. One, the beautiful daughter of the Master of Jesus College; the other the handsome son of one of the college porters. They went to the local primary school at Park Street together. They went to Parkside Community College. And when they were doing their ‘A’ Levels together at Hills Road, they resolved that one day they would marry each other. Secretly they exchanged rings.
But later, during a Gap Year in Africa a hesitation began to enter that young man’s heart. He still loved the girl desperately; but adult understanding had brought an adult awareness of the difference in their social backgrounds. And he felt he couldn’t marry her yet: he would have to prove he was worthy of her. So he set about getting himself a degree, but it did not go well. He ploughed all his exams. He was sent down at the end of his First Year. So he decided he would make money – a fortune in commerce might prove his worth. But that, too, went hopelessly wrong. So he enlisted and tried the armed forces. But he turned out to be a coward on the battlefield, and his military career ended in a dishonourable discharge.
So, some years later, he crept back to Cambridge to see his parents, hoping that this girl had forgotten all about him. But he found she was waiting for him. “You can’t still love me!” he said, “I’m a failure. I’m not worthy of you.” She said, “Of course I still love you. I’ve always loved you and I will always love you. Remember that ring that I gave you when we were together at Hills Road? I promised to marry you; and as far as I’m concerned, a promise is a promise.”
You see, real love is not a tribute: it’s a promise. In a marriage service the question is asked: “Will you take this man/woman to be your husband/wife?” And the answer is, “I will.” Now that doesn’t mean, “I think you’re the most beautiful person in the world.” It doesn’t mean, “I admire your virtue, your heroism, your temperament, your cooking.” It is an expression of personal commitment. It is a promise. Love cannot be earned.
One older man returned from a visit to a lady he’d been known to be courting for some years, and announced that he’d got engaged to her. “How did you propose to her?” he was asked. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t actually have to, because I did propose to her last year and she said then that she could never marry a man unless he could save at least £1,000 in a year. And this year she asked me how much I had saved. And when I told her £13, she said, “Well, that’s close enough!”
Love cannot be earned. It has simply to be given and to be accepted. Some people never realise that. They are forever seeking to earn affection and respect from other people – obsessed with the need to prove themselves worthy, to prove themselves lovable. But happiness never comes from the struggle to prove our worthiness to anyone. It comes from the assurance of knowing that someone loves us just as we are – ‘warts and all’. And the love of God is not something that the human race deserves. It is not something we can ever make ourselves worthy of. It isn’t a tribute that God pays to our moral achievements; or a reward for our spiritual effort. It is a promise. It’s something we receive.
God has made a vow and nothing can alter it. With God, a promise is a promise. All we can do is to hear it and believe it.
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God Promise Us |
You see, the direction of promise is one way. It comes from God to the human race.
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I want to ask you, as you look at that simple little diagram, which best represents your relationship with God, if you have one this morning? If I knew the secrets of your heart and I was to try to do a diagram of your relationship with God, would it be the wide arrow or the narrow? Are you resting contentedly in the knowledge that you are loved by a God who makes a promise to you? Or are you still restlessly trying to please Him? There is only peace in that wide arrow; there is no peace in the narrow one.
(2) The Purpose of the Law (vv. 19-25)
So let’s now consider how law fits in. ‘What, then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come. The law was put into effect through angels by a mediator. A mediator, however, does not represent just one party; but God is one’ (vv. 19, 20). In the next three paragraphs Paul continues to show the inferiority of the Law in a variety of different respects. Last week, in the diagram we showed again today, we saw that Paul was talking about the curse of the Law. Here he’s already shown that the Law came after the promise, and it couldn’t replace the promise. He makes the point there, in verse 19, that it came through a mediator, and (in verse 20) that it was bilateral. But it did have a purpose, and a positive purpose at that. It was not the purpose of negating the promises: ‘Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not! For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law’ (v. 21).
That purpose was threefold. (a) It was added because of transgressions (v. 19). The NEB translation may be helpful: ‘It was added to make wrongdoing a legal offence.’ That isn’t quite what the Greek says, but it’s an attempt to fill out the meaning of it. You see, the much clearer statement of God’s will in the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Old Testament Law made it clear to humanity when and how we were sinning.
One past curate here, Jonathan Fletcher, said that it had never occurred to him to spit in a railway carriage (as it may not have occurred to you!) until he was travelling once on a holiday journey in France and he asked his mother to translate the notice on the carriage door: ‘Défense de cracher’ – ‘Do not spit’. He said that for the rest of the journey he couldn’t stop himself salivating. The Law doesn’t just identify sin, it provokes sin – and it is ineffectual to curb sin. You may remember that limerick on the same theme about the old man of Darjeeling, who travelled from London to Ealing. It said on the door, ‘Please don’t spit on the floor’. So he carefully spat on the ceiling. We all know this, don’t we? If I say to you, “Whatever you do now, please, please, please do not think of green kangaroos.” You find it hard not to see them jumping about in your mind’s eye. The Law highlights and provokes sin.
