Please turn with me this morning to Galatians chapter 3. I will be reading verses 10 through 14, a passage that once again reminds us that the salvation of sinners is not accomplished through works of obedience that we perform for God, but rather through faith in the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ. Galatians chapter 3 verses 10 through 14. Scripture says, For all who rely on work, the works of the law are under a curse, for it is written, Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them. Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for the righteous shall live by faith. But the law is not of faith, rather the one who does them shall live by them.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree, so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. Let's pray together. Lord, we've just read the best news that has ever been read or spoken or heard in the history of the world. And yet so often we set it aside and forget about it and let a hundred other things preoccupy our minds and our hearts and our affections as we make ourselves stop and listen to your gospel this morning. Please give us fresh ears.
Give us open minds. Give us soft hearts that are sensitive to what your spirit is saying. Lord, thank you for the gospel. Thank you for saving us. We pray this in the name of Jesus, our only savior.
Amen. I want to acknowledge at the outset this morning that the book of Galatians contains a lot of redundancy, repetition of ideas and doctrines. Paul is not skittish about redundancy. In fact, it appears as if he's actually being intentionally repetitive. For several paragraphs now, he's been hammering home the fact that salvation is accomplished by faith and not by obedience to the law. And I'll confess, I entertained the thought of skipping forward a few verses and getting to a paragraph that isn't so similar to the last several paragraphs that we've looked at. But then I realized if Paul is being redundant, he's being redundant under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
In other words, if the Bible keeps repeating itself, it's because God wants the church to hear something over and over and over again. It's not our place to say, yeah, yeah, we got that. We can move on. As parents, sometimes we repeat ourselves a lot. Clean your room. Be nice to yourself. Take out your sister.
Take out the trash. And sometimes those repetitions are necessary. Sometimes they probably just reflect our own personal annoyances. But church, when God repeats himself, it's always necessary. It's always important.
It's always relevant. It's also because of how resistant we are in our flesh to this foundational truth of the gospel. And so we return once again to this wonderfully true doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in Christ. Now, if we were to try to draw a slight distinction between today's text and last week's text, we could say that Galatians three, one through nine last week emphasized the positive instruction that faith leads to the blessing of the covenant of grace, while verses 10 through 14 today emphasize the negative side of the same coin, namely that law keeping as a means of grace leads to the cursings, not the blessings, but the cursings of the covenant of grace. The law is absolute and it demands perfect compliance. If someone doesn't comply perfectly with the law, then the law will only bring condemnation and curses. The other day I was listening to a couple of guys debating on the radio. The issue was on whether a group of protesters had broken the law. The host of the show was arguing that they had not broken the law because what they did didn't hurt anybody.
The caller argued that they had broken the law because what they had done was clearly wrong. He started backing off from his strong assertion that the law is always black and white. And he began to explain that, well, some laws are more serious than other laws. Therefore, all laws should not be equally enforced.
Well, I finally concluded they're both wrong. The host was trying to redefine the meaning of the law. The caller was trying to redefine the application of the law. But what neither of them would admit is that the law, whether we're talking about the civil law or rules in an employee or God's law, the law by definition, by nature, is absolute.
It is black and white. And I think sometimes we have a hard time acknowledging the absoluteness of the law because if I admit that the law is absolute in measuring your morality, your righteousness, then I have to also admit it's absolute in measuring my morality. And if it's absolute in measuring my morality, then nobody's innocent.
We've all broken the law at one point or another. If it's always absolute, then we're all guilty. Well, the fact is we are all guilty. And so we find ourselves oftentimes scrambling for a solution. One of our solutions is to try to make the law relative. We try to say it's not completely absolute, just sort of absolute. Or we say, like the radio caller, that some violations of the law are worse than other violations of the law.
We don't seem to be so serious, usually happen to be the ones that we are committing. When we redefine the law in order to alleviate our guilt, we're admitting, first of all, that we're guilty. If we were innocent, there would be no need to tamper with the meaning or the application of the law. So by trying to redefine things, by tampering with it, we're admitting our guilt.
