Children of Promise

Please turn with me this morning to Galatians chapter 4. I'll be reading verses 21 through 31 as we spend a few moments today considering the nature of God's saving work, a work that is truly His work and not our work. We are saved by grace through faith in Christ, not of works lest any of us should boast. And yet how prone we are to try and offer God just a little bit of help, a little bit of our own work.

So that we can get just a little bit of the credit. God will not cooperate with sinners. Either He'll do the saving or the saving will not get done. Galatians chapter 4 verses 21 through 31. The son of the free woman was born through promise.

Now this may be interpreted allegorically. These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai bearing children for slavery. She is Hagar.

Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free and she is our mother. For it is written, The one who does not bear break forth and cry aloud you who are not in labor for the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband. Now you brothers like Isaac are children of promise.

But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit so also it is now. But what does the Scripture say? Cast out the slave woman and her son. For the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.

So brothers we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. Let's pray. Lord in our knowing, in our doing, in our being may we be always dependent upon your grace and not our works. So that to you alone would be the glory of the saving of our souls. I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well Paul has just admitted that he is perplexed. He is thoroughly confused at the Galatian church. These people had heard Paul himself preach the good news of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. They had accepted Paul's preaching as the Gospel truth. They had repented of their sins and given evidence of the credibility of their profession of faith in Christ. They had received the indwelling gift of the Holy Spirit. And yet even after Paul understood all these things they were considering the option of following after some false Jewish teachers into a life of legalistic works based religion. A choice that would have demonstrated that their progress in the Christian faith was mere hypocrisy.

And this trajectory that they were on was mystifying Paul. Why would a person who had heard the Gospel from an apostle and had believed that Gospel to the saving of their souls ever once wanted to return to their old lives as it was prior to their having heard and believed the Gospel? Why would a son act like a slave?

Why would a free person act like a prisoner? Why would someone who is under grace want to be back under the law? Well in our text today Paul gives three examples of the folly of this very thing, of a works based religion. And he gives these three examples, two from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament to serve as servants to the subtle and not so subtle ways in which we doubt God's promises.

If spiritually we are who we are by the promises of God then we have no grounds for boasting. If we doubt the promises of God we are demonstrating that our confidence, our hope, our security is ultimately not in God it is in ourselves. If we are not trusting God's promises we are trusting in our works.

Well let's consider these three examples. First we see that we are working for our salvation when we try to help God rather than trust God. Let's take a look at the story in the hands. Paul alludes to the story in verse 21.

He says, Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise.

And you know the story. God promised old Abraham and old Sarah that they would have a son through whom the whole world would be blessed, but there was no son. So Abraham and Sarah put their heads together and they came up with a plan.

They figured that if Abraham got the servant girl Hagar pregnant then there would be a son who would technically be Abraham and Sarah's. Now what were they doing? Well for one they were doubting God's ability or desire to fulfill His promise, the promise that He had made to them. But they were also thinking that their contribution, their sneaky little plan, not to mention their adulterous little plan to produce a son on their own, they were thinking that would constitute a legitimate fulfillment of God's promises. They were trying to help God. They were doing what the Galatians were trying to do. They were working for grace.

Have you ever done that? Have you ever tried to help God? Of course we would never call it that. We would rather couch it in orthodox sounding terminology like I'll do my part and let God do His part or God helps those who help themselves. We have virtuous sounding ways of describing what is essentially a lack of faith. We want to help God. We want to hurry things along.

And so we take matters into our hands that don't belong in our hands. It's a salvation by works, not by faith. My first car was a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle. I had a love-hate relationship with that car. It left me stranded more times than I can remember. One of the many quirks of this vehicle was that the cable that connected the gas cable to the carburetor would often break and leave me stranded. And so the car would crank. I could put it in gear but I couldn't give it any gas to make it move forward. It was a stick shift so as soon as I let the clutch out it would just stall. Well one day I was almost home when the cable to the carburetor broke for the umpteenth time. And it just so happened that I was at the bottom of an enormous hill in my driveway.

My house was at the top of the hill. But I realized that I could stand just outside of the driver's door and slowly let the clutch out while pushing on the car. And my pushing provided just enough forward momentum to keep the car from stalling. And this enabled me to push the Volkswagen up this giant hill and safely into my driveway where I could once again fix the broken cable. A couple of folks staring at me through their front doors as if to say, who is this superhuman seventeen-year-old who can push a car up that giant hill with ease?

What they didn't realize was the engine was doing ninety-nine percent of the work and I was just basically keeping it from stalling out. I think sometimes Christians view God like that Volkswagen Beetle. God does most of the work but occasionally He needs a little help, a little push. We need to take it upon ourselves like Abraham and Sarah to just nudge providence along a little bit.

