“My hope is built on nothing less / than Jesus’ blood and righteousness"

This is Paul’s message to the church in Galatia, and one that might be familiar to us from songs like the one above, and verses like Ephesians 2:8 where we proclaim that our salvation is ‘not of ourselves; it is the gift of God’. Yet while many of us might agree that we are saved by grace alone, functionally, we live by a law-based approach to life. Our sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ tells us that if we are to be saved, our good works must outnumber our bad works. After all, isn’t it only ‘good’ people that deserve to be saved? This is what Paul had to say in the middlish bit of his letter to the church:

(A) Faith, not works: we are made sons of Abraham to share in his blessings and attain righteousness through the Spirit by faith (Gal 3:1-9)

In Gal 3:1, Paul begins with a sharp rebuke - “you foolish Galatians!”. Much like a husband who forgets his wedding anniversary, the Galatians had forgotten a transforming, life-changing event - the public crucifixion of Christ - and they were in trouble. Forgetting the cross meant forgetting the very foundation of their faith, and so where their foundation had once been Christ alone, it was now a muddy mix of a half-Gospel, and their own attempts at ticking off a to-do list of Righteous Acts (the Mosaic Law). To address this, Paul got personal and pointed with a set of rhetorical questions that we too are invited to consider:

  • Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?

  • Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

  • Did you suffer so many things in vain, if indeed it was in vain?

  • Does He who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?

By these questions, Paul was actually painting in broad strokes the life of a believer:

  1. Receiving Christ: You received the Spirit (union with Christ) by hearing and responding to the Gospel with faith. You didn’t earn it!!!

  2. Journeying on in faith: He who began a good work in you is the one who will carry it to completion! This message is opposed to a theology that says: God saved me at the start, but now I save myself, I make myself sinless.

  3. Suffering: Please don’t render all your suffering for the Gospel in vain by following a false Gospel of salvation by works!

  4. Daily reliance on the Spirit: God continues to work miracles and supply the Spirit to those who hear Him and have faith in Him. This in-working of the Spirit is a continuing and daily affair!

Paul’s simple yet challenging point is that your whole life is reliant on faith in God. From the start to the end, it is God who is in charge, not us, and all we can do is to place our faith in Him.

To bolster his case, Paul then brings up Abraham to make the point that this has always been so since the time of their forefather, Abraham. The sovereignty of God is displayed in the promise given in Genesis 12:1-3: God tells Abraham that the promised land is one that He will show to them, that He will make of Israel a great nation, and that He will bless and curse the friends and enemies of Israel. Over and over again, God emphasizes that He is the one who is beginning and accomplishing the promise. If this is a group project, Abraham is the snooziest of sleeping groupmates, and the division of labor is:

God: do everything.
Abraham: just believe.

Abraham was counted as righteous not because he had a great beard or because he was a morally good man, but because he believed God. In Gen 15:6 God spoke, and Abraham believed what God spoke. What did this mean for the Galatians? In Gal 3:7, Paul draws the link between the Abrahamic promise and the promise of salvation – if we are ‘of faith’, if we believe in Jesus, then God binds himself to us in the same unshakeable way that He did to Abraham. And just like Abraham, we are simply called to believe.

You see, Paul wanted to be crystal clear to any Gentile believers who might have been misled by members of the worst party of all time (the circumcision party – Galatians 2:12). And if Paul had access to surveymonkey, he might have done up an MCQ for the church to fill in:

Q1: Becoming a Christian means:
(a) circumcision
(b) not eating shellfish
(c) not shaving forever and ever
(d) believing that Jesus Christ died for you on the cross

Now that MCQ might be easy to us because three of the four options are rather dated, but consider this:

  • how do you feel about Christians who do better than you (at school, in the workplace) – do you feel like you’ve received less blessing than you deserve? Or do you feel like your poor performance is down to you not having been ‘as righteous’ or ‘as good’ as them?

  • when you suffer and go through hardship, do you find yourself keeping score and chalking up points with God so that He begins to owe you blessing?

  • when you try to ‘have faith’ in God, does it feel more like a summoning up of bravado or confidence, as if faith were some spiritual mana that you can charge up?