Secondly, when we do this sort of tampering, we're essentially trying to fix our guilt by making the law keepable. And folks, what does the Bible have to say about sinners trying to fix their guilt by keeping the law? It condemns it over and over again. It condemns it. What about when we sit in judgment of people who are more sinful than we are?
That would be like a man stuck in quicksand up to his neck, mocking the person who stuck up to his mouth. I'm righteous because I'm not as sinful as that person. You realize that when we think that way, we are betraying our confidence in law keeping as a means of salvation. It's legalism.
It's self-righteousness. The fact is we are all bent towards trying to justify ourselves by keeping the law. And yet the fact remains, no matter who you are, the law is absolute.
It does not bend or flex to accommodate anyone, so we cannot do enough to undo the consequence of the law. And if you can accept that statement, then Galatians 3, 10 through 14 is going to be a drink of cool water for your soul this morning. If you reject that statement, then this text is going to annoy you and probably make you mad. This passage is for serious sinners, and we are serious sinners who need a serious savior. So with that in mind, Paul gives us several propositions that we need to embrace this morning if we're to find peace for our souls. The first is this, keeping the law cannot justify me.
Paul's opening statement is certainly not sugar-coated. He says very plainly, all who rely on works of the law are under a curse. And by works of the law, he means attempts at keeping the requirements of the law. And of course, this means keeping God's law. God's law is perfect. It's eternal. It's always just and right. So the problem here, the cause of the curse is not the law.
It's good. The problem is our failed attempt at keeping the law that brings the curse. The word curse means rejected by God, excluded from his covenant blessing, cut off from his good favor. To be cursed by God is to be cut off from everything that is good and beautiful and true. And Scripture teaches that when people remain in this accursed state to their death, that state is irreversible.
They will be cut off from divine favor for all eternity. So Paul's first statement is that if we are relying on our ability to keep God's law in order to make us pleasing to God, we will fail and we will be under his wrath forever. Now one of the interesting features of this text is that each point Paul makes is backed up with an Old Testament reference. In other words, Paul is doing some expository preaching here to the Galatians. He's using their Bible, which was limited to the Old Testament at this point in history, and explaining its meaning and application to their situation. We could call Galatians 3, 10 through 14 a gospel presentation from the Old Testament.
I think this could probably make for an interesting conversation with any Jewish friends you might have. At any rate, the first of four Old Testament references that Paul uses is right here in verse 10. He says, For it is written, and that's the formula that indicates an Old Testament quote. For it is written, cursed be everyone, who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them. And that's Deuteronomy 27, 26 that Paul is quoting. The point he's making is that unless you keep all of the law, you're under its curse. James makes the same point, doesn't he, in James 2, 10, which says, Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. The assumption Paul is making is that every one of us has broken God's law at some point. God's standard of righteousness is perfection, not almost perfection, perfection.
To fail at one point is to fail completely. And so Paul asserts that every person has morally failed at some point, therefore there is no one who can say, I've kept God's law. And if we haven't kept God's law, then we stand condemned, cursed by that law. If I'm relying on law keeping today, to make me right before God, I'm relying on something that I am incapable of performing.
Keeping the law cannot justify me. Now before we move on to the next step in Paul's argument, I want to point something out. I want you to notice that in both Galatians and Deuteronomy, where the statement is made, it's not the educators, it's the church, the people of God, the ones who are professing their faith in Christ that are being told these things.
And I think that's very significant. It shows us that the threat of God's curse is an act of love on God's part to His people. It's a loving statement intended to motivate and guide God's covenant people in living lives that bring glory to God. This really isn't about telling lost people how to get saved so much as it is about reminding people how they got saved, to remind Christians not to fall back into old ways of thinking and behaving. This truth is for the church.
It's something that we need to hear. Well, in verse 11, Paul buttresses his argument with another Old Testament reference, this time from the book of Habakkuk. We cannot be justified by keeping the law, he says, because justification comes by faith.
Or as Habakkuk 2.4 puts it, the righteous shall live by faith. Now, the prophet Habakkuk lived in a time when Israel was in great rebellion to the Lord. And yet, to Habakkuk's great frustration, God was not chastening or bringing judgment against them. So Habakkuk questioned God, how can this be just?
