May 16 2021
Galatians 3
As part of my ordination process I am working my way through what is called the Nazarene Course of Study. What is involved with this study is that there are twenty different subjects that have been deemed important for pastors to know and these subjects are then taught over a five week period. Sounds like fun doesn’t it? The current course that I’m in deals with part one of the history of the church which covers from the time of the apostles and Paul up through the Middle Ages not quite to the Reformation. All of this covered in five weeks, again, sounds like fun doesn’t it. The textbook we are using has a meager four hundred and ninety pages out of which we had to write one two hundred word overview of the textbook, two, five hundred word essays over various events from the textbook and one, final essay one thousand words in length on a person covered by the textbook. Now, even though the textbook is about four hundred pages too long and is a hard of a read as one can find, what it does do is to make me amazed that we sit here today with some idea of means to believe in Jesus Christ. I mean, I cannot tell you how horribly Christianity has gotten derailed and not just once but multiple times throughout history. There were many wrong beliefs that had sprung up and numerous abuses conducted in the name of the church, there were some very evil popes and the allegiances that the church had with various countries, which led to the holy wars and the Crusades. As you read along in this history of the Church it isn’t hard to hear Paul speak from the fifth chapter of Galatians that the works of the flesh are sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness and orgies because each one of these seems to make an appearance. I say this as a reminder that what Paul is writing in his letter to the Galatians is one of those things that has always plagued the church. The temptation is always present to give in to the ways of the flesh which is evident by the results. Now, if this is all that was found in our history as a church most likely we would not be worshipping Jesus this morning. We have to praise God for two very important graces that he gave to preserve the life of the church these being his holy Word and his Holy Spirit. Time and time again, someone would be confronted in the Holy Scriptures by Jesus and take to heart what he taught, how he lived and how he died willingly upon the cross and the truth of his resurrection and ascension and the Holy Spirit would convict their hearts so that they began to live out the truth that compelled them and as they did so others would be moved to join them. There, in the midst of what seemed like a hopeless and lost case, arose a people whose lives were once again marked by love, and joy and peacefulness with each other. They were people who were kind, who treated each other like family, they were renowned for their goodness and their undying trust in the God they believed in. Their’s was the way of gentleness and an undivided heart in their love of God so much so that even when faced with death they never wavered. It was these fruits which marked out that they were of a good tree, the tree of life, a life of the good and Holy Spirit. Time and time again, there would be these people who would keep the holy flame alive not willing to let it go out. This too Paul knew of when he wrote his letter to the Galatians, this life caught up in the work of the Holy Spirit.
So, what history teaches us is that Paul rightly understood the danger at hand when the people who followed Jesus got off track, deciding to try their luck at going it by the strength of the flesh. You hear Paul’s urgency as his words fly off the pages of his letter, “O foolish Galatians ! Who has bewitched you?” To be bewitched meant that someone had cast a spell that rendered a person unable to make reasonable choices. In these words we begin to hear Paul reveal that he regards himself as a spiritual parent who wonders just why their children are making such dumb choices. Like a parent Paul is wondering had they fallen in with the wrong crowd which had persuaded them to mindlessly go along with them to their own peril.