We don't stop long enough to realize that when we behave this way or think this way we're essentially saying, God you're not doing it right. You're not acting quickly enough. You're not aware of what I need. You're not self-sufficient. You're not all powerful. You're not all wise.

You need me. It's a works-based salvation. It's all neatly packaged in a man-centered theology. And we're blinded to the man-centeredness of it the most when it concerns things that we care about the most. Our comfort, our reputation, our children, our marriage, our job, our church, our country. We care about these things so deeply that we begin to panic when circumstances that touch these arenas aren't going the way we think they should. We panic and we roll up our sleeves and say, I guess I'll just have to take care of this problem myself. Soon we begin to make compromises and give justifications for all sorts of beliefs and behaviors that we would have never entertained before the emergency began.

What is all of that? It is a lack of faith in the promises and power of God. Instead of waiting on the Lord and resting in His sovereign goodness, we surge forward with our own sovereign plan for the universe. We start trying to push the Volkswagen up the hill. The problem is God is not a Volkswagen. He's a semi-truck. He's a freight train.

He cannot be pushed around, controlled, or manipulated in any way. The other problem is we're not God. And so we will have to resort to Hagars and to the horses and chariots of Egypt. But all the while God is saying, trust me, the righteous shall live by faith. Now to be sure as God's children we get to join Him in what He's doing.

We're not passive lumps of clay. We are jars of clay that have a purpose, that have a function, that we are to be fulfilling. We are most certainly supposed to be obeying and following and serving the Lord with our lives. But we need to understand that we don't serve and obey and follow the Lord because He needs us. We serve and obey the Lord because it brings Him joy to allow us to serve in His vineyard with Him. We're like the three year old who is helping his dad fix the car. He's not out there because his dad needs him.

He's out there because his dad wants him and because he wants his dad. So even our labor for the Lord then is all of grace and is grounded in the promises of God which are accessed not by earning them but through faith. Well the second illustration Paul gives of a works-based view of God and of salvation is the example of exilic Israel losing hope in God's promises. He turns the story of Sarah and Hagar into an allegory and then plugs that allegory into an Old Testament passage from Isaiah. Look with me at verse 24. Now this, the story about Sarah and Hagar, may be interpreted allegorically.

Now let me just pause for a moment and explain something that's not directly related to our text but it's important for us to understand. Paul says that he's interpreting this Old Testament story allegorically. An allegory is a story that's interpreted symbolically, right? It involves reading a meaning into a story that is foreign to the story itself. Let's say for example my story is this, a dog named Spot ran after the ball.

That's my story, exciting story. It's about a dog and a ball, simple as that. But if I were to allegorize the story I could perhaps say that the dog Spot represents sin like a spot on the moral character of a person. I could ask in what way then does sin run?

Well sin runs away from God. So then what does that imply about the ball? Well the ball would need to symbolize something that's antithetical to God, opposed to God and something that sin is drawn to.

We could say the ball symbolizes temptation or maybe some specific sin like the sin of lying since lying is I don't know elusive and bouncy like a ball. That's allegory. That's how allegorical interpretation works. So Paul says that the story of Sarah and Hagar may be interpreted allegorically. In other words he's about to assign symbolic meanings to the various parts of the story to make a point.

The thing I want to explain is this. Paul's allegorizing of scripture is the allegorizing of an apostle who's under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. If and when we allegorize scripture we are not apostles under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We are not at liberty to interpret scripture allegorically simply because we happen to see a correspondence between Spot the dog and sin.

Or between David's son and the blood of Jesus Christ. Now that last example might have raised some eyebrows because we've probably all heard several sermons of the story of Rahab that were preached allegorically maybe many times. And it's difficult for us not to see correspondence between a scarlet object that saves a sinner from destruction and the scarlet blood of Jesus that saves a sinner from destruction. Using analogies in scripture is fine. Using those analogies to illustrate biblical truth is fine. That's what Paul is doing in Galatians 4. What's not fine is for us to think that just because we notice an interesting point of correspondence between two passages of scripture that we have somehow stumbled upon the secret hidden key that unlocks God's intended meaning of those verses. One pastor said, You can find just about any novel symbolism in a passage of scripture. But when you do this you aren't searching to find what God wants you to know because of what He reveals in a passage. You are looking for what you see in that passage. The Bible then becomes the vehicle for your message.

And so we want to be careful. Our allegorizing is at best an illustration of a truth and that illustration is only a good as the illustration's ability to illuminate the truth to which it points. But a man-made illustration is never on par with the inspired Word of God unless of course it's an illustration that is inspired by the Holy Spirit. And that's exactly what we have here in Galatians 4.

So back to our text. Paul draws a point of correspondence between the story of Sarah and Hagar and Old Testament Israel. Verse 24, These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai bearing children for slavery. She is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem. And that would be the Jerusalem of Paul's day.

