Then, Just as Now
By Rev. Res Spears
Galatians: Be FREE! • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Transcript
Have you ever noticed how much people hate change?
We like to be comfortable, to be confident that we know what’s coming next. We DON’T like the unknown or the uncertain, and those things are hallmarks of changing situations.
This might explain why my newspaper career included so much conflict and upheaval. I was the editor brought in when the publishers wanted to see changes in their newsrooms.
I like to think I brought a commitment to professionalism and integrity to these newsrooms, some of which had become something of a joke in their communities. My job was, at least in part, to restore credibility and respect where it had been lost.
But folks don’t like change. And so, there were always people who pushed back against what we were trying to accomplish.
There was the year when nearly my entire staff walked out on my birthday, which also happens to be Boss’ Day. There were the times when my publishers told me they’d been getting calls from some of my employees complaining about the changes I’d brought to the newsroom.
There was the time, not long after I’d started working as editor of the Suffolk News-Herald, that I learned everybody on my staff had entered a pool, betting on how long it would take me to quit that job. And some of them seemed especially committed to doing what they could to make that happen.
Spoiler alert: The longest anybody on my staff thought I’d stay at the paper was one year. I was there for 10.
Even when I became a pastor, I still faced resistance to change. In my first week here, I posted the following on Facebook: “Change can be hard. Change can be off-putting. Change can feel as if it's about to shake our very foundations. But take heart, because God never changes. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. Join us Sunday at 11 a.m. to hear how God's unchanging nature can bring you comfort in a season of change. (And, really, when is it NOT a season of change?)”
Within minutes of that post going live, we’d received a response from someone who occasionally attended services here saying, “Care must be taken with change, to insure it is God’s will and not mans’ arrogance!”
And he wasn’t wrong. But I couldn’t help but notice the only change he was aware of was that there was a new pastor here.
Change is hard for everybody. And one of the things I’ve learned through the years since I became a follower of Jesus is that we have to extend as much grace as possible to those who struggle with it.
But we also have to be sure that the changes people are worried about represent some real change.
Today, as we continue our study of the Book of Galatians, we’re going to see the Apostle Paul confront those who considered salvation by grace alone through faith alone to be a change too great to accept.
We’re going to see him argue that this has ALWAYS been the formula for justification before God. And I hope that by the time we’re done, you’ll be encouraged in the knowledge that God NEVER changes, along with the understanding of what that means for US.
We’re going to be looking at the first nine verses of chapter 3 today. But before we do, let’s do a quick review.
Remember that Paul and Barnabas had planted churches in the Galatian region — what’s now western Turkey — during their first missionary journey.
But then, these mostly Gentile churches were visited by a group of Jews from Jerusalem, who began to teach that the new Gentile followers of Christ must ALSO be circumcised and follow certain dietary restrictions in order to be truly saved.
Having heard of what was going on in Galatia in his absence, Paul wrote this letter to counter the false teaching of these Judaizers, these men who were claiming Gentiles would have to become Jewish first, before they could become Christians.
And as we began to look at his theological argument last week, we encountered the key verses in this letter:
20 “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
21 “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.”
Remember that Paul’s main argument in this letter is that the ONLY way we can be justified before God — in other words, the only way we can be acceptable to God — is through the righteousness of Jesus imputed to us when we place our faith in Him.
The Judaizers in Galatia and elsewhere at the time considered this to be not just a change from how they thought God treated their forefathers, but also a blasphemy that came out of Paul’s arrogance.
But as we’ll see this week, Paul corrects their misunderstanding of salvation in the Old Testament. He reminds them of the role of the Holy Spirit in their salvation, in their justification, and in their sanctification.
And in the process, he reminds us that, whatever else might change in our lives, God NEVER changes.
Let’s read this passage together, beginning in verse 1 of chapter 3.
1 You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?
2 This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?
3 Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
4 Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain?
5 So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?
6 Even so Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
7 Therefore, be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham.
8 The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the nations will be blessed in you.”
9 So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer.
“You foolish Galatians!” This wasn’t some innocuous turn of phrase Paul used to start this section of his letter. Scripture portrays those who reject or disregard God’s revelation as fools.
And so, Paul is suggesting that the Galatians who’ve been “bewitched” — who’ve behaved as if they are under some kind of spell, as if they don’t have access to reason — have rejected God.
This is a strong rebuke against those who’ve allowed themselves to be led astray. In any other context, they’d be fightin’ words.
He’d presented the gospel to them clearly. He’d described the sinless life, the sacrificial death, and the supernatural resurrection of Jesus.
