At the Right Time
Galatians: Be FREE! • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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While I was studying this week’s passage in the Book of Galatians, I got to thinking about due dates, and something occurred to me that I’d never noticed before.
Have you ever noticed the wildly different contexts for which we use the term “due date”?\
Lately, for instance, I’ve been reading a lot of eBooks from the library. Each of them has a due date. That’s the date the book needs to be “returned” to the library. Unless I finish the book ahead of time, the due date is the date when the library will disable the book on my e-reader.
For all you old-school folks, the due date is the date by which you’re supposed to have returned the physical book back to the library branch where you got it. And the next day is when the fines start accruing.
But the term “due date” used in the context of a pregnant woman has a completely different meaning, doesn’t it? On a pregnant woman’s due date, the expectation is that she’ll DELIVER a new baby, not return it.
English is weird, and I have all the respect in the world for those who learn it as adults. How they ever understand all our idioms and figures of speech is beyond me.
What exactly is supposed to take place on a due date depends entirely on the context. Perhaps a baby will be born. Perhaps a library book will become overdue. Perhaps your mortgage needs to be paid.
But in each of those cases, the concept behind the term is the same: One season has ended and another begun.
In the case of the new mom, the season of sleep and carefree living is over and the season of nighttime feeding and diaper changes has begun.
In the case of the library book, it’s now time to choose a new book to read. In the case of your mortgage, the season of eating dinner out is over, and the season of ramen noodles has begun.
One appointed time has passed, and another appointed time has begun.
The Apostle Paul talks about this idea of an appointed time in the passage we’re studying today from his letter to the Galatians.
And what he says is that because of what took place at the appointed time — or as he puts it, in the fullness of time — humanity has been released from the hopelessness of everything we’ve tried to do to make ourselves righteous before God, to make ourselves acceptable to Him, to earn our way into heaven.
You’ll recall that he wrote this letter to a group of churches he and Barnabas had visited in what’s now western Turkey during their first missionary journey.
Many Gentiles had come to faith in Jesus Christ during their visit, and house churches had sprung up in the cities where those new believers lived.
But after Paul and Barnabas had returned home, a group of men came from Jerusalem, preaching that the new Gentile believers would have to follow the Mosaic Law in order to be truly saved.
Their faith in Jesus was good, the Judaizers said, but it wasn’t enough to truly save them. They needed to supplement that faith with righteous works.
And Paul correctly saw that this message from the Judaizers was a false gospel. He saw that it would actually KEEP people FROM being saved, because it taught that THEY could do something to save themselves.
This false gospel of the Judaizers actually NULLIFIED the true gospel of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Paul has supported his argument thus far with the example of Abraham, whose faith God counted as righteousness. He’s supported it through the words of the Old Testament prophets.
He’s explained the true purpose of the Mosaic Law. God gave it to the people of Israel to convict them of sin, to make them see just how sinful they were, and to set out the just punishment for disobedience, for rebellion against Him.
And, as we saw last week, he’s talked about the change in our character that takes place when, through faith in Jesus, we are clothed with Christ and His righteousness.
Most of what he wrote in chapter 3 was about justification — in other words, the change in a believer’s legal standing before God, from condemned sinner to adopted son or daughter of God — forgiven, redeemed and declared righteous by God because of our faith in Jesus.
But justification is just one part of salvation. In chapter 4, Paul turns his attention to sanctification — in other words, increasing holiness, being transformed into the image of Jesus, being made more like Him.
It’s a topic he alluded to in chapter 3, where he wrote:
3 Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
His point there and in much of the rest of chapter 4 is that just as there’s nothing any of us could do to earn God’s favor and save ourselves, there’s also nothing any of us could do to earn His favor AFTER we’ve been saved.
He already loves us as sons and daughters. He’s already given us His Holy Spirit as a pledge of His love and a downpayment on His promise of eternal life.
We can — and should — do good things (and avoid doing evil things) as a loving response to God’s great love for US.
But the minute we start thinking all our goodness will earn us a higher rank in heaven, a better seat at God’s table, or gold stars next to our names in the Book of Life, then we’ve nullified His grace.
And in the passage we’ll examine today, we’ll see that even the timing of Jesus’ incarnation on earth was a function of God’s sovereign grace.
Let’s read this passage together, beginning in verse 1 of chapter 4.
1 Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of everything,
2 but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father.
3 So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world.
4 But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law,
5 so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.
6 Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”
7 Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.
Now, Paul starts this passage with another example of how the Mosaic Law was intended to box people in, to put them into a position where their only hope was to turn to God in faith.
In the past couple of weeks, he’s used prisoners under watch by guards and children under the administration of strict pedagogues as metaphors for the state of mankind under the Law.