Now, what follows Paul’s impassioned pleas to come back to having their wits about them is that he tells them that it was before their very eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. It seems as if Paul has made a very abrupt change in what he is talking about until we remember another letter Paul wrote, his first letter to the church at Corinth where he begins that letter with what he called the wisdom of the cross. So, knowing this then as a rebuttal to the foolishness of the Galatians Paul holds up the wisdom of the cross. Yet as soon as Paul holds up the cross as true wisdom then he, once again, makes what seems like another abrupt turn in the conversation, when he asks the rhetorical question, “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or did you receive the Spirit by hearing by faith?” This is again followed by a question which echoes Pauls first words of condemnation, “Are you so foolish? And then further questions, “Having begun by the Spirit are you now being perfected by the flesh? Here Paul reveals just what is at stake, what some scriptures translate as being perfected but what is perhaps better understood as attaining the goal. Here we must push the pause button and ask just what is the goal that Paul believes all believers are to strive to obtain, a goal that apparently cannot be obtained by the flesh, by our own personal resolve or strength or good intentions? This goal that I believe Paul is speaking about is what he earlier referred to in the second chapter of his letter to the Galatians as having Christ live in us. This is the same as what we the Church of the Nazarene know as being entire sanctification, the giving of oneself completely over to the Lordship of the Holy Spirit. This is the goal of all believers, a goal that cannot be obtained by the flesh because it is precisely the flesh, the very root of our sin nature that must be destroyed, crucified with Christ. This crucifying of the flesh had begun to be at work in the lives of the believers in the church of Galatia because as Paul tells us they were willing to suffer, to be vulnerable to the point where the wounds of the flesh no longer dictated their actions. Paul knowing that they had suffered because of their faith wanted to know, if their suffering would be for nothing? Would their suffering teach them nothing about the faithfulness of God in all circumstances? Paul knew that only as the faithfulness of God transformed their hearts could their hearts respond in like terms, with faith. The faithfulness of God was like God breathing life into them and their faith was them exhaling out this gift of life. Faith is a breathing in of the faithfulness of God and breathing out our faith in him; it is a continual, relational response to God understanding him as our very source of life. It is here in his letter that Paul brings up the great hero of faith, Abraham, the one who had faith in God and it was this faith which was accounted to Abraham as being righteousness. It is Abraham who rightly understood the dimensions of what faith in God are. As we read in the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, we read that to have faith in God means that we know that God alone is the one who gives life to the dead and God alone is the one who can call into existence those things that do not exist. Those who trust that these things are true of God alone are the ones that Paul insists are the sons of Abraham. Now, to our modern sensibilities such a statement doesn’t arouse any emotions but to those who heard this statement who were of the Jewish faith it is more than likely that some would have been angered by it. To many Jews, to know themselves to be a son of Abraham, one who could recite their lineage all the way back to their founding father Abraham, this was a source of great pride. But to this idea, Paul says that this way of thinking was not necessarily true. No, just to say that Abraham is your flesh and blood is no longer the criteria; what really matters is do you believe and have faith in God like Abraham did, if so then you are indeed a child of Abraham. Now why this understanding of just who is Abraham’s child is so important is that it ties right in with the promise God had made to Abraham when he first called Abraham, the promise which stated that through Abraham all of the nations would be blessed by God. Paul here reveals that how this promise is fulfilled is that those who have the same faith as Abraham will be blessed just like Abraham was blessed, the blessing of being in right standing with God.
Once we understand that believing like Abraham believed that this is the blessing that God was promising would come through Abraham, then it becomes understandable why in the next breath Paul begins to speak of curses, the polar opposite of being blessed. What God did when he gave the people of Israel the Law was that he put them under a curse. The law itself was good and holy as Paul tells us in the seventh chapter of the letter to the Romans. But what the Law did was to demonstrate through one people, the people of the Israelites, that the flesh, the strength of who we are is not able to do the good that is demanded by the Law. Moses even points out the fact that God would have to act in the lives of his people in order for them to be able to fulfill what the Law demands. In the thirtieth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people, “The Lord your God will circumcise your heart, and the heart of your offspring so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul that you may live.” So, this tells us that apart from an action of God, the people would be unable to love God with all that they are and apart from God they would be unable to be out from under the curse, the certain death that comes from their inability by their own power to do what the Law demands. The good news is, Paul tells us, is that Jesus has redeemed us from the curse. Even though we, as Paul himself said, that no good dwells in us, in our flesh, the good news is that Jesus, the Suffering Servant, the one who knew no sin, became sin, our sin, so that through our offering him up to God by faith as the offering for the guilt of our sin we might become people able to be the justice of God. This is what Paul is saying when in our scripture for today that in Christ Jesus the blessings of Abraham has come to the Gentiles. It is Jesus who is the embodiment of the one who gives life to the dead because we were the ones who were dead accursed under the law and through faith in Jesus we are now alive. Now, the Holy Spirit, the one who raised Jesus from the dead has raised us up to life and the Spirit remains as long as life remains.
