Galatians 3:10-14
Amen. You can be seated. Turn
in your copy of God’s word to Galatians chapter three. Galatians chapter three, our
passage today will be verses 10 through 14. And as you’re
making your way there, just a reminder that Galatians is the first of
Paul’s written letters. chronologically, it’s perhaps
in a different order in your copy of God’s word, but Galatians
would have been written just after his first missionary journey,
where he went to the churches in Southern Galatia, having been
sent by Antioch, he went across to the island of Cyprus and preached
across the island and went to the mainland and preached through
the churches of South Galatia, preached to them, the goodness
of God in Christ. And then a short time later,
he gets a report that they have fallen away from faith in Jesus.
And they believe that Jesus plus circumcision, Jesus plus adherence
to the laws of the Old Testament equals salvation. And he’s, as
we’ve seen, rather upset with them. So he spent the first couple
of chapters saying, I’m Paul, I’m an apostle of Jesus, not
of men. I’m Paul, the preacher of Jesus, not a preacher of a
man-made gospel, and I’m justified by faith, though I used to be
a law keeper. You were justified by faith. It was your experience when the
Spirit came upon you. And then he unloads on them,
and we’re in the middle of his sort of left and right hooks
of the boxing match he’s in with the Galatian Judaizers, and he’s
unloading on them this firestorm of, well, Abraham believed God. and was justified. He didn’t
do works. And now he’s gonna say to us today, you wanna rely
on works? That’ll get you a curse. That’ll
get you death because you can’t do the works of the law and be
saved. Only faith in Jesus brings the
promise of Abraham to both Jew and to Gentile. So let’s now
give our attention to God’s word from Galatians chapter three,
beginning at verse 10. For all who rely on works of
the law are under a curse. For it is written, cursed be
everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book
of the law and do them. Now it is evident that no one
is justified before God by the law for the righteous shall live
by faith. But the law is not of faith,
rather the one who does them shall live by them. Christ redeemed
us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, curse it as
everyone who is hanged on a tree so that in Christ Jesus, the
blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles so that we might
receive the promised spirit through faith. Amen. The word of the
living God. May he write all its eternal
truths. etching them in our minds and in our hearts. I love watching
people attempt to follow a rule and perhaps they blog about it
or write a book about it. Some years ago, there was a young
lady named Julie who attempted to cook through Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And so she spent 365 days, I
think cooking 524 meals. Some of you perhaps watched Julia
Childs on PBS and you remember her eccentric behavior and voice
and maybe you’ve been to the Smithsonian and seen her kitchen.
Perhaps you have her thick volume on your cookbook shelf in your
home. Well, this gal, Julie, decided in the early 2000s when
writing and blogging on the internet was a new thing, I’ll do this.
I’ll cook these meals. I’ll take pictures. I’ll post
my experience on the internet and of course it turned into
a book, it turned into a movie, but you stand back and look at
what she accomplished in that one year, quite a feat, quite
a success to be able to master those meals. Now others have
attempted to follow a rule or an order. And they’ve attempted
to write about it and suggest it to others. For example, you
read of the ancient monastic order of St. Benedict, the rule
of St. Benedict. People over the years have sought
to follow God more closely by living a monastic lifestyle.
And so they read through the rule of St. Benedict. They read
about living the monastic quiet life away from the world and
its pressures, following a regiment of chores and duties, but also
following a regimen of spiritual exercises honoring the hours
of prayer time each day in the services of the ancient church
calendar. Perhaps you’ve bumped into the
girl who, back in 2012, sought out to live a life of biblical
womanhood over the course of a year. She let her hair grow.