The Law could show them they were sinners, and it could set out strict penalties for disobedience — the penalty of eternal separation from God, for instance — but it could do nothing to bring them LIFE. Life only comes through faith.
And this week, we now see a third metaphor — that of the wealthy young heir who’s constrained by guardians, limited in what he can do by managers, until the time he reaches the legal age of majority.
Just as the prisoner is under guard and the child is looked over by a pedagogue, an heir who hasn’t reached the age of majority is under the stewardship of managers and guardians.
What Paul is trying to make us see is the difference between the strongbox the Law erects around people and the freedom they have through faith in Jesus.
The strongbox was created for those who were spiritually immature, whereas freedom in Christ is the experience of those who have become spiritually mature in Him.
For the Jews, the strongbox was the Law. They were in bondage to it, unable to break free from its condemnation.
For the Gentiles, their strongbox was their pagan religions and superstitions and faith in themselves and their kings and other leaders. They were similarly bound these things, which, like the Law, offered only condemnation for their sins.
Even the Gentiles, to whom the Mosaic Law had not been given, were in bondage, as Paul put it in verse 3, to “the elemental things of the world.”
There’s some disagreement over what Paul means by this phrase. A good translation of the Greek word is “first principles,” which isn’t very helpful by itself.
But in the context of the Galatian culture at this time in history, I think what Paul has in mind with this phrase, “elemental things” is all the things these Gentile believers had been taught by their pagan parents about spirituality. This also fits the context of the passage we’ll look at next week.
From the time they were small children, the Galatian Gentiles would have been taught to worship idols. The sky god Sabazios was depicted as a horseman of the heavens, and Cybele was considered the Mother Goddess.
And so, the “elemental things” Paul has in mind here could be the false gods the Galatians had been taught to worship as children.
From a larger perspective, he’s referring, at least in part, to the world’s teachings about spiritual matters, whether it’s encouraging people to worship idols of wood and stone or to place their faith in their own righteousness or in the broken and twisted systems of this world.
The world teaches us to look for hope and redemption APART from God. And Satan, the ruler of this world, doesn’t care what you believe as long as you don’t place your trust in Jesus Christ.
The world teaches us to put our trust and our hope in anything BUT God and to treat the object of our trust with religious devotion.
This is demonic. We know these teachings are demonic in origin, because all religion that’s not from God is demonic. Whatever is not from God and denies God is by definition opposed to God and, therefore, from Satan.
And billions of people throughout time have fallen prey to Satan’s false religions — perhaps especially to the one that says we can earn our way into heaven by our good works.
But from before the foundation of the earth — from before God ever said, “Let there be light” — from before He’d ever created Adam and Eve and before they’d sinned against Him — God had a plan to redeem mankind from the sin for which we were condemned.
And in a way, this plan had a due date. It came in “the fullness of time,” as Paul says in verse 4.
In Roman culture, a father would choose the time at which his son would be taken from his guardians and made a free man.
When this time came, the son would be released from his guardians and managers and allowed to make his own choices, allowed to make his own way in the world.
Similarly, at the time He knew to be right, God sent Jesus to bring freedom to we who were in bondage to elemental things.
It’s amazing to me how perfectly timed Jesus’ advent was. The Roman Empire was near its peak.
There was a universal language among the people of that Empire, which spread into parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. This made it easier for the gospel to take hold wherever it went.
And a system of well-built roads made it easier to TAKE the gospel to places that would have been out of reach just a couple of hundred years earlier.
Even the rise of the Jewish system of synagogues was an aid to the ministry of Jesus, giving Him places to teach all around Judea and Samaria.
By coming when He did, Jesus was able to maximize the effectiveness of his three-year ministry. And this is an example of God’s sovereign grace in the history of salvation.
But it wasn’t just that Jesus CAME to us that’s important. In this verse, Paul gives us three conditions Jesus met that enabled Him to do what He came to do: to “redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.”
First, Jesus is the eternal Son of God. “God sent forth His Son,” Paul says in verse 4. In other words, Jesus was already God’s Son when He was sent. He didn’t BECOME God’s Son when He was born of the virgin Mary, nor when He was baptized, nor when He was crucified.
Jesus has ALWAYS been God’s Son. And as such, He is equal to the Father. He IS God. He was able to represent God to mankind. Indeed, He said, “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father.”
And because Jesus IS God, He’s able to offer reconciliation to God for all who turn to Him in faith.
Second, Jesus was “born of a woman.” This was a common way at the time of saying someone was human. And just as Jesus is fully God, He is also fully HUMAN. He’s able to represent mankind to God.
