The Law vs the Promise

 “The Law, The Promise and the Exile”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Thanksgiving Sunday, Oct 13, 2019

Text: Galatians 3:10-18 // Series: Galatians: Freedom Through Christ  

Welcome, friends.  Happy Thanksgiving. My name is Brad Sumner, I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge and it is our privilege and pleasure to have you here with us today.   

Let’s play a little game to start.  I’m going to say a phrase and you shout out who or what comes to your mind.  If I say the phrase “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” who or what comes to your mind?  (Dickens)

If I sing the phrase “sometimes you wanna go…” (Cheers)

If I say “shaken, not stirred.” Who do think of?  (Bond)

If I say “the 12^th man” what am I speaking of?  (Seahawks)

If I start with the slightly less well-known phrase…

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, (who or what do I mean to infer?)

And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. 

You see, sometimes when we want to invoke the whole poem or movie and the ethos and feeling of it, we simply use the first line.  Or when we want to compute the idea of a whole song, we only have to sing the chorus.  Or for our Catholic brothers and sisters, entire papal encyclical letters are invoked by quoting the first line in Latin.

Similarly, in ancient Judaism, when you wanted to reference a whole Psalm, for example, you would quote the first line. Why bring this up? In our text today we’re going to see multiple uses of this kind of inference so I wanted to get you warmed up.  We’re going to dig into each one of them to ensure we get clarity on what is going on in an important conversation.    

This fall, we are studying the book of Galatians here at Jericho Ridge.  And we have come in the middle portion of the book to one of the most dense, most notoriously difficult passages in the New Testament.  So we need to approach it with both humility but also a sense of curiosity.  What was the original author, the Apostle Paul, trying to communicate to the original readers, the little group of Jesus-followers in the province of Galatia in modern-day Turkey about God’s Promises?  And, what, as we listen to the Spirit, is God saying to us one of us here?  Let’s dive in.

Paul has been laying out the notion that there are two paths that you can walk on.  One path is the path of rule keeping / Law following.  You see there were false teachers in Galatia that were suggesting that in order for you to get in good with God, that you had to do all the right things.  You had to observe ancient Jewish food laws.  You had to observe the sabbath day. You had to become circumcised.  And if you played your cards just right, God would count you amongst the faithful and part of God’s family.

But Paul has been arguing that there is another path.  The pathway to blessing.  And he is going to argue forcefully and compellingly that if you want to follow that pathway of Law, that you are actually not at all following the path of blessing.  But that you are following the futile pathway that the ancient people of Israel walked – that pathway did not lead anywhere productive.  So, as Robert Frost’s poem suggests, we would do well to pause and to take a look down each one as far as we can and decide which one has the better claim.  Because otherwise, we may find ourselves walking down a road that we think is leading to blessing and life but we are really walking right off a cliff!  [How can you be sure you are on the road to blessing?]

Turn with me in your Bibles or on your devices or to the Bible inside the Jericho App to Galatians 3.  I’m going to start reading at verse 10 (NLT).   

 “But those who depend on the law to make them right with God are under his curse, for the Scriptures say, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the commands that are written in God’s Book of the Law.’” (Galatians 3:10)

Whenever you see in the New Testament a phrase like “For the Scriptures say” that means the author is quoting the Hebrew Scriptures or the Old Testament… Paul here is quoting from the ancient covenant that Moses ratified between God and the people of Israel when the left Egypt millennia before. Every good first century Jew knew their history… They understood that in Deuteronomy a series of blessings had been outlined for those who followed God’s ways and a series of curses had been outlined for those who disobeyed. [Pathway picture].  The people had been invited to stand at their own fork in the road and to choose a pathway to walk out…. Blessing if you obey the commands of God and non-blessing if you do not.

We are going to see this morning 4 signposts, as it were, along the path, that Paul lays out in his argument in Galatians that we need to pay attention to and understand so that we can be assured that we are on the right pathway.  Here in Galatians 3:10 we see the first signpost and also the first quotation that Paul invokes…. Signpost 1 – Curse

“Cursed is anyone who does not affirm and obey the terms of these instructions.” - Deuteronomy 27:26

This curse business may sound harsh to our ears as modern people who embrace the notion of personal freedom and efficacy.  Bu what Galatians is arguing is that if you want to depend on following all the rules in order to be right with God, you’re on the wrong pathway.  And this claim that people who depend on the Law to make them right with God but who come up short would NOT have been strange to the Jews of Paul’s day. They would have looked at their own lives and history and said “yup.  The curse is real.  The world is still broken and I know I’m not perfect.”  BUT there was always the HOPE that if we could promote a return to God through rule keeping, that things would turn around Deuteronomy 30:1 “In the future, when you experience all these blessings and curses I have listed for you, and when you are living among the nations to which the Lord your God has exiled you, take to heart all these instructions. 2 If at that time you and your children return to the Lord your God, and if you obey with all your heart and all your soul all the commands I have given you today, 3 then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes. He will have mercy on you and gather you back from all the nations where he has scattered you... 5 The Lord your God will return you to the land…. Then he will make you even more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors!  