Why aren't you punishing your children, chastening them? And God's answer was very shocking to the prophet. He told Habakkuk, I will come back in time. In fact, even now, I'm getting the Babylonians ready to come and chasten them. Well, this was unthinkable to Habakkuk because the Babylonians were even worse than Israel. They deserved judgment even more than Israel did. A worse offender came into the discussion, and suddenly Habakkuk's view of Israel changed. He started thinking, Israel's bad, but the Babylonians are far worse.
We're not as bad as they are. And so he questioned God, how can you use them of all people to judge us? What we need to notice is that this line of reasoning reveals a subtle works-based view of righteousness, doesn't it? It's the view that says, as long as I'm not as bad as the next guy, I don't deserve punishment. It's just another form of justification by works.
In this case, the work being relied on is the work of being less bad than someone else. It's like the hunter who asked his buddy, aren't you afraid of the bears that live in these woods? And his buddy said, no. The hunter said, well, don't you know that bears can run 30 miles per hour? His buddy said, I don't have to outrun the bear.
I just have to outrun you. Sometimes we think like that. We think to ourselves, God's judgment is reserved for the worst of sinners, so as long as I'm not the worst sinner, I'm safe. As long as my righteousness outruns the righteousness of those around me, then the bear of divine righteousness won't get me. But God's answer to Habakkuk and God's answer to us this morning is this, the righteous shall live not by works, not by being better than the worst sinner, the righteous shall live by faith. In other words, if you want to be right with God, the only way you'll get there is by faith.
So let me summarize Paul's argument up to this point. He says trying to get right with God by keeping the law is actually under God's curse, God's wrath, and then he gives a reason why. It's because to be justified by law-keeping, one must keep all of the law, every bit of it.
Well, experience and scripture tell us that nobody has ever done this. Furthermore, if anyone is righteous before God, they've only gotten there by faith, not by obeying the law. Well, Paul then continues with the third Old Testament reference in verse 12. He says the law is not a faith, rather the one who does them shall live by them. And this is a reference to Leviticus 18.5. Now, in its original context, Leviticus 18.5 is a positive statement about obedience to God. The Lord is telling Israel that he is their God and therefore they must keep his law. If they do so, they'll find great blessing and life in keeping his law. God is letting his people know that he cares enough about them to give them his law as a guide for life and their obedience will bring great joy and blessing. You see, the law as a guide for the Christian life is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's a wonderful thing. The problem comes when we begin to try to keep the law as a ticket to acceptance with God.
And delight in the arena of sanctification becomes a curse when it is viewed as a means of justification. My sister-in-law Nancy was cleaning windows at her dad's house one day with a homemade concoction she had made. I think it was mostly ammonia. She had mixed this stuff up in a gallon plastic jug like a milk carton or something. One of the sisters thought it was a jug of water and she put it in the refrigerator. She got thirsty and she opened the refrigerator and took a big gulp of window cleaner. After a call to poison control and about a two-hour wait, she was going to be okay and we all had a good laugh. But you see that liquid made a great window cleaner. It made an awful beverage. When something is used for its intended purpose, it's great.
When it's used for something other than its intended purpose, it can be deadly. There is law. There is delight and blessing to be found in God's law as a means of instruction in the Christian life. But as a means of justification, the law brings nothing but condemnation and guilt and death and accursedness.
Paul's point in quoting Leviticus 18.5 is to make sure we understand that in terms of our justification, the way of faith and the way of works are mutually exclusive. You cannot rely on them both simultaneously. The one cancels out the other. It's like trying to cross a lake and you have two options. You can either swim across or you can go across in a boat.
Once you choose an option, you have necessarily rejected the other option. If you're depending on the boat, you're not swimming. If you're swimming, you're not depending on the boat. You say, what if I'm in the water but holding onto the boat?