She called her husband master, I believe, for that year. And
she did all the things she read about in the Bible and blogged
about it. It was quite famous. Maybe you’ve
tried the kosher diet. You’ve decided you live by the
Levitical laws of the Old Testament and seeing what that’s like. Well, These are interesting,
aren’t they? Cooking Julia Child’s cookbook. Perhaps you burn something. Perhaps
you don’t flip the pan just like she does or give that robust
voice that she had just the right way. But that’s okay. You’re
still going to eat better than most people in the world if you
even err a little bit in her recipes. But think about the
exercise that Paul is attacking here. He’s saying to the Galatian
Christians, he’s saying to the Galatian Judaizers, no one can
set out to live by the law of God and
achieve salvation. No one can read the Bible and
attempt to keep the laws of God whole and pure and complete and
entire and achieve salvation before Almighty God. No man can
do this. And in a sense, he’s saying to
the Galatians, why are you even trying? As he speaks into this
great controversy at the churches of Galatia, this region of churches,
he’s attacking that they have been bewitched, they have been
fooled, they have been snookered into believing that it’s Jesus
plus some combination of ceremony and especially circumcision that
reaches salvation for them. And he’s saying, absolutely not. No way is this to be thought
of as a means of salvation by you. Now, remember he’s, showed
them his own experience. He showed them that he was a
law keeper, didn’t work. I met Jesus and that’s what saved
me. He’s shown them their own experience. I portrayed in my
preaching, Christ Jesus crucified and you, you saw the spirit work
in you and you came to salvation through faith. Now he’s shown
them Abraham’s experience. And in our passage today, he’s
going to show them that the old Testament from the front of it
to the back of it, from the beginning of the old Testament to the end
of the old Testament, Salvation is in Christ alone, by faith
alone, and it is not by any works at all of any man that one is
saved. I want us to think about this
passage from three perspectives. I want us to think about it from
God’s perspective. Plan A. I want us to think about
it from the biblical perspective, Exhibit A, and then I want us
to think about this passage from our individual perspective, and
that’s Option A. So Plan A, Exhibit A, and Option
A. Plan A speaks of the eternal
mind of the triune God in eternity past. Some have said of God,
the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit, that they
met in their eternal heavenly boardroom in eternity past. And the agenda for the day on
the docket, what will bring us the most glory? What will bring
us the most glory? It will be the salvation of mankind
from sin. through the person and the work
of the second person of the Trinity in Jesus Christ. And so we understand
this to be the covenant of redemption, the Latin pactus salutum. We understand that the decrees
of God are His most holy, His most wise, His most gracious,
and His most perfect determining all things, or as our confession
says, He decrees whatsoever comes to pass. And so for his own glory,
God made the world and everything in it. For his own glory, he
made mankind and put them on the face of the earth. And we
enter the story of plan A in the scriptures in the garden
of Eden, when God made Adam from the dust of the ground, he made
Eve from the rib of Adam. And when God put them in the
garden, he told Adam, your job is to work or make the garden
productive. Your job is to keep the garden,
to protect it. Your job is to be fruitful and
multiply both the ground and humanity. And your job is to
live righteously until the glory of God through the generations
of Adam and Eve spread across the whole face of the earth.
Garden, not jungle and chaos. was to complete the face of the
earth so that the glory of God would cover the ends of the earth. God gave to Adam and Eve a law. That law was to not eat of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day they
ate of it, they would die. But we suppose that it also implied
if they didn’t eat, they would live. And after a stretch of
time, they would live forever because they would take of the
tree of life and they would live forever in righteousness before
God and before His holy and awesome face. Well, in theology, we call
this covenant, the covenant of works. Adam, eat and die. Adam, don’t eat and live. It had blessings and it had curses. And we know that Satan slithered
into the garden We know that the law written on the hearts
of Adam and Eve spoke loudly in their consciences against
what Satan was tempting them with, but they were worldly. They saw the fruit was a delight
to their eyes. They saw the opportunity to end
their rule by God and become self rulers, to become autonomous,
to determine their own destiny, and determine their own destiny,
our destiny, they did. They ate the forbidden fruit
and they fell from their position of righteousness. They were happy
and holy. They were in fellowship with
God. He revealed his will to them. And when they sinned, they
became sinful and miserable. They failed to keep God’s law
pure and whole and entire. And so they broke. the covenant
of works, and they became sinners. And we, by birth from Adam, have
become sinners as well. You know, God is a God who loves
to bless. At the end of every service,
we receive the benediction. The Lord bless you and the Lord
keep you and the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be
gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance.
upon you and give you peace. God is a God who loves to bless.
