The Law and The Promise

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

And so we're going to be in Galatians chapter 3 today, as soon as I can find it, my Bible. We're going to be in Galatians chapter 3 today. We're going to be going all the way from verse 8 to verse 29. Okay, so we're covering a lot of ground today. We won't read every single verse, but we're going to try to kind of capture what's going on in this letter. So, in the letter to the Galatians, to capture kind of the mood of what's going on, I thought it would be helpful if we saw a couple of signs that helped us illustrate the fact that sometimes we want to communicate a really simple message, but we really messed that message up. So that might look like sassalili, but that's supposed to say sale. It's just done poorly. And then there's another one, we've got a few more of these. That's probably supposed to say we're not happy till you're not happy, but it actually

says we're not till you're not happy or we're not happy until you're not happy. It's strange. Let's keep going. No safety, smoking first. Probably meant to communicate something else. You don't matter, give up. Probably meant the opposite. And then don't save a life, be afraid to give blood. They probably meant something a little different, right? So we are constantly, as human beings, we are trying to say something that we are not communicating very well, okay? In fact, sometimes when we say it, it comes out as the opposite of what we mean, okay? That we're not incredibly good at this, okay? And so we mean it, we say it for one thing, but it means another thing. We do this often whenever we talk about laws or rules. We do this a lot. So we'll say something like, hey, don't touch the stove. And that's like a rule that we're going to put on a child, and that's a good rule.

Laws can be good and proactive and protective and God honoring, yet, yet, there is an inherent lie that we often believe that lives within any law, any rule that there is. And that's this lie. The lie is, if I could just make everyone obey this law or this rule, things would be better. If I could just make everybody do what I want them to do. So how many times have you seen a driver disobeying a traffic law on the road? You're like, if that guy would just, because it's always a guy, if that guy would just taken shots at men this morning, how many times have you had a coworker taking a shortcut that you know won't work? You know it'll be more frustrating for everybody else, but they're still going to take that shortcut and you're like, if that guy would just listen to me, I would just do, and of course with children, how many times is a child taking an unnecessary

risk? And I don't mean just small children, I mean adult children too. You are looking at your children and you're going, why are you doing this? If I could just make you listen to me, if I could just make you do what I want you to do, right, then everything would be better. That's the lie that we believe. If we kind of make people do what we want them to do, then their lives will be better. That is the inherent temptation, lie, flaw within a law. And it sounds small. It sounds very small. However, handling bad behavior is where a lot of us are going to make huge mistakes. How do we handle bad behavior? Because we want to put laws on people to fix bad behavior, right? So we see some driver, we see somebody doing something they shouldn't do, we're like, okay, we need law reform, we need to put more laws on people. But the dirty secret is that everybody knows, it doesn't matter how many laws you put on

people, they're going to do what they're going to do. But the reality is when you put laws on people just to fix bad behavior, it might actually fix it, but it leads to death. Because living under laws, living under laws inevitably turns bitter. Living under law inevitably turns bitter. And for Christians in particular, living under laws ends up rivaling their relationship with Jesus instead of supporting it. Living under a law ends up rivaling or attacking that relationship with Jesus instead of supporting it. Sometimes we give people rules, laws, and that's children, co-workers, employee handbooks, whatever. We do that to support good behavior. We don't do that so that they'll be tempted to do something bad, or we don't do that to make their life better. And so how do we deal with this? How do we deal with bad behaviors and rules? It's not like we can live without rules, but it's not like we can let bad behavior persist.

So what do we do? How do we do that? And this isn't just like spiritually, this is everything. This is parenting, this is co-workers, this is your whole life. How do you deal proactively in a gospel way with bad behavior? And this is exactly where we're going to be going today in the book of Galatians. In the book of Galatians, the first thing the book of Galatians does is it draws a sharp contrast between the law and the promise. Okay. Now we talk about the promise first verses eight and nine Galatians three, sorry, that's where we're going to be today in the book of Galatians chapter three. I didn't say that before. And we're going to start in eight and nine. It says in the scripture for seeing, for seeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preach the gospel before him, beforehand to Abraham saying, shall all the nations be blessed. So then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham."

