Galatians 3:10-14
Curses—
This passage, which will be the last we look at before the beginning of the new year, is crucial for understanding Paul’s view of the human condition and what Christ’s work involved. The ideas will be expanded in his other writings, especially Romans. It helps us answer the question, What happened on the cross?
Curses—Ours
10 For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse;
This is a clear warning to those who might be tempted to listen to the false teachers who were wooing away the faithful in the Galatian churches. Rather than being a path to winning God’s favor, relying on “the works of the law,” that is our keeping the demands of the law leads to being “being under a curse.”
Decades ago, Robertson said this curse hung over the believer like the sword of Damocles. Paul was certainly suggesting that we sinners lived with the reality of impending doom.
To put the matter simply, the person who is under a curse should expect God’s worst, not God’s best. The cursed one experiences the awful wrath of God. For the Gentiles who may have been hearing the words of this epistle, the notion of the wrath of God (or the gods) would have been familiar. Much of their religious practice, from formal sacrifices to the daily rituals that marked their every activity were intended to ward off the wrath of one god or another. This was hardly a new view of God but Paul was about to present a new view of God.
For now, however, Paul makes it clear that despite our best intentions, setting out to win God’s favor by our good works will fail.
for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.”
Why should this be? The problem isn’t that the Law isn’t good; the problem is we aren’t good. Even the best of us have failed to keep the Law. William MacDonald explains:
It is not enough to keep the law for a day, or a month, or a year. One must continue to keep it. Obedience must be complete. It is not enough to keep just the Ten Commandments. All six hundred and some laws in the five books of Moses must be obeyed!
But it gets worse. Remember Jesus’ discussion of the Law in the Sermon on the Mount. He demonstrated that the Law’s demands went beyond the mere “letter of the Law.” For example, the prohibition against murder carries a prohibition against hatred; the prohibition against adultery means no lusting.
Let me try a simple experiment. Are you a liar? Accuse most of people of being a liar and they will respond with anger, indignation. In some times and places you might have found yourself challenged to a dual.
But have you ever told a lie? I don’t mean this week or last month, I mean at any time during your life. Lying is so much a part of our human makeup that if you say, “I’ve never told a lie,” most people will be ready to call you a liar. Now, how many lies does it take to be a liar?
Ok, there’s no fixed figure. But if you say, “A few lies hardly makes a person a liar; you’d have to make lying a habit before you could be called a ‘liar’.” That makes sense but what if we ask the opinion of that man, woman, or child you lied to, that person who had the reasonable expectation of hearing the truth from you?
At heart here is our picture of God. If Paul had introduced a picture of God as One who counts our faith for righteousness, he was by no means denying the old view of God as One who is holy and intolerant of sin. Speaking of this attribute of God, Charles Hodge wrote, “Holiness, on the one hand, implies entire freedom from moral evil; and, upon the other, absolute moral perfection.”
In a vision, the prophet Isaiah found himself in the throne room of heaven. There he heard the angelic host chanting, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.” Specialists in Hebrew literature tell us that when anything is repeated we should pay special attention (consider Jesus introducing some of his remarks with “Verily, Verily” or “Truly, Truly” since Jesus didn’t speak King James English) and when something is repeated three times, you had better pay extra special attention. Isaiah’s responded to this vision of a “holy, holy, holy” God by crying, “I’m doomed.”
Now, Isaiah was not necessarily what we would call a bad guy. Compared to many in the nation at the time he might have stood out as an example of uprightness. After all, he appears to have been at worship when he received this call to be a prophet. Yet, when this good guy had the occasion to view himself compared to God, any pretensions of personal rectitude melted away and he saw himself as “unclean,” no better than the people whose lives belied their identity as God’s people.
Paul will better explain the role of the law later in the letter but now he seems to be answering that person who might complain, “No fair, if none of us can keep the law well enough to earn God’s favor, then the fix is in from the beginning.”
11 Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law; for “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”
Now the Jews hearing Paul’s words read would have known that no one ever really kept the law perfectly. That was why Judaism included the elaborate sacrificial system; it was intended to deal with the moral failure of the people as a whole and of individuals. But it was always tempting to think that somehow, someway just being Jewish provided a a moral edge.
To counter any such thinking, Paul returns to the principle he explored earlier: the only way to be justified before God to any degree is through faith. On the one hand, our incessant failure to keep the law should make us recognize the imperative of relying on God's promise to justify those who have faith. Then, too, if any who rely on the law should be able to attain a right standing with God, the principle found in the words "the righteous will live by faith" cannot be universal as Paul seems to say it must be.
Even if we should grant that justification by works is theoretically possible, human experience makes it clear that it has not happened.