Still, you're either depending on the buoyancy of the boat or you're depending on your ability to swim. The one option cancels out necessarily the other option. Paul says faith and works work like that. If you live by the law, you are rejecting faith necessarily. If you live by faith, you're rejecting the law. Now mind you, we're not talking about whether or not Christians should obey the will of God in a general sense. Of course, we should, but that's not what Paul's dealing with here. What he's talking about is the futility of trying to gain acceptance with God, trying to obtain salvation by obeying his law. I like the way Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer explained it. He said, apples do not make the tree, but the tree makes the apples. Christians are not made righteous by doing righteous things, but having been made righteous by faith in Christ, they do righteous things. He's talking about obedience. He's simply saying, forget about obedience as a means of justifying yourself.
It cannot be done. It's like a builder who starts building a roof in order to make a foundation. That's upside down.
It's backwards. The foundation must be faith in the righteousness of another. The fruit of that foundation then is righteous living. So verses 10 through 12 make the point that there is no justification to be found in keeping the law.
But thankfully, Paul doesn't stop there. He goes on in verses 13 and 14 to remind us that only faith in Christ can justify me. Only faith in Christ can justify me. Verse 13, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. Christ redeems us. That word redeemed is a common word around church. We hear it and speak it and sing it a lot around here, but it's actually a very rare word in the New Testament.
It only occurs four times. But what a sweet, sweet word it is. It refers to Christ buying us back from the sentence that the law had pronounced against us. Well, how did Christ redeem us from the curse of the law? Paul says, by becoming a curse for us. See, curses don't just go away. You can't just ignore them and sweep them under some heavenly rug. They have to be dealt with. Curses have to be carried out.
They have to be fulfilled. So the only way for sinners like us to become uncursed is for us to either endure the curse or for someone else to endure our curse for us, to become a curse in our place. Paul describes the way Christ accomplished this. And he describes it by quoting a fourth Old Testament passage. This time it's Deuteronomy 21, 23, which says, for it is written, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. Deuteronomy 21 is describing the procedure for executing a criminal whose crime deserves death. They were to be executed.
And then their body was to be hanged on a tree or a post as a sign of disgrace. Now, our minds, perhaps immediately, go to crucifixion when we read this. But in the Old Testament, this verse did not refer to crucifixion.
The Hebrews knew nothing of Roman crucifixion at the time the Mosaic law was written. And yet we see, do we not, a clear parallel, a correspondence here between God's law that brought disgrace and stigmatized a person who deserved capital punishment and Rome's treatment of criminals. Crucifixion in first century Rome just like capital punishment in the Old Testament theocracy of Israel was a disgraceful way to die and a cursed way for one's life to end. And so Paul points out that Christ, as he hung on the cross, was under the curse of God. The wrath of God was being poured out on him. Now, the only way Christ could have been made a curse for someone else was if he was not accursed himself. He could only bear wrath against sin for someone else if he had no sin in himself. Otherwise, he would simply be bearing his own curse, right?
Not the curse of someone else. This is why doctrines like the deity of Christ and the sinlessness of Christ and the virgin birth are so critically important. If we deny any of these doctrines, then Christ ceases to be sinless. And if Christ ceases to be sinless, then he is unqualified to bear the punishment for anyone else's sin. Because then he would be bearing the punishment for his own sin. But Christ did become a curse for someone else. He became a curse for us, which means his death was substitutionary.
He died in the place of others. We might become the righteousness of God. Isaiah 53 six put it this way. All we like sheep have gone astray.
We have turned everyone to his own way. And the Lord has laid on him. Jesus Christ, the iniquity of us all. We did the sinning. Christ did the suffering. Christ became a curse for us.
And why did he do this? Why did he remove the laws curse? The Bible gives us two reasons in verse 14. So that in Christ, the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles and so that we might receive the promised spirit through faith. The emphasis here is on the inclusion of Gentiles in God's covenant of grace. Covenant of grace, of course, was initiated when God gave Abraham certain promises of blessing all the way back in Genesis 17. God told Abraham, I'll give you land.
I'll give you descendants like stars. I'll make you a blessing to all nations. I'll be your God and you and your children will be my people. Every blessing God gave to Abraham found its fulfillment in Christ. As a result, everyone who was united to Christ is made an offspring of Abraham and is included in all the blessings that were given to Abraham's offspring. You see, Jesus Christ is the ethnic connection to Abraham. And he's the spiritual connection to Gentiles so that in Christ, the Gentiles receive the blessing promised to Abraham. That's exactly what Paul says in verse 14. In Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham comes to the Gentiles.