Okay, so we have a promise given to Abraham. That promise, in short, is in you, all the nations will be blessed. So a little bit of context. In Genesis, God meets Abraham. Abraham has not done anything to win God's favor. win God's favor, he hasn't like performed any function. God has no reason to reward him yet or to do anything. And God says, I'm going to make a promise to you. I'm going to make a covenant with you, me to you. It's not you to me, it's just me to you. And that my promise to you is that in you, in your offspring, I'm going to bless the entire world. That's the promise. The promise is that blessing would come to everyone through Abraham. Now again, this is when Abraham was in his late nineties and had no child. Okay, so believing that promise, okay, that's a big deal. So he believes this promise.

And this promise we see in Galatians 3 8 9, it's available to everybody and it's only received by faith. Right? So in other words, the promise is so big that it takes faith to see it. Let me give you a simple illustration. If I would say this is a table, okay, right here, this is a simple fact and it requires no faith. You can literally see the table. But if I would make another claim and I would say there are only three tables like this in the world. Okay, well that's a, that's a bit bigger of a claim, isn't it? And it actually takes faith. You would actually have to believe me or you'd have to prove it, which would take a while and a lot of travel. So what's the difference in between just saying this is a table and there's only three like it in the world, the scope, that the claim that I'm making about this table is so big that it actually requires faith to

believe it. Right? What God is saying to Abraham is that in you, the entire world is going to be blessed and not just like blessed, like have a warm feeling, but blessed in the sense that God means blessing. God means blessing in terms of, you know, this relationship where it's not that problems never happen, but that God's gonna be faithful to us, right? That's this promise that we're talking about. And so the promise that we see, just in short, it's from God. It's really big and it takes faith to believe it. The promise is from God, it's really big and it takes faith to believe The law is a little different. The law is also from God, but it shares a different purpose. And we're going to spend a little bit of time on the law. Galatians 3 verses 10 through 12, okay. It says, for all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. For it is written, curse be everyone who does not abide by all the things written in the book of the law and do them.

Now, it is evident that no one's justified before God by the law, for the righteous shall live by faith. But the law is not a faith. Rather, the one who does them shall live by them." So, what does that mean? That means the law works differently than the promise. The promise is from God to us, given to us, we didn't earn it, nothing. It's just God being faithful to us. The law is different. The law, it's helpful to think about the law like an x-ray machine. The law exposes your flaws. It shows you how you don't measure up. We all know this about an x-ray machine. X-ray machine will expose all your flaws, but it will not heal you. You need doctors for that. You need surgeries for that. If anybody thinks, I'm going to get on this x-ray machine and it's going to heal me, we'll be sadly mistaken. That's not what x-ray machines do. The law in this sense only serves to condemn you.

The law only shows you where you don't measure up. And so in verse 10 it talks about the curse. Curse be everyone who does not abide by all the things written in the book of the law and do them. This is why it is embittering to live under a law because all you have are exposed flaws. you have are unsolved problems. If with our children, if all we do is tell them the laws that they are not living up to and tell them how they can better live up to those laws, well that's fine, they'll have a moral compass, but they will not understand that they really can never live up to that law. They can never perform it perfectly, right? Because this This is what the law does. The only encouragement that lies within the law is don't mess up. That's it. That's all you can say with the law. Don't mess up. And actually it takes no faith to live by the law. It actually takes control and perfection, but not faith.

Not believing that somebody else did something for you. No, it's doing it yourself. That's what the law is. The law is like betting on yourself. You ever seen American Ninja Warrior? You ever seen those little things that they kind of jump through, like the huge wall? And maybe you're sitting there in your younger years, you would have thought, I don't know, maybe I could do that. Maybe that's just me. I don't know. There's no way I could do that. I would like twist the knee on the first one, fall in the pool. My family would be there like, okay, dad got it over with. That's like the law. like the law, it's this course, except it's way worse, it's way more difficult, it's impossible. No one would finish that course. No one would have the best time. No one would scale the wall and hit the button. That's not what the law is there for. And in fact, because the law is the 10,000 foot wall that is completely unscalable, the fact that that's

there, it's why we needed rescue from the law. Because we couldn't do it. It's not because we just didn't try hard enough or weren't good enough or didn't study long enough. It's because we just can't do it. It's impossible. And so Galatians 3, 13 explains this very fact. It says that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. This is really interesting. He didn't, let me just say it differently. Jesus didn't redeem us from the curse of the law by removing the curse. Jesus didn't save us from having to live up to the law by somehow magically taking away the law. That's not what happened. Jesus actually became a curse for us, for it is written, curses everyone who's hanged on a tree. So this right here is the meat of the gospel. This is the core of the apple. That Jesus came, and whenever he came, He followed that law perfectly, right?

