Galatians: A Study of Christian Freedom
This passage is too lengthy to cover in one Sunday. Therefore, I am posting only that portion of the study I plan to cover this Sunday.
Lesson 9: Why the Law or Who Are We. Galatians 3:19-29
Over the past few years Americans have seen severals court cases involving irate defenders of the separation of church and state challenging the display of the Ten Commandments on public property. Perhaps the best known was the 2003 challenge to the display of the Commandments on a 2.5 ton monument at the Alabama Judicial Building. When Chief Justice Roy Moore refused to remove the monument after being ordered to do so by a Federal Judge, he was dismissed as a justice.
Many Americans supported Moore, believing his efforts both honored God and pointed to a fix for what was wrong with the country.
While Moore may have been honoring God, I think Paul would look at the situation and say, “If you think the Ten Commandments will fix what’s wrong with your culture, think again.”
Of course, it’s common to think that a system of rules will correct society’s problems. Even science fiction promotes that notion. An episode of the classic series Star Trek has an attorney, speaking before an alien court, commend “Moses…, the Code of Hammurabi and of Justinian, Magna Carta…, Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies, [and] the Statutes of Alpha III.”
The notion that all we need is the right set of rules ignores the reality that the problem is not with our rules but with us.
Paul addresses this matter when he discusses the purpose of the Law.
19 Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions…
If the Law can’t save us, what good is it? Why do we have it? On the one hand, Paul says the Law “added because of transgressions.” The God’s Word translation renders that as the law was “added to identify what wrongdoing is.” It may be a little more complex than that. A little reflection on the Law allows us to “identify” what right-doing is—at least to a degree. The Law, at once, allows us to surmise what we ought to be doing and tells us how far we are from doing it. The Law presents a picture of how we ought to relate to God and to one another.
Think about those commandments that speak of our human relationships. They are so basic that they are repeated in some form in almost every culture. Even in cultures where polygamy is practiced, adultery is considered to be wrong. The commandments present the basics of how we ought to live. In this, the Judge Moores are correct in commending them.
But the Law is also a measuring stick that shows how we don’t measure up. It is a mirror that shows how our lives fail to reflect its ideals. It is a target that we so often miss. Almost two hundred years ago, Adam Clarke wrote, “[The law] was given that we may know our sinfulness, and the need we stood in of the mercy of God. The law is the right line, the straight edge, that determines the obliquity of our conduct.” Two hundred years ago you could get away with a line like that because most of your readers would know “obliquity” meant a deviation from what should be.
So, while the vision of a society guided by the Ten Commandments might have prompted judges, teachers, and even churches to post copies of the commandments, it is naive to believe society will ever be conformed to those ideals by its own power. The notion that we get to heaven by knuckling down and adhering to the law is contrary to the gospel. Stott quotes Andrew Jukes on this point, “Satan would have us to prove ourselves holy by the law, which God gave to prove us sinners.”
until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made;
But the Law was not the end of God’s dealing with humankind. Hindsight allowed Paul to see that from the beginning the Law wasn’t God’s final Word on dealing with us sinners. The coming of Christ would make a difference. How it would make a difference Paul would explain after saying more about the Law’s origins.
and it was ordained through angels by a mediator. 20 Now a mediator involves more than one party;
These are among the most debated and argued about verses in Paul’s letters. Dozens of interpretations exist for these verses. I going to offer my perspective while encouraging you to examine others if you’re interested.
While the Old Testament does not say so, Jewish tradition said the Law was given to Moses by angels. Stephen confirmed that tradition in his defense before the Sanhedrin when he charged, “Angels gave you God’s Law, but you still don’t obey it.”
The key point Paul is making is that Moses was the mediator between God and the people. In the nature of things “a mediator involves more than one party,” so we may think of the Law coming from God (via the angels) through Moses to the people. It would be different with Christ.
Paul makes this clear when he says…
but God is one.
No mediator was involved in giving the promise to Abraham. Here Paul is arguing for the relative superiority of the promise given to directly to Abraham to the Law mediated through angels and Moses. Paul is by no means disparaging the Law; he is showing that the choice the Judaizers were placing before the Galatians was a choice that would involve taking a step backwards. It would be a little like choosing to take aspirin for a raging fever when penicillin was available.
Each medication has value but the one deals with symptoms—which might be harmful in themselves—while the other goes to the root of the problem.
21 Is the law then opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed come through the law.
Paul is returning his focus to the purpose of the Law. Keeping that purpose in mind will help us understand how the Law relates to the gospel. If the Law had been intended to save us, to bring us into a right-relationship with God, the Law-way of salvation and the Gospel-way of salvation would have been in contradiction. But that was not the purpose of the Law. We have to ask how God could have given such a law with such a purpose; ask how it would have worked. We have to ask that because it’s already been made clear, the problem was not with the Law but with us. In any case, bringing us into a right relationship with God was not the intent of the Law.