And what's the proof? What's the evidence of that blessing coming to the Gentiles? Paul says it's the promised spirit, the gift of the Holy Spirit. Remember back in the book of Acts when Peter preached the gospel to Cornelius and his family, a family of Gentiles. Acts 10 44 says that while Peter was preaching to Cornelius's family, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word. And the Jewish believers who had come with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit was poured out even on the Gentiles. Later, when Peter was reporting these things to the church authorities, he gets to the part about the Holy Spirit falling on the Gentiles and he says, If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God's way? And it says that when the church leaders heard this, they fell silent and they glorified God, saying then to the Gentiles also, God has granted repentance that leads to life. The undeniable sign that Gentiles were included in the covenant of grace initiated with Abraham was the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Paul's point in Galatians 3 14 is that all that was promised to Abraham and everything that Christ acquired at Calvary and everything that the Holy Spirit guarantees to the believer, forgiveness, sonship, eternal life, the indwelling presence of God, joy unspeakable and full of glory, heaven.
In fact, everything you can think of that is included in salvation belongs not just to the Jews, but also to the Gentiles. To the Gentiles in Christ Jesus Christ redeemed us to give us all these things. And all one must do to receive these blessings is to have faith, to have confidence in Christ crucified. If you pursue these blessings by attempting to keep God's law, you will miss out. You will forgo these blessings. But if you pursue them through faith in Christ's ability to keep the law for you and in Christ's becoming a curse for you, all of these blessings are yours in him.
Church, it really is that simple. I don't think we always recognize the seriousness of the sin of self-justification. When we pursue justification in our own strength, not only are we forfeiting the riches that are ours in Christ, we're also guilty of committing a great affront to God. In the book of Revelation, so much describes the idolatrous nature of self-righteousness, of legalism.
He says it like this. He said, all hypocrites and idolaters set about doing what rightly belongs only to the divine majesty and to Christ. They do not say it in so many words, I am God, I am Christ. Yet, in fact, they proudly challenge Christ's office and divinity so that it is like saying, I am Christ. Such a spirit does not want to be a recipient or allow anything to be done for itself, but rather wants to be an agent doing those things that God should be doing and that should be received from God. Such a spirit denies God and sets up the creature in the place of the creator.
When we try to justify ourselves before God, we make ourselves idolaters of the worst order. And the truth is we could never do enough. But the good news is we don't have to do enough. God has already done enough.
As one pastor put it, the fires of His wrath have spent all their fury at Calvary. And every believer, Jew and Gentile alike, is perfectly safe without ever having to lift a finger. There's a quote that's often referenced from C.S.
Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. In the story, you're asking Mr. Beaver if Aslan, a lion who reminds us a whole lot of Christ, if he is safe. And Mr. Beaver replies, safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn't safe, but he's good. He's the king.
And that's true as far as it goes. God is not a safe God, if by safe we mean that he'll never disrupt the things that you and I think make for a happy and secure life. But Christian, in terms of your moral standing before God, in terms of God's unconditional acceptance of you for the rest of eternity, in the face of your all too frequent lapses into living by the law rather than by grace, and failing to measure up to the law's relentless absolute standard, you are safe. Christ is safe. He has absorbed God's anger once for all on your behalf. And because of that, everything is going to be okay. The very word of God that's before us this morning reminds us of that truth, and it calls us, brothers and sisters, to simply rest in that truth today, tomorrow, and for all eternity.
Let's pray. Lord, once again, you've reminded us that we are saved by grace. And so once again, we thank you for the unspeakable gift that's ours in Christ. Lord, guard us this week from lapsing back into the belief that our sin is really not all that bad, or that since we're not as bad as the next person, we're okay. Lord, to think that way, we admit, is to overlook the seriousness of our sin's offense against you. It's to demean your holiness and your love in sending your son to die for our sin. So help us by the power of your Holy Spirit in us to receive and rest upon Christ alone as he has offered to us in the gospel. Lord, we believe, but help our unbelief. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