He didn't skirt around anything. He didn't kind of bypass what was hard. He followed all of it. And on top of that, he took on a curse that he didn't deserve. He didn't deserve to hang on a tree, which is actually the curse. So he took on sin. And on this, we're getting into the details of how, what it says in Galatians 1, 3, and 4. that Jesus gave himself to set us free. We're getting into the details of that statement that Jesus gave himself. How did he get himself? Give himself. Why did he give himself? How does that all work? This is how it works. Jesus gave himself to set us free. And let's keep reading from 13. It says that Jesus became a curse for us. Now into 14. He became a curse for us so that in Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham, that's the promise, capital P promise, the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles. Gentiles fancy way of saying

non-Jew people. Okay, everybody not a Jew is a Gentile. So to us, right? So that in Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham might come to us so that we might receive the promise spirit through faith. So in sum, Jesus takes our curse. He takes our penalty. He takes our penalty so that we can receive the promise. So that the law is taken care of. Jesus came and fulfilled the law for us so that that would set us free so that we could then follow however imperfectly we're gonna follow and we're gonna follow imperfectly. how and so that we could receive that that promise part of why Kimmy and paper baptized this morning was because Jesus took the law fulfilled it set them free to say sorry I said Kimmy I meant Susie thank you the whole family was laughing at me all you guys didn't notice they noticed sorry Susie was baptized Kimmy was not baptized today sorry sorry

Peyton and Susie, the whole reason, I'm making a point and everything, now it's all ruined. Start over, okay, we'll get that moved back. Peyton and Susie, the whole reason they were baptized today is because Jesus took the law, fulfilled the law, so that they could raise their hand without condemnation and say, I want to follow Jesus. Because without, with that law still there, when they raised their hand, the law would slap it down and say, you don't deserve to follow Jesus. And it would be right, because the laws only function is to condemn you.

And so Jesus needed to big boy the law so that we could raise our hand and say, I wanna follow Jesus without condemnation. Romans 8, 1 says, there's therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. This, this is our hope. And we're going to get back to this in a minute. But the Galatian churches, now this is the book of Galatians, it's a letter to the Galatian churches. It's several churches all dealing with a similar problem. And so these churches, they still had an issue. They still needed to know something about the law because an important question kind of presents itself at this point in the argument. And that is what do we do with rules then? Right? If Jesus fulfilled all the law for us and we're set free and we can follow Jesus. Does that mean like a kid who's a Christian doesn't need any rules? That we just like let them be feral children,

like run in the backyard, maybe get, you know, find a beehive or something crazy? No, no. We still do something with the law and we've got to figure out what that looks like. So what do we do with the law? The Galatian churches are dealing with this and so we deal with it in Galatians 3:19, we're gonna skip a little bit. And it begins with the question, why then the law? Which is an operative question, right? Like it's, well, since God gave the promise first and then the law came 430 years afterward, why give the law at all? Why give the law? It was added, the answer in 319, it was added because of transgressions. Until the offspring that should, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made. And it was put in place through angels by an intermediary. Okay, let's not get lost in the weeds. The first question, why have the law in the first place?

Now remember, remember the laws like an x-ray machine, it just shows your flaws, it exposes your problems, your big, big, big problems. However, even an x-ray machine that only condemns you serves a good purpose because even though it condemns you, the exposed flaws teach you where you are weak. In other words, you are not living under the delusion that you are okay. You are not somehow wondering about how all these other people just can't seem to make it in life, but you, you never sin, you never have frustration, you never have problems, your children are perfect, your marriage is perfect, your life is perfect, your job is perfect. No, that's nobody. Nobody is like that. And so, it's actually a grace. Think about it if you had a sick person if somebody if you were sick and you were just feeling sick You didn't know what was wrong You could you know you went to this E&T specialist you went to the there all these different specialists