In Galatians 3, Paul is saying “I want to highlight the problem.  There is no way you or I or anyone could keep up or live up to the requirements of the law.  There is no one who is perfect.  So we’re all hooped!”.  So what do we do?  Well, Paul is glad you asked!  Lets’ keep reading in Galatians 3…

Galatians 3:11

“So it is clear that no one can be made right with God by trying to keep the law. For the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.”

Sometimes I hear people talking about the Old Testament and saying things like “well, back then, you could get in with God by rule keeping BUT then when Jesus came, God changed up God’s plan and now you get in by the whole faith bit.”  But here’s where that thinking is wrong headed.  Paul is quoting from the Old Testament, from the book of Habakkuk and saying “it is through faith that a righteous person has life”. Signpost #1, curse, may highlight the problem but signpost #2 highlights the solution:

Signpost 2 – Faith

“The righteous will live by their faithfulness to God” Habakkuk 2:4

Or “by their faith in God”.  In other words, placing faith and trust in God is the pathway that we have all been invited to walk on down throughout all of redemption’s history.  It wasn’t law keeping in the olden days and now, post-Jesus we just see things as they are and we walk out a different way.  No. Like we talked about last weekend, faith has always been the sign over the entrance to God’s family. And the way in is the way on.  Faith isn’t an addition we layer on while still walking down the pathway of law, trying to be a good person.  It’s being transported to an entirely different map.  

Listen to how the argument builds in Galatians 3:12

“This way of faith is very different from the way of law, which says, “It is through obeying the law that a person has life.”

The problem isn't the Law itself, per say.  The problem is that the law cannot ultimately and most deeply deal with the problem we face as human being.  Signpost 3 – law

“If you obey my decrees and my regulations, you will find life through them. I am the Lord.”  Leviticus 18:5

The challenge is that when you keep walking down the Law keeping pathway and keep telling yourself “I’m gonna do enough good stuff in my life to outweigh the bad stuff I do”, that pathway is not the pathway of blessing because I never know when I’ve reached the destination!  The pathway of Law keeps highlighting my insufficiency and deficiencies. The law pathway keeps reminding me that I live under a curse for doing stuff I shouldn’t do and for leaving undone good that I know I ought to undertake.  So that law really isn’t a life-giving tool.  It’s a spotlight on my inadequacy and on all the things that are broken and wrong with the world.

But then Paul introduces some profoundly good news in Gal 3:13

“But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing. For it is written in the Scriptures, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’”

Here again, Paul is going back into Deuteronomy.  And one of the components of the Law was outlined in Deuteronomy 21…

Signpost 4 – cross

“If someone has committed a crime worthy of death and is executed and hung on a tree… [they are] cursed in the sight of God.” Deuteronomy 21:22-23

Here Paul makes a stunning claim.  He agrees that the Curse pronounced for misdemeanour is a real thing.  He agrees that the Law points out the punishment for transgressions.  Paul’s readers would be expecting that they would still have to work harder in order to get themselves out from under the Law.  BUT then, in a stunning and unexpected way, God steps in and in Jesus, takes upon himself the curse for wrongdoing.  But not just in any old way… Jesus allows himself to die on a hanging tree.  To be placed there on our behalf.  The point of the curse is that Messiah, Jesus, bore the full weight of the curse and by doing so, broke it.  And because the law has been satisfied: the payment for wrongdoing has been made. NOW the blessing of Abraham can flow not just to the Jews, but also to non-Jews.  To you and I.  As God has always intended!  The irony of this this is so thick in Pauls’ writings that we sometimes miss it:  

The Cross is the location of God’s Great Reversal

The cross is that place where God absorbed all of the evil of the world and through sacrificial and costly love, overcame.  The cross is that place where the curse was broken and the law was fulfilled and therefore you and I no longer have to choose to live under that kind of rule-keeping, white knuckle kind of thinking.  Worried about if God loves us or if we can be part of God’s family.  Listen to verses 14-18…

Gal 3:14

“Through Christ Jesus, God has blessed the Gentiles with the same blessing he promised to Abraham, so that we who are believers might receive the promised Holy Spirit through faith.”