Now Paul turns to the intent of the Law. In so doing, as Alan Cole explains, he shows how the Law and the gospel of grace “must be complementary rather than contradictory in the overall plan of God.”
22 But the scripture has imprisoned all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.
The Law does something negative that, in God’s providence, is positive. It shows that we are all sinners. It is the same conclusion he would reach in Romans: “… all have sinned and fall short of God’s glorious ideal.”
Though the Jews should be thanked for giving the moral law to the world, they are in the same boat as the rest of us. Cole explains:
Paul's emphasis on the universality of human sin (v. 22) and the universality of God's judgment on all sinners (v. 10) reduces Jews to the same status as Gentiles—the whole world is a prisoner of sin. So identification with the Jewish people by circumcision and observance of the Mosaic law does not remove one from the circle of "Gentile sinners" (2:15) and bring one into the sphere of righteousness, blessing and life. Rather, it leaves one imprisoned under sin.
When the law allows us to see the prison bars surrounding us, we are finally ready to accept that our only salvation—literally—must come from another. The awful fact that we are all sinners leads to the conclusion, as one translation puts it, that “the only way for people to get what God promised would be through faith in Jesus Christ.”
23 Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed.
Now, Paul presents a secondary purpose for the law. Again, this is would have been a new way to look at the Law. He tells us the Law provided a kind of protective custody for us. The NIV points to this meaning: “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed.”
Some scholars believe verse 22 refers to the whole world and shows how the law indicts the whole world, while this verse (23) is addressed to Paul’s Jewish readers. If that’s so, Paul is attempting to show those readers that the Law with all its ceremonial demands was a kind of prison for the Jews. Keeping its regulations controlled every aspect of their lives. To show you what I mean let me cite a contemporary example.
Well, it’s not exactly contemporary. It comes from when Pat and I lived in Houston in the mid-seventies. We lived in an apartment complex where many Jewish people lived. In fact, we in our section of the complex there were only two Christian couples—Pat and I and the Roman Catholic couple next door. Anyway, we had an older neighbor named Francis Finkelstein (I’m not making this up). Francis and Pat became friends; Pat occasionally took her shopping and Francis would sometimes visit at our apartment. She was an observant Jew but didn’t seem be worried about having some young Gentile friends. One day she confided that she didn’t much care for doing dishes; the hot, soapy water bothered her hands. Pat asked if her apartment didn’t have a dishwasher. She said it did but she couldn’t use it because she didn’t know if the former tenants kept kosher or not. If they didn’t, the plastic lining of the dishwasher was contaminated. Her rabbi told her that she would have to have the entire interior of the dishwasher replaced to be sure. She couldn't afford to do that so she washed her dishes by hand.
Now, multiply that by dozens of other laws about diet, observing the Sabbath, and rules about other aspects of life. Just trying to observe them could be imprisoning.
Of course, the law’s effect is not entirely negative. On one level, the law both restrains and protects us. It keeps us from doing harm to others or ourselves. And it protects things that are valuable. The Mosaic laws about worship, property, and sexual morality, had they been strictly observed, would have preserved Israel from the moral chaos that marked their neighbor’s lives. But, overall, the law was a burden. As Matthew Henry put it: “they were shut up, held under the terror and discipline of it, as prisoners in a state of confinement.”
But there was a goal to this. It was to make them more eager to accept what Christ offered when he came.
24 Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.
Paul changes the imagery now, from the Law as “jailer” to the Law as “guardian.” The word “disciplinarian,” used in the NRSV, is misleading and even “guardian” doesn’t tell the whole story. The word Paul uses refers to “a child-minder…an attendant slave who watched over a child in a wealthy Greco-Roman household.” (From The Expanded Bible) This slave who looked after a child until he was about sixteen wasn’t a teacher but guided the child to the school, making sure the child arrived safely, prepared to learn. The Message paraphrases it this way: “The law was like those Greek tutors, which which you are familiar, who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure thee children will really get to the place they set out for.”
You can say that the whole Jewish experience with the Law was to bring them to Christ, to make them ready to accept justification by faith.
So, even though the Law is not the gospel, it may become a tool of the gospel. If we were to reduce the Law to just the Ten Commandments we would have a noble moral ideal. We would also have a constant reminder of how often we fail. And the fact of that failure reminds us of our need for the gospel.
W T Conner taught theology at Southwestern Seminary in the 1930s. It’s said a student once asked him, “Dr Conner don’t you think that if a man lives up to the light he has he will be saved?” Dr Conner replied, “Yes I do.” Then he added, “Now, trot that man out.”
The Law does not provide the cure for our problem, it provides the diagnosis. Christ is the cure.
God gave the Jews the great gift of the moral law. But he also gave them the greater gift of the Promise of a Messiah, of a heaven-sent Change-Agent, One who would deal with the problem we could not deal with on our own.