It is easy to nod our heads in church and say that we are saved by grace. But if we examine our hearts, reliance on the law can creep up in subtle ways like the ones above. Sometimes it is a deep condemnation that we carry around, that we are not good enough, and an endless dread that we will be found out, and sometimes it shows when we are quick to tear others down and to pinpoint their faults to keep feeling good about ourselves. Sometimes we read the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and our first response is to “thank God that I am not like that awful Pharisee”. Can we ever be freed from reliance on the law? What’s so bad about the law anyway?

 

(B) Redeemed, not cursed: Christ’s substitutionary work redeems us from the curse of the Law (Gal 3:10-14)

The Mosaic law laid out in Exodus 20-40 can be organized in several ways. Some categorize it as a three-part series on “how to treat yourself, how to treat others, how to treat God”. A more formal categorization splits it into the Judicial Law, the Moral Law and the Ceremonial Law.

But whichever way you slice it, Galatians 3:10b should make you pause: “cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things”. This is the cursed reality of a life of salvation by works – if you so much as slip up once, fall below the standard once, and get caught, it’s over. No matter what you do thereafter, no matter how good you become, a single failure becomes your final verdict. And so the more we read about this law that we must keep both in letter and in spirit, the more the curse weighs down on us. Absolute perfection is the passing grade. Who could possibly bear such a heavy load?

Yet Gal 3:13 goes, "But Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us so that we might be free." And if you’re reading this could I encourage you to pause whatever you’re doing for a moment, and think about how we look at and treat people who are ‘cursed’, or broken. Those who struggle with sin of some sort, whether it is the more tangible and visible kind of vice, or just people who are proud or nasty or unpleasant or hard to be around, the sort that we distance ourselves from. Because Jesus looked at the people who were desperately broken and baying for His blood, and He saw the curse that they were under, the selfishness that so easily takes over and rots every human heart, and He knew that under the law they would have to pay a heavy penalty. He looked at me and saw my brokenness and burden, and He said: put it on me. Let the curse fall on me.

Why? So that we might be saved. So that the weight of the perfect law that bears down upon us if we so much as think about it, so that the weight of our sin that closes in on us and condemns us day and night – for those who put their faith in Christ, all these heavy weights are now gone, unshackled from us, and we can lift our heads and approach a perfect God.

So in these first two sections, Paul shows us what the way is and why we must take it. Faith in Christ. Not the Law.

 

(C) Promised, not earned: the Law does not make the promise void (Gal 3:15-18) 

Now despite the above, Paul knew that many of his listeners still feared the clutches of the law. And while he had chastised them earlier, he now assured them: If humans know how to keep their word, what more God. If us flawed and untrustworthy humans can grasp and honor the idea of a binding covenant, what more a perfect and steadfast God, in whom there is no shadow of turning? Don’t get it wrong! The appearance of the law does not change this promise!

We who live on the other side of the cross know this to be true, because even when we set ourselves against Jesus, and scorned Him, and mistook Him as some warmongering conqueror, and though not one of us could keep the law, He did not turn away, but went resolutely to Calvary.

So at the end of tonight’s study, we are led to ask: what kind of a God is this? That keeps His word, not to an equal, but to us humans. A sovereign, faithful, unchangeable God, not swayed by our grandstanding and attempts to win favor, but not dissuaded by our failures and ugliness and betrayals. This is the God that our faith is built on. Will you come and know Him? He desires to be known by you.

What does the Gospel mean for you today, living on the other side of the Cross, having seen and received the precious and costly fulfillment of God’s promise. What does the unveiling of God’s gift - union with Christ - mean to us? If it is not precious, then come to God and ask Him to show you how He loves you.

Lord, we thank You for Your Word. Thank you for speaking to us and pulling us out of our week, for reminding us that this passage and these scriptures are for us today. Like the Galatians, we struggle daily to earn our righteousness before You, to understand what it means to put our faith wholly in You. Remind us of the graciousness and beauty in Your promises to us. Help us to have faith in that and to understand what it means to cling so tightly to You. Today, I am depending on Your Word, Your promise, Your Gospel. Nothing of my own I bring - my Shepherd does it all, and because of Him and not my sheepy striving, I lie down in green pastures and drink from quiet streams and am refreshed. Amen.

Written by Joseph Tay.