None of them could really point out what's wrong and then you finally have a doctor says I know exactly what's wrong with you And it has to do with your lymph nodes Well You would thank that doctor even though he is condemning you he is giving you bad news He is showing you where you're weak. You're still thankful because now at least you know Now you know. This is the good. This is the grace in the law. It actually shows you where and how you are weak. And in this way, the law for us is like a governor, like a limiter of freedom. It shows you the boundaries of what is good and what is bad. Right? It tells you what is good and what is bad. that. Speed limits, for example, are not evil. Okay. I know they feel evil. I do, but they're not. They just show you what's safe. They're not good. They're not evil, but they show you what's safe. But they can't teach you how to drive. They can't teach you how to love another car,

or another person in a car, another driver. Okay. They can't teach you that. It's not about your heart, it's about showing you where the limits are. And in that way, the law is good. It shows us that. And we see this more in the next two verses with a second and related question. Galatians 3, 21 and 22, it says, is the law then contrary to the purposes of God? Certainly not. For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the scripture imprisoned everything under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. I ran through that pretty quickly. I'll summarize less quickly. Second question is, is the law contrary to the promise? Does it negate the promise? Does it attack the promise? Does it not work in conjunction with the promise? And the answer is no, it does

work in conjunction with the promise. In fact, the law ushers us to the doorstep of the promise. right? The law in effect, and we follow this, the law shows you where you're weak and it says you need a healing. In fact, you need so much help that you cannot do this on your own. You need not just a favor, you need not just somebody to help you live better. You know, when Peyton and Susie were coming to me, I'm I'm not giving them a book and say, all you need is 10 things on how to love people better, right? This isn't self-help. This is transformation. This is being made new. And this, this is what the law ushers us to the doorstep of the promise. It tells us that our problems are deeper than we could ever imagine. That's what the law does. It doesn't just show you that you're sort of bad. We talk about this all the time. I'll talk about it again. In our minds, we have an evil continuum.

Okay? It's this line, right? And over here is Mother Teresa, and over there is Hitler. Everybody's favorite punching bag. Okay? Not that I have any compassion for Hitler. So over here is Hitler. Over here is Mother Teresa. We're about like here. We're a little left of center. Right? little bit. We don't think we're that bad, but we know we're not that good. In Scripture, what we see is a consistent witness that we are over here. We're right here. We have no delusions about being over there. In fact, Mother Teresa is not even over there. The continuum is not real. In an old Western, bad guys wore black hats and good guys wore white hats, right? We would all have black hats. We would all be in the corn rubbing our hands together, trying to figure out how to do the next evil plot. We are broken people and it's not a little break, it's not a sort of break, it's a whole life break.

It's a life destroying break. It's a break that will not just destroy your life but your children's and your children's children's life. It is a big, big break. It is destruction. We need saving from this destruction and the law makes that painfully clear for us. And that is a grace. Galatians 3, 23 through 24 will keep going. It says, before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. Look, when we make laws, and then as a government, as a family unit, as a church, when we make rules and laws, we should understand full well, be absolutely super minded, that those laws will not teach us goodness and gentleness. That if you want your children to grow in patience and understanding, simply slapping a law on them

will not teach them that, okay? That is destructive thinking, right? If our church, if our church leadership is like, hey, we really want to grow spiritually this year, well, the next thing we do is to sit down and write 10 laws that we're all gonna follow for that next year. That would be a terrible idea, and it wouldn't actually bring out the fruit that we're trying to see. That's not what laws do. They won't instill compassion in people. They won't teach people to live by hope. What can do that? A promise. A relationship can do that. God knows. He created you. The only way, the only way that you are going to grow in compassion is through a relationship with God. The only way that you're going to grow in patience, the only way that you're going to begin to live by hope, The hope that is true and lasting, not the hope that you're going to live to the weekend. A true hope, a hope that is not bound by time.

That can only happen through a relationship with God where He has made a promise to you. And the good news is that He has made a promise to you. A capital P promise, just like it did to Abraham, that we receive by faith. Our call as a church body, let me speak to the church for just a second. Our call to church body, our call is to display goodness, to show compassion, to speak truth, to be a witness, not a measuring stick. We are not called to show people where they fall short. People are actually painfully aware of that. However much they try to hide it, they are aware. Our call is to make disciples, not recite rules. Rules are fine and good and have their place. However, our call is not that. How will we strive to make disciples an increasing measure? How will we display the goodness of God if not in person? If not in face-to-face relationships?