He's the one saying this. For she is in slavery with her children. So in Paul's allegory Hagar who in Genesis was Abraham's attempt to help God by His works. Hagar represents the law. Mount Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

Hagar represents slavery, bondage to the law because keeping the law never yields the freedom that one hopes it will yield. Hagar represents present day Jerusalem. Paul's present day Jerusalem. A Jerusalem that had rejected Christ as the Messiah and crucified Him for crimes He didn't commit. A Jerusalem that was trying its best to obey the rules of Moses in order to earn favor with God. It was a Jerusalem that like Hagar and her son the Jewish male was enslaved. Verse 26, But the Jerusalem above. In other words the real Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem, the Christian Jerusalem is free.

And she, Galatian Christians, is our mother. Paul then quotes Isaiah 54 one in verse 27, God is about to do the miraculous. He's going to give children to the barren woman who cannot have any children of her own. Isaiah is describing an act of miraculous unexpected divine grace. Now the Old Testament context of this quote of Isaiah that Paul uses is a context of exile. Israel had been unfaithful and so God had chastened her by allowing her enemies to defeat her and take her off into exile. But God had also promised that He would bring them back one day. He would restore His people to their land. He would restore them to a place of blessing and peace and happiness.

And so even though they were experiencing barrenness, mourning, chastening, affliction, there would be a day in the future of restoration. So God says to them, don't lose hope Israel, keep the faith, keep trusting Me. Well God did bring Israel back to the Promised Land. He did restore them and in fact He sent them the greatest salvation a human being could ever receive. He sent them His only begotten Son Jesus Christ to save them from all of their sin and from all of their enemies and from the devil and from death itself. But what did Israel do? John 1 tells us what Israel did.

John says that in Jesus was life and the life was the light of men. He came to His own and His own people did not receive Him. They rejected God's promised hope and instead chose the path of slavery to the law. Israel in her spiritual barrenness was offered life but chose death.

She was offered freedom but chose slavery. She was offered grace but chose instead dead works. How do you respond to the chastening hand of God? Because your response in moments of divine chastening reveals a lot about how you view the Gospel. The right response to chastening is repentance of the sin that brought about the chastening. The wrong response to chastening is to think that you can feel bad enough about your sin to earn your way back into favor with God.

Yes we ought to grieve over our sin but we never grieve as those who are without hope because God is the one who promises hope and restoration. To act and think and feel as if the only way out of my sin predicament is to claw my way out of the guilt back to obedience or by feeling sorry enough for my sin or by refusing to receive the forgiveness and the freedom that come from Jesus Christ then I'm living like Israel according to a works based legalistic version of salvation that cannot save. Penance without repentance is not the Gospel it is slavery. This brings us to the third and final example that Paul gives of a works based salvation. We betray a legalistic works based view of salvation when we listen to and believe false Gospels rather than the Gospel of grace. And this is where Paul really brings it all back home to the Galatian Christians and to us.

Verse 28. Now you brothers like Isaac are children of promise. We're not children of bootstraps we're children of promise. We're not self-made sons of God like Abraham producing Ishmael to help God out.

No we are grace made sons of God like Isaac the miracle child the child of promise. Paul's readers were supposed to be like Isaac in the allegory but they were acting and thinking more like Ishmael. They were behaving like children of works rather than children of promise.

They were listening to false teachers who wanted credit for having pushed the Volkswagen up the hill on their own. They were embracing a belief system that contradicted God's truth God's Gospel. Was born according to the flesh and that's Ishmael persecuted him who was born according to the spirit that's Isaac so also it is now. There came a point in Genesis when conflict began to grow between Ishmael and Isaac between Hagar and Sarah. In other words the consequence of Abraham trying to take matters into his own hands and the consequence of God fulfilling his promises began to clash with each other.

You see the great ideas that we think will help God out actually end up opposing the plans of God for us. And so what Abraham thought would fix the situation ended up ruining it to the point that someone had to go because jealousy and hard feelings and persecution were beginning to erupt in the family. Now the parallel between that Old Testament conflict and the conflict brewing in Paul's day between the false teachers and the Galatians Christians is sort of implied here he doesn't state it explicitly but it's obvious the false teachers in Galatia just like Ishmael and Hagar were making a mockery of the true children of God by spreading a false gospel.

So Paul gives the solution in verse 30. He says but what does scripture say cast out the slave woman in her son for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman. This is a reference to Genesis 21 where Sarah insisted that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away essentially excommunicated from the family because they were mocking Isaac and looking down on him as if they were his superiors. Now Sarah's motives may have been wrong. Sarah's motives may have been perfectly right and just for our purposes today which is simply to understand what Paul is saying in Galatians 4. We don't have to answer all the head scratching ethical questions that arise from the Genesis story of Hagar and Sarah. What we do need to understand from this powerful inspired allegory is that false gospels and true gospels ought not and indeed cannot co-inhabit the true church.