Now as Paul continues through this second chapter of Galatians to hammer home the problems of the law, in believing that it in some way had the ability to give life, Paul says something that is so important to his whole argument. Paul simply says, “But God is one.” Why does Paul right here want to bring up what had to be a very obvious fact? I mean, of course Paul, God is one, what’s your point? The point is that as God is one so there must be only one people. Yes, when the Law was given to Moses the mediator between God and his people, there most certainly were two sets of people, the Jews who had the Law and everyone else. But the Jews were to understand by their recital every day, that the Lord their God was one Lord and since this was so then ultimately the plan was that there was to be one people on account of their being one God. Their life under the Law served only to prove the weakness of everyone to be people who could bring forth justice. Even with the most perfect of laws the people of Israel still killed the perfect Son of God when he walked within their midst. Nowhere was it more clear than at the cross that the Law had imprisoned the people under sin and it had done so that the world might be saved through faith in Jesus Christ and nothing else. It is this entry into Christ by faith that has created a new oneness in the family of God, one where all the old designations of this world, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, none of these no longer matter when Christ becomes our all in all.
It is this oneness that is found in Christ that is witnessed to by the giving of the one Holy Spirit. Listen to how Paul writes about this unity of the Spirit as he writes about it in the fourth chapter of Ephesians, as he tells them to be, “…eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit-just as you are called to the one hope that belongs to your call- one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all and in all.” Here, just as we heard in the letter to the Galatians, we listen to Paul state that we are to be extremely diligent to guard the unity, to watch over this unity as a precious jewel.Then Paul explains that the foundation of this unity is that there is one Jesus, and that there is only one faith in what this one Jesus has done for us. There is one baptism where we understand the death that we deserve and the new life received through the Holy Spirit. All of this unity though is to witness to the fact that there is only one God, a God who is one Father, a reality that becomes known to us by faith and thus brings us back to where we started. Yet there is more that we cannot simply ignore because Paul says that this God, the God who is the one Spirit, the God who is the one Lord, Jesus Christ, the God who is the Father of all, this God is over all. This is fairly understandable, that God being in heaven and heaven is often thought to be over us in a way, pointing perhaps to God the Father who is in heaven. But then God is said to be through all, which means that it is God who is the bond which binds us together, the God that is understandably the God we know as the Holy Spirit. Then Paul tells us that God is in us, and here we remember the term Paul often uses, that Christ is in him, this is his hope of glory. This is, I believe the goal Paul believes all of us are to strive for. This is what Paul meant when in our scripture for today he tells the Galatians, “Having begun by the Spirit are you going to obtain the goal by the flesh? The beginning of the Spirit is as Paul explains is when we place our faith in Jesus he being the offering for the guilt of our sin, this is when the Spirit enters into our life as a witness to our new standing with God. This is the moment of new birth, the moment of our adoption into the family of God. Yet as wonderful as this new life is Paul is clearly stating that there is a goal beyond this moment, one that cannot be obtained through human effort but must be reached again by faith. When we understand this then we can understand Paul’s disgust with the Galatians church reliance on the flesh. What Paul knew is that God is not finished with us until all reliance on the flesh is crucified, until we embody the wisdom of the cross. Only as the flesh is fully crucified, only as the sin nature is cleansed away by the blood of Jesus can God be Lord of our life without reservation. In the book of Hebrews, the ninth chapter, we read in the fourteenth verse of the purifying work of the blood of Christ who we are told offered himself through the Holy Spirit without blemish to God. To have Christ in us is to be united with Christ, allowing ourselves to be offered up without blemish in service to God. So, as Christ offered himself up to us we are to end up through the Holy Spirit offering ourselves, our flesh, in full submission to God, so that he might be glorified. To attempt anything in the power of the flesh is to be going against the very goal that God has for our life, a life God so graciously has given to us. So, as we have begun our new life by the Spirit let us remember that we are to finish the goal by the Spirit, allowing the Spirit to offer us up as an act of worship to the glory of God. Amen!
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