How will we not do that? This is why God came in the flesh to set us free. He didn't just order an edict from on high, became personally why because it's personal because it's a relationship because it's a promise that God made personally to us look at Galatians chapter 3 verses 25 and 26 says but now that faith has come we are no longer under a guardian for Christ Jesus for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith now that faith is here we're set free we're not we're not condemned to live under the law because we now have access to the promise. And this is the benefit of the promise we see in the next, the last three verses that we're going to read, Galatians 3, 27 through 29. Just listen, just drink this in. This is just good news, right? For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither

they're slave nor free, there's neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring heirs according to the promise. I want to break that down into three encouragements. I don't want to leave that, those encouragements with you today. The law, like we said before, it brings us to the doorstep of the promise. It highlights the promise. It shows how, just how good that promise is. And it does it by doing three things. At first, it changes our identity. And we're going to look at this a lot more next week, but it changes our identity. It says that you have in Galatians 3, 26, it says you put on Christ, right? In other words, you are being made new. You are being made into a new person. When you follow Jesus and you become more like him, your life will begin to look more like his. You will never achieve perfection.

That's not actually the point. The point is that as you are maturing, that you are looking more like Him, He is using you, He is building in you. You are an agent for the kingdom of God. Because Jesus in you, says in Scripture other places, says that Christ in you is the hope of glory. And another way to say that is that Christ in you is the promise fulfilled. It's the promise. That's the promise God made Abraham 4,000 years ago.

It's the promise that God made Abraham a long time ago. Jesus Christ coming to live in you, you being able to put on Christ with no condemnation. That, that is the power of the promise and it changes your identity. Another thing that it does is it prioritizes our tribes. Now, there's much made here of, there's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. And I'll just say two things about it. Number one, people are very tribal by nature. We look for people that are like us. That's what we do, right? And it's not necessarily wrong or right. It's just something that we do as humans that we're going to look for people that are like us or agree with us or whatever. And sometimes a really fun thing to do is to find commonality with a person that you didn't expect to find commonality. And so people are tribal by nature, but when you believe the promise, your family changes.

You get a new family. Now hear me, you don't quit being male or female. Okay? I mean, I'm a Christian and I'm still male, right? However, Jesus, my identity as someone who follows Jesus, my identity in this new spiritual family, it trumps whatever my other roles are, whatever my other tribes are. Democrat, Republican, I can't think of other things, male, female, slave, free.

There's all kinds of things that divide us. I think it would actually just kind of belabor the point to list them all. You can probably think of 10, that Jesus is over that. Oh, that he's over race. Jesus is over all those things. Those things don't divide us as Christians. As Christians, we are Christians first, and we are everything else second. Right? This is part of the promise. This is the promise of being in a new family, and it's available to everybody in the last. And we're going to end with this, is that the promise changes our identity because we believe the promise like it says in verse 29, it makes you an heir. And it doesn't mean, you know, it's not like being an heir of some, you know, destitute pauper that didn't amount to much. You are an heir to the Creator of the universe. You receive what your Creator intends for you to have. Now what you were created to have, that is what you are going to come into.

That the promise changes your destiny. So what does that mean? That means that we don't need to scrounge around for resource control. We don't need to continue to measure ourselves against what other people have or don't have. What we can say is my future is taken care of and that's good enough. That's enough for me to know. My future's taken care of. I can trust God because He promised an inheritance. He promised to make me an heir. That promise is available to anyone who would receive it. So we're gonna have our time of response and we're gonna sing three songs. As we do, I'm gonna be standing right over here.

And if you want to make a decision, if you wanna know more about the promise, if you just wanna receive prayer and then go sit back down, that's great. But if you want to make a decision, if you wanna follow Jesus to do that today, I would encourage you, as we sing, at any point in any of those three songs, I would encourage you, get up, come and talk to me. Let's see what the Lord can do. Let's see what decisions I can help you make today, and see how we can help you kinda take that next step, whatever that is. Let me pray for us. Jesus, thank you for today. We ask that with the promise that you've given us, we ask that just that we would begin to live by it. Not that we would deserve it, not that we would somehow earn it, but that Jesus, that you invite us to a victory already won, a relationship already established, help us to see it and to walk in it and to lay hold it.

And it's your duty that we pray, amen. When I sit here, the last prophet's the prince of the day Tonight it's just a campfire for content O Cross, us, it's me come and die, And find that I may truly live. O, the full Cross, O, the full Cross, All who gather here, By praise draw near and the sure name From his head, his hands, his feet Go down, did ere such love and strife For thorns compose, so rich of frown. O thou who's for a cross, has for a cross, Didst we come, and by now, they truly live. O thou who's for a cross, has for a cross, By grace draw me in this short name The nature of small things So my soul will go Left for cross, left for cross It's recommand I And find that I may truly live O thou for cross, O thou one else for cross All who gather here by grace drawn in Bless your name