We read all throughout the scripture, various Beatitudes. You perhaps
know them from Matthew’s gospel. Blessed are the poor. Blessed
are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed
are the pure in heart. There’s a handful of them, I
believe seven in the book of Revelation, blessed are the dead
who die in the Lord for they shall rest from their labors.
And so you get the idea throughout the scripture, God loves to bless
his people. but he doesn’t bless disobedience.
No, he curses disobedience. He curses covenant infidelity. He curses those who rule themselves
and do not live in submission to his holy law. And so our first
parents’ disobedience brought them exile from the garden. Our
first parents’ disobedience brought them exile from the presence
and the fellowship of God. Our first parents’ disobedience
sent them into the woods, hiding from God, covering their shame
with fig leaves. And yet God in his mercy, instead
of cursing them, cursed an animal. And that animal lost its life.
It lost its skins and those skins became a covering for their sin
and for their nakedness and for their shame, because God loves
to bless his children, but he can only bless through a sacrifice.
He can only bless through the shedding of blood. That’s the
only remission for our sins. And so Adam and Eve were then
called to live by faith in the one who loved them and would
give up his only son to die in their place. And so we see, if
you fast forward through the history of God’s people, you
see that God’s people are chosen. His people are holy. They are circumcised in heart.
Their life is to worship him. And as God gives to Israel his
various laws and decrees, he wants them to live a life of
civil holiness as a nation. He wants them to live a life
of cultic holiness as a worshiping people, but he wants them to
live a life of moral holiness as they obey the Ten Commandments. And so God in his grace gave
us plan A. And I want you to understand
there is no plan B. Christian theologians throughout
the centuries will tell you, well, God has worked in dispensations
because, you know, he made the world and everything in it and
Satan messed that up. No, God permitted the fall. That
was part of plan A. God sinlessly uses sin for his
own glory. God permitted Adam and Eve to
sin. God permitted generations to rise up in unrighteousness
so that when he had Noah, the one righteous one in a generation,
build an ark and his people would be saved through it, it brought
him glory. So there’s no plan B. There’s no plan C. God in
eternity past gave us plan A and he has been working it out in
human history ever since the beginning of time. And so Plan
A, brothers and sisters, is the story of the Bible unfolded before
our eyes. I want us to think, though, about
Exhibit A. If Plan A is the story of God
redeeming man through his son, the Lord Jesus, Exhibit A is
that it’s plainly told to us in the scriptures of the Old
and New Testament. Now Paul here is speaking of
the scriptures of the Old Testament. He’s going to bookend the beginning
and the end. He’s going to say in Leviticus
and Deuteronomy and in Habakkuk, the scriptures say over and over
and over that the just shall live by faith. Never does it
say in the Old Testament scriptures, the just will live by works.
Never does it say in the scriptures that if you, If you score 100%
on your test, you’ll get into heaven. And we’ll see why that’s
not possible. But from Abraham to Isaac, to
Jacob, to Joseph, to the nation of Israel, to David and to Solomon,
and throughout all the generations of God’s people, they were given
a law. And in the economy of God’s,
people. He gave them what we call three
laws. He gave them the civil law. This
is how you’re to obey as a nation under God and Israel within boundaries. He gave them a ceremonial law.
This is how you are to live and worship in a holy and precise
way before the living God. Don’t make it up as you go. worship
me my way. And then he gave them the moral
law, the 10 commandments. Now we understand from the book
of Hebrews that Jesus fulfilled the ceremonial law. He is the
spotless lamb slain before the foundation of the world. And
so that ended, as we see at the death of Jesus, the curtain of
the temple torn in two, the sacrificial system ended. Those things only
pointed to Jesus. And now that he’d come, now that
he had suffered and died in our place, those were ended. The
civil laws ended with the ending of the nation of Israel under
exile and the subsequent, what do you call it, occupations by
Rome and Egypt and others. Israel has ceased. to be a nation
ruled by God since that time. And so the civil laws have ended. Now we can find great use from
the Levitical laws. We can find great use from the
civil laws for our own use in the church and in the world today.