12 The law is not based on faith; on the contrary, it says, "The person who does these things will live by them."
The very nature of the law is contrary to the principle of faith. Faith is about trust, the law is about doing. When it comes to the law, the words of the Jedi master apply, "Do or do not, three is no 'try.'" The law-way to salvation does not involve resting trust, it involves constant activity. Resting is foreign to the law way of salvation. The law way of salvation involves the constant anxiety of wondering if you have done enough.
I first heard this story shortly after Mother Theresa’s death. A woman came into the office one morning with red eyes and looking for a strong cup of coffee. As she stood with her colleagues, one of them asked, “What’s wrong? You look like you haven’t slept.”
“I had a terrible dream,” the woman said, “I dreamed I had died and gone to heaven. And I was in a long line of people waiting for St Peter to review our lives to see if we had done enough good works to get in.”
“Wow,” her co-worker said, “that’s weird but you’re a pretty good person. You give to charities and go to church pretty often.”
“But you haven’t heard the rest,” the worried woman said, “Mother Theresa was standing in the line in front of me.”
“Ah,” another co-worker said, “that would be a little scary but I still say your a good person and would have nothing to worry about.”
“You don’t understand,” the anxious woman said, “after St Peter reviewed Mother Theresa’s life, he looked at her and said, ‘You could have done more.’”
The demands of the law don’t lend themselves to a restful piety. But God hasn't left us there.
13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”—
Paul offers a vivid image of Christ’s work on our behalf. The word “redeemed” suggests a situation in which a slave’s freedom is purchased by another, sometimes at great cost. Christ paid the price to free us from the curse of the law. Just what this “curse of the law” has been debated but it seems reasonable to conclude it must include the punishment that comes from failing to keep the law. For our sake, he became accursed.
This would have been new to the Gentiles. A God who exploded in wrath they could understand but this was a God who became the object of his own wrath.
Paul doesn’t go into great detail in explaining this; instead, he cites a verse from Deuteronomy: “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” The verse refers to a practice which the Bible does not so much endorse as control. It was a custom to hang the body of any person who had been executed as a criminal on a tree for all to see. (The practice was followed in many nations for centuries—including medieval England where bodies hung from London Bridge for weeks.) Those who hung on the tree were not cursed because they were hung on the tree; they were hung on the tree because they were seen as cursed. In first century, Judea being “hung on a tree” was something of a synonym for being crucified. So, Jesus being crucified was evidence of his having been cursed.
In Romans, Paul will explain that the cross allowed God to be both “just” (true to his holy demands) and a “justifier” (One who honors the faith of those who trusted him). So, the cross becomes both a reminder of the heinousness of sin and the depth of God’s love. Of course, God’s solution was by no means partial or in anyway deficient.
Again, Paul was silencing the false teachers who were disturbing the peace of the Galatian Christians.
Welsh preacher Cynddylan Jones says:
The Galatians [influenced by the false teachers] imagined that Christ only half purchased them, and that they had to purchase the rest by their submission to circumcision and other Jewish rites and ceremonies. Hence their readiness to be led away by false teachers and to mix up Christianity and Judaism. Paul says here: (according to the Welsh translation) “Christ hath wholly purchased us from the curse of the law.”
The implications of Paul’s claim were stunning. He could have easily taught the Galatians the little chorus popular a few years ago: “I owed a debt I could not pay, he paid a debt he did not owe.”
The prepositions Paul uses allows us to picture this in away that shows the dynamic of Christ’s work.
According to verst 10 we were “under” (Gk hypo) the curse of the law. Christ became a curse “above” (Gk hyper) us and even took us “from,” literally “out-from” under the curse. The Contemporary English Version attempts to capture these images: “But Christ rescued us from the Law’s curse, when he became a curse in our place.” So did the Living Bible paraphrase: “But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself.”
This is why Christians speak of Christ being our substitute. He took the wrath that was coming our way. This resulted, as one writer puts it, in a situation in which “God was satisfied forever; the law was silenced forever; and the believer is saved forever.”
14 in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
The Judaizer’s insistence on being circumcised to be a Christian would have made no sense if Paul were addressing only Jewish-Christians. He was addressing Gentile-Christians as well. The blessing of justification by faith was being extended to the Gentiles. They did not have to submit to circumcision and their Jewish brothers and sisters did not have to resubmit to the tedious dietary and social taboos that had distinguished their lives prior to coming to Christ.
Paul returns to a point that began this section: the basis of the believer’s receiving the Spirit (the token of being a Christian). Paul had angrily asked, “Did you receive the Spirit by following the demands of the law or by believing the gospel?” The implied answer, of course, was through their faith. So, receiving the Spirit and its potential for intimacy with God is a blessing extended to those who had once been considered especially cursed by God, the Gentiles.
This truth reminds us of an old saying that “God had only one Son and he made him a missionary.”
Observations: As we reflect on the Advent season and all the blessings of Christmas, we need to remind ourselves that what made Christmas necessary was a curse.