And he’d explained that only by trusting in Jesus and His finished work at the cross can sinners be reconciled to the holy God who created them for fellowship with Him.
And clearly, the Galatians had responded in faith, because Paul talks about them having the Holy Spirit within them. So, what had happened?
Well, pretty much the same thing that happens to new believers who are led astray from the orthodox Christian faith even today.
“It is quite possible for one to have been truly converted and to have begun with a clear, definite knowledge of the saving grace of the Lord Jesus, and then because of failure to follow on to study the Word and to pray over it, to come under the influence of some false system, some unscriptural line of teaching. And so often when people do come under some such influence you find it almost impossible to deliver them. They seem to be under a spell.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 3:1, quoting Ironside.]
The problem in Galatia was the same as the problem among many believers today: They don’t have a true and appropriate appreciation for what Jesus did at the cross.
And they find grace a hard pill to swallow, because it means that we’re not even the heroes of our OWN stories.
And here, Paul begins to catch his stride, firing one question after another at his readers in these first five verses.
Back when I worked in an office, people used to tease me about my stress position (SHOW IT).
This is how I looked whenever I was editing a particularly rough piece of writing or when a reporter’s story left me with more questions than answers. Perhaps it’s why I’m going bald now.
I can imagine Paul sitting across the table from his amanuensis, his personal secretary, holding his head like I did, wondering what to do about the Galatians and finding himself more and more shocked by their foolishness.
“Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?” he asks them.
The Holy Spirit is the sign of the New Covenant. He is given to believers to live within them the moment they place their faith in Jesus Christ. And only those who turn to Jesus in faith receive the Holy Spirit.
So, this question should have settled the debate, once and for all. If the folks in the Galatian church had the Holy Spirit within them by virtue of their profession of faith in Christ Jesus, then they’d been saved, and there was nothing more they needed to do to secure their salvation.
At this point, they hadn’t even considered the Mosaic Law as a supplement to the salvation formula, so the Holy Spirit couldn’t have come into their lives by works of the Law.
And they could know whether the Holy Spirit lived within them by looking for the growing fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, among others — within them.
But we should also note that Paul tells the Ephesian Church that the Holy Spirit is given to believers as a seal and a pledge of the inheritance of eternal life that we’re promised as believers. So, if “works of the Law” are required for salvation, then what’s guaranteed by the Holy Spirit?
And if the the justification and salvation of sinners is a work of the Spirit at the point of salvation — doing for us what we had no power to do for ourselves — then why would we expect any part of salvation — including sanctification — to be through our own works?
Indeed, Paul asks how we can expect to be perfected by the flesh. How COULD we become more like Jesus through our own sinful human nature?
Has everything you’ve experienced since turning to Jesus in faith been to no end, Paul asks in verse 4? Have the persecutions you’ve suffered been for nothing?
Remember that Paul told the Roman Church that GOD causes all things to work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, which is to make Jesus-followers into the image of Jesus.
If we’re trying to sanctify OURSELVES through our own righteousness, then it’s not God doing the work in us through His Holy Spirit.
And this is important, because this is what a lot of Christians try to do after giving their lives over to Jesus. We turn to Him in faith, and then we begin to try to power through the process of sanctification. We try to conquer sin in our own power.
Of course, “you have to confess sin, and to give up sin; but the more earnest and intense your desire the more you fail, until you see that you cannot conquer sin yourself. It is as you come to Jesus and confess you are not strong enough to cast out sin, and say, Lord in Thy power I will live a holy life, that you will obtain the Holy Spirit—you receive the Spirit by faith.” [Andrew Murray, The Spiritual Life (Chicago: Tupper & Robertson, 1896), 105.]
WE are weak, but HE is strong.
And finally, Paul has one more question for the Galatians in verse 5.
Were the miracles that had been done in Galatia a response by God to those whose righteousness had EARNED His favor? Or were they done as gracious acts for those who never could earn God’s favor through their own righteousness?
The miracles seen by the church in Galatia had served to confirm Paul’s message of salvation by grace, through faith. But no similar miracles had confirmed the Judaizers’ message. Paul’s telling them here to look at their own experience for proof of what he’s saying.
So, Paul has appealed to the experiences of the Galatians to begin his argument for salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
But now, he’ll turn to Scripture — in particular, to the Genesis account of the Jewish patriarch Abraham — to make his point.
The Judaizers went back to Moses to try to prove the necessity of the Law for salvation. But here, Paul goes back even further, back to the Book of Genesis, where we see the first discussion of faith in the Bible.