We're not children of the slave but of the free woman. Paul is commanding the church in Galatia to stop listening to the false teachers and instead believe and obey the pure gospel of grace. In other words as one preacher put it to remain in the sphere of promise. When it comes to the application of God's word scripture either calls for us to know something or to do something or to be something. Knowing, doing and being these are kind of the three categories of application.

What's interesting about our text today is that all three of these categories are addressed. With the example of Abraham Paul is calling for us to do something. He's saying in your behavior, in your actions don't run ahead of God.

Don't take matters into your own hands like Abraham and Sarah did. Demonstrate your faith in God by simply obeying God. One of the most beautiful and obvious evidences of faith in God is simple obedience through the commands of God.

With the example of Exilic Israel Paul is calling for us to be something. He's addressing our attitude towards the Lord when he calls us to rejoice in chastening, to break forth and cry aloud even when we seem barren and desolate and alone. To be able to have joy in the midst of chastening is an act of trust isn't it? Despair in suffering is the attitude of works. Joy in suffering is the attitude of faith. Are you prone to panic?

Are you prone to hopelessness? Is God not trustworthy? Will he not fulfill his promises to you? Our attitude is our emotions, our outlook on life should reflect an unswerving confidence in God and that confidence often manifests itself most clearly in an ability to rejoice in suffering. And finally, Paul's reproof of the Galatians themselves to stop submitting to their persecutors and to cast out this element of false teaching that they were accommodating is a call for us to know something. It's a call for us to know and believe the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ which is also a call for us to reject all false gospels. What are you filling your mind with? To whom or to what do you run for truth, for knowledge, for instruction?

If we're constantly running to teachers who just scratch our itching ears with information that appeals to us because we want it to be true or because it makes us look good or feel good about ourselves but is contradictory to the actual truth, contradictory to God's truth, the truth that truly sets us free, then we need to cast out the enslaving false gospel and submit our minds to what God has said in his word. Once upon a time there was a young prince who lived with his father, the king, in a majestic palace high up on a mountain. One day as the sun was beginning to set, the young prince who had been exploring a forbidden path just outside the palace gate lost his way. As the dark of night settled in, a band of robbers stole the boy and carried him deep into the valley below. Now the valley was full of thorns and thistles and shadows and the wicked people who dwelt in the valley enslaved the boy and taught him their cruel and harsh ways. In time the boy became a man and the man became like the people of the valley and so believing himself to be one of them, he forgot about the palace and the mountain and the king until one day when he stumbled upon a path at the foot of the mountain.

As he began climbing the path, he met a soldier on a horse. The soldier bound the prince, not knowing he was the prince, and carried him to the palace where he was brought before the king for judgment. The king immediately recognized his son because good fathers never forget their children. When the prince discovered his true identity, he was in disbelief. How could he be royalty when all he had known was life as a slave in the valley?

But as the faint memories of his childhood began creeping back into his mind, he realized it was true. He was the prince, the son of the king. His disbelief gave way, however, to sorrow at the thought of having fled. He forfeited a life of happiness with the king in order to live in the valley. Whenever he would see the beautiful sunrises and sunsets from the high palace wall, waves of regret would sweep over the prince's heart. How many painted skies had he missed while living in the valley?

How many years had been wasted in the valley, years that he could have spent learning and loving and laughing and feasting with the king? Many seem to say, you are not a slave, you are a son, and all is well. Beloved, if you are in Christ, you are not a slave to the guilt and regret and condemnation of the law. You are a son.

If you are in Christ, you are not hopelessly relying on your past track record, your present resolutions to do better, or your future successes. You are a son. And if you are a son, then you are an heir. The palace is yours.

Its riches are yours. The king is your father. Stop going back to the valley in your mind, in your heart, in your actions, and instead live like a child of promise, whose value and purpose and joy depend utterly on the promise giver. I want to say one more thing, and then we'll close in prayer.

There may be some here this morning who have never, never been out of the valley. You've never met the king, never known the sweet comfort of having guilt and regret and sorrow silenced through the forgiveness of sins. If that's you, I'm here today to declare that you can be freed from the slavery of sin this morning. You can experience the joy of belonging, body and soul, to the king, to God, your creator, your redeemer, and all you need to do is call out to Jesus Christ, the Savior. Jesus Christ promises to save all who call upon Him, and He never breaks His promises.

Let's pray. Father, you have truly promised us great things, things that we often in our unbelief and self-sufficiency find too difficult to believe, but you are faithful. You do not deny yourself. You keep that which you promise. So help us then to walk in the freedom of sonship that you've given to us. Abba, Father. We pray in the name of the great firstborn son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who saves us and keeps us. Amen.