“During his earthly life Jesus experienced all of the … fears, trials and temptations that are the common lot of every human being. As Heb 4:15 expresses it, Jesus was put to the test in every conceivable way that we can be put to the test—yet without sin.” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 302.]
And because He lived a sinless life, He was then able to give Himself as a sacrifice at the cross. There, the sinless Son of God took upon Himself the sins of the world and their just punishment.
He paid the debt that we couldn’t pay. He took the punishment that each one of us deserves for our rebellion against the righteous and holy God who made us to be like Him.
God Himself, in the person of His unique and eternal Son, took upon Himself the punishment that WE deserve for rebelling against Him.
And third, Jesus was born “under the Law.” He was born a Jew while the Mosaic Law was still in force. In fact, He said He’d come to fulfill the Law.
“As F. F. Bruce has noted, while Jesus was ‘under the law,’ he was nevertheless not under sin. Thus ‘he himself had no need of slave-attendant, guardian or steward, and he came to bring his people to the point where they too could dispense with their services.’” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 304.]
And these three unique characteristics of Jesus made it possible for Him to “redeem those who were under the Law.”
That’s a clear reference to the Jews, of course, but in the context of the rest of this passage, it refers to everyone — Jews and Gentiles, alike — who’d been “in bondage under the elemental things of the world.”
With His sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection, Jesus redeemed us from sin, rescued us from condemnation, and brought hope where there had been only hopelessness.
He made it possible for us not only to be forgiven, not only to be redeemed, not only to have eternal life, but to be adopted into the family of God as sons and daughters.
Now, we who follow Him in faith receive the full rights and responsibilities as sons. We’re no longer under the watchful eyes of the guardians whose teaching offered only condemnation and not hope.
We’re no longer under the spirit of bondage. Now, we’re under the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of adoption.
God sent Jesus so we could have the rights of sons and daughters in the kingdom of God. And He sent the Holy Spirit to live within the hearts of believers to give us the power to use those rights.
“The Holy Spirit is the sign and pledge of our adoption so that by his presence in our hearts we are truly convinced that God is for us, not against us, that indeed he is our Heavenly Father …. [And] the first, most basic indication of our adoption is that we have a new form of address for God. The Spirit invites us to join in his invocation, crying “Abba, Father.” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 307.]
Now, the word “Abba” in verse 6 is an Aramaic word that’s sometimes translated as “Daddy.”
“However, we oversentimentalize this word when we refer to it as mere baby talk and translate it into English as ‘daddy.’ The word Abba appears in certain [Hebrew] legal texts … as a designation used by grown children in claiming the inheritance of their deceased father. As a word of address Abba is not so much associated with infancy as it is with intimacy. It is a cry of the heart, not a word spoken calmly with personal detachment and reserve, but a word we ‘call’ or ‘cry out’. …” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 4:6, quoting George.]
The idea here is that in Christ, we have an intimacy with God that we never could have presumed to have if Jesus Himself hadn’t told us to call God “Abba.”
And if we have this kind of intimacy with the God of the universe — if that intimacy is confirmed by the presence of the Holy Spirit within us — then we’re already loved by God as sons and daughters.
So, why would we ever want to go back to the things that enslaved us? Why would we ever think we could improve His perfect love for us with anything we could do?
We are already heirs through God. What else could we desire?
And all of this is the result of grace working through faith, not works. All of this is available to us because God in His sovereignty sent His Son in the fullness of time — born of a woman, born under the Law.
But if you’ve never placed your faith in Jesus and His finished work at the cross, then you’re still a slave to the elemental things of this world.
Your sins have condemned you before God. There’s no amount of good things you can do to save yourself from the just penalty you deserve for those sins. You’re boxed in, and your only hope for escape is Jesus.
Will you turn your life over to Him today? Now is the hour of salvation. The fullness of time has come for YOU.
I don’t often do this, but if you’ve never trusted in Jesus for salvation, and if you’re ready to give your life to Him, then I’d like you to pray silently with me now, as all heads are bowed:
“Lord, I know I’m a sinner, that I’ve failed to live up to God’s standards, and that I deserve to be condemned for my sins. But I thank you, Jesus, for giving your life, for taking the punishment that I deserve for my sins, for paying the debt I could never repay.
“I thank you for giving your life so I can have eternal life. I thank God for raising you from the dead, proving He has the ability to keep that promise.
“Lord, I thank you for forgiving my sins, and I pray that your Holy Spirit will dwell within my heart, starting right now, so that I can become more like you. I am yours, Lord.”
Now, if you prayed that prayer along with me this morning, then HALLELUJAH. And please come up and let me know during the next song or after the service. I’d like to talk to you about how to get started right in following Jesus.
