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July 20, 2003 |
"Galatians" |
Pastor Brian Shimer
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"Are you a Jew or a Christian?"
Galatians 3-4
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I. | Sharing out of the Book of Galatians has been a great journey for me.
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Even though we are taking the larger themes of this tremendous book, rather than taking it verse-by-verse, still, it is impacting my life. If anyone here has dealt with the pull toward law, it is I. I love Jesus, I want to serve Jesus but over the course of my life I have sought to legalize that following of Jesus into a system. I have sought to capture faith in a formula and ended up with dead religion.
I remember when I was led to fast from prayer. It was a crazy idea, but I knew it had come from God. There was this sense of panic in me. So, I stopped praying except to read a Psalm aloud or to thank God for what He was doing. I did this for a month I think it was. It broke apart religion and helped me experience faith anew.
After he'd left, Paul found the Galatians similarly caught. They had believed the Jewish converts from Jerusalem who told them that for a Gentile to really be saved they must keep the whole Jewish law. They specifically focused on circumcision. God had given circumcision as a sign of the Jewish relationship with Himself
When you think about circumcision it is a brilliant sign and applies to us.
It shows that the relationship with God is indisputably physical. It is not ethereal.
Circumcision is an operation on the most intimate member of the male body. It is not a decoration, like a tattoo. It is performed at the place, which shows our essential identity, where we know and are known. Relationship with God, likewise, is not embroidery; it constitutes our character.
Circumcision is a wound. The scar remembers the pain of being separated from one way of life and set apart for another. It shows that we are not born innocent and pristine and then gradually fall away into sin; rather our natural condition requires intervention and is marked by an encounter with the divine, the holy.
Circumcision was a vicarious act. Not every person was circumcised; only the males carried the sign. The women however were equally God's people. In this way the sign could never be confused with the reality itself. It was both necessary and not necessary! It was a sign of a reality.
The circumcised person is not whole but partial. The missing part is cut off by God's command, which command also supplies what is lacking. The visible sign of obedience to the command is also a sign of the invisible God who promises to redeem, to guide and to bless. (E Peterson, Traveling Light, IVP c'82 p 81-82)
It is not too surprising that this symbol that had accumulated 2000 years of authority would have the power to dazzle and impress even to the extent of obscuring the reality it symbolized. The Galatians had been told to believe that the symbol was the reality of the relationship itself. They were confusing appearance of reality with the reality itself. That is like saying the earth must be flat for it appears flat!
But they were acting more like our dog Jenny then like thinking people. If I point my finger and say "Look!" Jenny will look not where I am pointing but at my finger. For her my finger is not a sign but simply a finger with texture, odor and taste. So the Galatians and their deceivers just kept staring at circumcision-- keeping the law to grow in Christ!
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II. | This is the source of Paul's many questions to the Galatians.
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John read these from the Message translation
"Did someone put a hex on you?
Have you taken leave of your senses?
How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God's message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God."
Paul is challenging his hearers and us to begin thinking about faith. What happens by faith and what happens by keeping the law?
In Peru we noticed that nothing happened by our own efforts. We were there in the will of God, living the plan of God, and all things happened because God planned them. The second time we visited the newest school in Cerro, The Alfred Nobel School, we arrived just prior to the noon hour. The time had changed for us to do the program, so they had us wait about 30 minutes in the courtyard. At first we were distressed that we would not have time to do the program, but then relaxed in the warm sun under blue skies, and Grace, Danny, Chelsea and others began to play basketball with the children on recess. It was a great break. It was a gift of God to us in the midst of a busy schedule. Had we been slaves to our schedule, we never could have relaxed. But because the whole week was a faith walk, we did release the schedule. Thirty minutes later in the classroom filled with students, we hardly had room to move, but we were relaxed, open to whatever God was doing and watched as every little hand went up to receive Christ.
Paul says in these chapters 3 and 4 that the Galatians have received God's Holy Spirit and seen God perform miracles by faith, not by works. (3:5)
He wrote that they and we become children of Abraham, children of the promise made to Abraham also by that same faith. "Those who believe are children of Abraham" Paul wrote in verse 7. That same verse in the Message translation is as follows:
"Is it not obvious to you that persons who put their trust in Christ (not persons who put their trust in the law!) are like Abraham, children of faith?"
It is by Faith that we are made right with God (v 11)
It is by faith that God has redeemed us through the work of Christ from the curse of the law. Paul wrote: "He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith (did you hear it?) we might receive the promise of the Spirit." It is not by believing, life comes to us!
Redeem is such a great word. It refers to a particular kind of sale in slavery. Imagine a slave serving in a city observed by a wealthy citizen. That slave is owned by someone. But this wealthy citizen because of compassion, mercy, or whim, is purchased, but not then owned by this new owner. Instead once all the fees have been paid to the temple and to the previous owner, the new owner says: "I now set you free". Once a slave now a freedman, this person was freed not to do something but to be someone!
Because we have been redeemed, Paul says, we receive full rights as sons of God -- sons who are full heirs, who address God as FATHER or even DADDY.
Finally, if you compare verse 16 and verse 29 you see something amazing that God has done. It says this original promise God made to Abraham and to his seed. Peterson translates: "You will observe that Scripture, in the careful language of a legal document, does not say, "to descendants," referring to everybody in general, but "to your descendant" (the noun, note, is singular), referring to Christ."
Scripture notes that the law which was added 430 years later would not annul the promise of the will God had made earlier. It would be as if the household rules the children live under while in my home, could effect the will that I have legally set down on their behalf. The will is a promise for them and is unaffected by the rules of the home.
What occurs by faith then is that when we enter this promise made to Jesus on our behalf by accepting what God has done for us, we by entering Christ, become that descendent, it says in verse 29. As Scripture states, in the NIV, "if you belong to Christ, then you ARE Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise."
Heirs of God, children of promise, people who have been ushered into freedom-all this by faith, or simple trust in what God has done.
And all this was forfeited by the Galatians trying to do it all themselves by works of the law. Living by the law they were slaves, they were under the curse (for "utterly cursed is every person who fails to carry out every detail written in the Book of the law.") (3:10).
Paul asks, "What was the purpose of the law?"
1. The word torah means to throw in a direction, so the law was given to give us direction,
to point us to Christ, to lead us to Him, in order for us to be justified by faith (3:24).
2. The law then is like arrows painted in a church parking lot. It shows us how to get
in and out, in order for us to come to worship Jesus. The purpose of the arrows though
is not for people to just drive carefully around in the parking lot following the arrows
and never stopping, getting out of their cars and entering the building! That is how
the Galatians were using the law!
It is like the Galatians were being offered a security system in which they would not have to live by faith, would not have to trust in God, but could trust in themselves.
They had returned to slavery, turned back to "those weak and miserable principles" that had previously enslaved them. They had been intimidated into scrupulously observing all the traditions, taboos, and superstitions associated with special days and seasons and years." They had become more like Jews than like Christians. They'd taken their lives into their own hands.
It is so easily done.
Paul reminds them that Abraham had even tried that. He had not waited for God to fulfill his promise but had taken God's promise into his own hands and tried to make it happen. The result of his impatience was Ishmael who persecuted the son who was born of God's promise, Isaac.
Where are you taking your life into your own hands?
Where are you seeking to bring about God's promise and creating instead a tangled mess?
Where are you trying to live like a Jew rather than live in the freedom of a Christian?
If I learned anything in Peru, it was God is fully capable of accomplishing all He intends to accomplish through me. All he needs me to do is show up.
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