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It makes it clear in your and my heart that we are not the people we ought to be, and that we fall short of God‘s standards all the time. It declares that ‘the whole world is a prisoner of sin’ (v. 22). It holds us prisoners (v. 23), ‘locked up until faith should be revealed. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith’ (v. 24).
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Law Sin Christ |
You see, the Law is not bad. The shame and guilt that you and I feel in our hearts when we’ve done wrong is a very good and helpful thing, because it makes clear to us that wrong is wrong, and that you need a Saviour and I need a Saviour. The Law points us in those two directions: it points out our sin and it points us to Jesus.
But, these verses tell us that (3) the Law had a limited validity. Do you see that word ‘until’ in the middle of verse 19?– ‘It was added because of transgressions until the Seed [that’s Jesus Christ] to whom the promise referred had come.’ And then there’s an ‘until’ in verse 23: ‘ ... we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed.’ We go on from there: ‘So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.’ Now, the expression ‘put in charge’ (v. 24) and the word ‘supervision’ (v. 25) both come from a Greek word ‘pedagogue’, referring to the slave responsible for a child’s behaviour. The pedagogue was not actually a school-teacher, not actually a governess; but a sort of moral tutor, teaching the young child and the adolescent the difference between right and wrong: guarding, as it were, their outward behaviour. And the Law does its best to guide human behaviour, instructing us in what is right and what is wrong. But at conversion comes the indwelling Spirit of God. For, in historical terms, at the coming of Jesus the Spirit was given to all men and women who accept Him as their Lord and their Saviour.
Christian behaviour, therefore, isn’t governed by outward law. It is governed by an inward love relationship with God, who gave His Son to die for our sins, and has given us His Spirit to dwell in our hearts. Now I need to ask you that question this morning: Have you grown up into that sort of relationship with God? Is your behaviour, day by day, governed by rules, by laws? Is that how you assess the way you behave? Or do you walk with your hand in the hand of the living God? And do you live to please Him in your life?
There’s a big difference between us this morning, because all of us are in one category or the other (maybe you ignore God altogether, that might be a third category). But those who do take Him seriously are all either living under Law or living according to the Spirit. The second half of the letter is going to say much more about that, so we’ll leave it for now, and move to our final point – in that last lovely little paragraph which we are going to finish on.
(3) The Unity of the Children of God (vv. 26-29).
Paul says this: ‘You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.’
Verse 28 is a lovely verse (with which we started the service): ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Every day the pious male Jew was supposed to offer thanksgiving to God for a threefold privilege: that he had not been born a Gentile; that he’d not been born a slave; and that he had not been born a woman. I think Paul had that prayer of thanksgiving in mind when he wrote verse 28. It’s rightly a very famous verse: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ But notice what he’s really talking about in these verses, because his focus is not actually on equality, it’s on unity. Do you see that? Because we all have access to God by simple trust in His promise to us, hearing and believing the gospel, accepting what He has done for us in Christ, faith in Christ – all different ways of saying exactly the same thing: just hearing and believing what God has done for us. There is only that one route into the relationship that matters more than anything else in life; so all the things which distinguish us from one another are insignificant in comparison.
We’ll never get human equality right until we get this picture right as well. Paul is not saying that the distinctions of race, rank or gender do not exist. He is saying they do not matter. That’s two very different things. Throughout the ages humanity has hankered for liberty, freedom and equality. The human race has struggled, in many, many different ways, to achieve these by looking at one another and trying to make us all level with one another. But the only true equality that human beings ever achieve is the experience of unity that comes when we come back into relationship with the God who made us, who made us as beings who long for equality and liberty in our hearts, and when we realise that all of us are saved in the exactly the same way, and stand before Him on exactly the same basis.
Let us go to our last picture. You’ve seen this picture before: it’s a simple little visual diagram to try and convey a spiritual truth – that again and again, in all sorts of different ways, your friends and mine are involved in trying to achieve equality and freedom for human beings.
Some spend their entire lives working round the rim without ever realising that there is that centre. That’s why human beings are equal: it’s not because we’re equal in talents and abilities or we are the same – we aren’t the same, we’re hugely different. But there is one thing that makes us equal, that is the God who made us in the first place. You won’t find grounds for equality between the races, the classes, the different sorts of people, anywhere else.
Look again at those final verses: ‘You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ If we want to be at one with our fellow man and woman, we must first be at one with the Creator of our fellow men and women. And it all comes to us by promise: ‘If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.’ Amen.