We’re going to look at a couple of passages from Moses’ account of Abraham’s life to get a better handle on Paul’s argument here.
First, let’s look at our introduction to Abram in Genesis, chapter 12.
1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you;
2 And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing;
3 And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”
Here’s God promising, among other things, that, if they’d step out in faith, the 75-year-old Abram and his barren wife, Sarai, would be given an heir who would father a great nation through whom the Gentile nations of earth would be blessed.
Abram’s response in verse 4 was to leave his home and go where the Lord led him. He responded in faith.
And then, we come to Genesis, chapter 15. Time has passed since that first promise. But Abram and Sarai are still childless. So, God reaffirms His promise and gives more details to make it clear that the child of promise will come from Abram’s loins.
And look what happens next:
5 And He took him outside and said, “Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.”
6 Then he believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Abraham believed in the Lord; and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.
In other words, Abraham had faith in the promises of God. He had faith that God keeps His promises and that God COULD do what He’d promised to do.
And God counted Abraham’s faith as righteousness. Because of Abraham’s faith in God, God justified him. He declared Abraham to be righteous, even though he was a sinner.
Abraham hadn’t earned God’s favor. There was nothing he’d done — nor anything he COULD do — to earn God’s favor.
In His sovereignty, God had CHOSEN to bless Abraham, a man who’d been raised in a pagan culture among a family of pagan worshipers, and a man whose faith, it turns out, wasn’t always as strong as it seems here in chapter 15.
But even though Abraham’s faith was sometimes weak, Paul says in this week’s passage from Galatians, it was Abraham’s FAITH in the promises of God that justified him before God.
That’s the point we’re meant to understand in these two passages from Genesis.
And, as Paul says in verse 7, it is we who’ve placed our faith in Jesus, the Messiah whom God promised throughout the Old Testament, who are the true sons of Abraham.
We demonstrate that we are LIKE Abraham — that we bear a family resemblance to him — by our faith in the promises of God and particularly in the promise of eternal life through faith in Jesus.
“What endeared Abraham to many Jewish thinkers were his virtues and his deeds. They understood him to have kept the law before it was written.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 3:8, quoting Morris.]
But what Paul says here is that what really counted from Abraham’s life was his faith, not his works.
Andrew Murray has something interesting to say about this faith and the necessity of renewing it each day.
“Faith always means this: there is something I cannot do myself; I trust another to do it for me. Faith is always a confession of helplessness…. And it is not only by faith once for all, but it is by faith every morning, that the action of the Holy Spirit may be received fresh from heaven…. If you want to live the life of the Holy Spirit, it must be a life continually renewed from heaven. I must come every day to be filled fresh with the Holy Spirit. This must be the holy habit of my life. As you began, so continue, by faith.” [Andrew Murray, The Spiritual Life (Chicago: Tupper & Robertson, 1896), 106.]
God had preached this message of salvation and sanctification by grace through faith to Abraham in those Genesis encounters. And Abraham’s faith would be the model for the faith that would later save Jews and Gentiles, alike.
We are, as Paul puts it in verse 9, blessed with Abraham the BELIEVER, not Abraham the law-keeper.
And the thing I want you to get from all this today is that salvation has always been by grace through faith.
In the Old Testament, saving faith was in God as the one who would keep His promise to redeem fallen mankind.
In the New Testament and the Church Age, it’s faith in the incarnate Christ, who laid down His life, taking upon Himself your sins and mine and their just punishment, so that all who turn to Him in faith can be forgiven, saved, and have eternal life.
Nothing has changed, except that we now have the historical evidence of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection as further proof that God keeps His promises.
It always bothers me when people say they think the God of the New Testament is different from the God of the Old Testament.
To be sure, He operated among and administered mankind differently from the Old to the New. But neither He nor His plan of salvation has changed.
He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. There is no shadow of turning with Him. He’s not arbitrary nor capricious in his dealings with mankind.
And because God never changes, we who’ve turned to Jesus in faith can be sure of our salvation. We can know that the Spirit within us will continue His regenerating work in us.
We can be certain that — as Paul puts it in Romans, chapter 8, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
If you are a follower of Christ — if you’ve placed your faith in Him and His finished work at the cross — if you’ve accepted Him as Lord and Savior — there is nothing you can do to change His love for you.
Your good works won’t cause Him to love you more. And your sins won’t cause Him to love you less. You are His, and He has promised that you won’t be cast away.
And for people who don’t like change, this is good news, indeed.