The Evidence of the Blessing: FILLING of the Holy Spirit. God has come to live in you and to bring assurance of God’s presence and power. Gifts for service and witness.  All yours when you exercise faith to believe God’s promises.  Friend, if you have not yet opened up your heart to God, do it.

To hammer home this point Paul uses an example from daily life:

Image: The Fine Details of a Legal Contract. 

Gal 3:15-16

“Dear brothers and sisters, here’s an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or amend an irrevocable agreement, so it is in this case. God gave the promises to Abraham and his child. And notice that the Scripture doesn’t say ‘to his children’ as if it meant many descendants. Rather, it says ‘to his child’
and that, of course, means Christ.”

Lawyers LOVE to debate minute distinctions in the law, right?  So Paul picks up on this and says “let me give you an example of what happened here.  So God makes a promise pre-Moses to Abraham.  And God makes this promise not to a group of you but to a singular person.

Distinction1 – Seed vs Seed

Seed of Abraham (plural) = Jewish nation

Seed of Abraham (singular) = Jesus Christ

Paul says “you consider yourself children of Abraham, members of the Jewish nation and thus you think you have the market on God’s blessings all to yourself. But God’s promise of blessing didn’t come to you because you were born into some special family that had history. No. God made an irrevocable agreement with Abraham that God would bless all humanity through Abraham’s seed.  Singular.  Through a child that comes through Abraham’s family. 

• Implication: Christ is the sole heir, the channel through which all of God’s promised blessings come to humanity. NOT by being part of a Jewish community  

You don’t walk the pathway of blessing by being part of a church or faithfully giving money to good causes or by seeking to be a good person.  No. You receive the promise of God by placing your faith in Jesus.   

Paul goes on to make another fine distinction:  Gal 3:17

“This is what I am trying to say: The agreement God made with Abraham could not be canceled 430 years later when God gave the law to Moses. God would be breaking his promise.”

Paul uses two different terms here to describe what is going on.  The Jewish people of Paul’s day would have used to term LAW to describe what God did with Abraham and also what God did with Moses.  But Paul is saying “um, nope.  Those are two different things.  FIRST, God made a promise to Abraham.  And that promise was not changed in any way 430 years later where Moses comes along in Deuteronomy. 

And here’s the Distinction #2: PROMISE vs. LAW

You might be familiar with the concept of a Legal precedent: The latest document supersedes the earlier one (e.g. - a will).   

Paul breaks them apart into separate things!

Paul is saying “the promises of God are older BUT they are also unbroken.  They still stand.  God’s promises of blessing, God’s promises to all those who express and live their lives by faith do not get somehow overturned or upended by the giving of the Law.  As if there is now some clearer or better or cleaner way to get into God’s family.   No!  The

• Implication: The Law given to Moses 430 years after Abraham doesn’t annul/revoke it: God’s promise still stands!
• The Law can’t be added as an addendum to the Promise. They’re distinct entities

God is always faithful to the promises that God makes.  If you are looking for something firm and sure and certain in the storms of life, you can cling to the promises that God has made because God never breaks a promise.  Think for a minute of some of the promises that God has made. Promises like Deuteronomy 31:6 “Be strong and courageous for the Lord says… I will never leave you nor forsake you.”  This morning are you feeling lonely or alone?  Everyone else has a home, a place to go for the holidays. You are not alone.  God is with you.  God guides like a father, comforts like a mother.  God sets the lonely in families.  This morning God is saying to you “I see you.  I know you.  You are not alone. You are my child.” 

Or maybe this week, you fell back into the same old pattern of sexual sin or gossip or greed or whatever you struggle with. And you think to yourself “I feel so dirty or unworthy. What am I even doing here today?”  You might be unable to shake that nagging sense of guilt that the pathway of Law holds over you.  But the wonderful promise of God in I John 1:9 “if we confess our sins, God is faithful. God will forgive your sins & cleanse you.”    

The worship team is going to come and we are going to respond to God.  And as we do this I want you to think of the difference laid out in Gal 3:18

“For if the inheritance could be received by keeping the law, then it would not be the result of accepting God’s promise. But God graciously gave it to Abraham as a promise.”

This Thanksgiving, what strikes me is the Distinction 3 – gift vs payment

Payment: Keep the terms; get the reward

Gift: It’s YOURS!  The gift of God is abundant life through Jesus.

• Implication: "Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15 NIV)

 Maybe you need to spend time repenting and receiving. Or saying thanks.