But what about the moral law, the 10 commandments? Well, Exhibit
A, the scriptures of the Old and New Testament tell us three
important things. about the Old Testament, about
the moral law, about the coming of Jesus. It tells us, number
one, when we look in the mirror of the law, we can’t do it. We can’t keep it. You look in
the mirror and you’re out of place. You’re unkempt. You don’t
measure up to God’s standard and your heart leads you astray
where you transgress the laws of God. And so you look into
the mirror and it drives you to Jesus Christ. In fact, Martin
Luther, the great reformer of the Protestant Reformation said
the law is a tutor, the law is a schoolmaster. In one place,
he said the law is a hammer and it drives you out of yourself
to Jesus. No man can keep God’s law perfectly,
but does daily break it in thought. in word and in deed. And you
know that to be biblically true. And I think you know that to
be experientially true. You’ve seen it in your own life.
You’ve read it in the word and you know that God in exhibit
A has diagnosed our sin problem very well, very clearly and quite
perfectly. And so God’s people are driven
to Jesus We’re driven to Jesus because we can’t fulfill the
righteousness that is required by the judge of the earth. Now you say, what abiding or
continuing relevancy is there for the moral law of God in the
Christian life? Well, some Christians would say
there is none, Jesus fulfilled it, Jesus kept it. But it serves
as a guide To live a life that is pleasing to Christ. I love
how the Heidelberg Catechism, which we’re reading through on
Sunday night, is broken up into three G’s. That’s the letter
G. Guilt, grace, and gratitude. And when you see your guilt before
God and then see the grace of God in Christ to take your sins
and cover them, it leads to a life of gratitude. What fit return,
Lord, can I make? We sing from the Psalms. Well,
we can obey God. We can do what pleases Him. We
can have a heart that beats for the kingdom, a heart that beats
for the glory of God and the obedience of God. We see that
in David’s Psalm 119, A to Z, I love thy law, O Lord, and I
strive after keeping it, not as a means of salvation, because
that could never be accomplished, but as a means of gratitude,
as a means of pleasing God and loving Jesus for what He has
done. And that leads us to see very
clearly what Paul says here in Exhibit A in our passage. Deuteronomy
27, he quotes, cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things
written in the book of the law and do them. The one who does
them, he quotes in verse 12 from Leviticus 18, the one who does
them shall live by them. Could you rely on the works of
the law as a means of salvation? Could you, like this girl, Julie,
open up Julia Child’s cookbook and cook through it and eat 365
days of happy meals? Yeah, you could probably do that.
But could you open this book? And starting tomorrow morning,
like it was New Year’s, could you obey God’s law perfectly
and achieve salvation before the judge of the earth? The answer
to that is no. Now, the Bible gives that possibility,
right? One could, in theory, live a
righteous life and achieve righteousness before God. And you say, how
can that be so? You just said we break God’s
law daily in thought, word, and deed. Well, look at Jesus. Jesus
was conceived by the Holy Ghost. He was born of the Virgin Mary.
He was born of her yet without sin. And when we speak of Jesus
Christ, we speak of his humiliation. He was born in that in a low
condition. He was made under the law. He
suffered under the indignities of this life of being from a
poor family. He suffered the indignities of
this life by being mistreated. He was a prophet not respected
in his own hometown and on and on it went until his passion
week when he was spit upon, he was despised, he was rejected.
He was a man of sorrows. He was acquainted with grief.
His chastisement was for our sins. and he died the shameful
death of the cross. But Jesus obeyed God perfectly. We have Adam in the garden of
paradise with everything he needed, he disobeyed God recklessly,
right? Then we fast forward and we have
Jesus in the wilderness with nothing, 40 days and 40 nights.
Satan comes and tempts him, comes and tempts him and, you know,
Adam should have taken his hoe and chopped the head of the serpent.
and kept the garden. Jesus listens to Satan. He runs it through the word of
God. He speaks the word of God back to him and tells Satan where
he can go. Buzz off. Leave me alone. I have to do
the work of the Messiah righteously and not unrighteously. No shortcuts. And so exhibit A in the scriptures. You can’t keep the law. but there
is one who kept it for you. There is one who has obeyed perfectly. There is one whose righteousness
has been accepted before God, and that righteousness now becomes
ours by faith. Remember our definition of justification. It’s just as if I’ve never sinned
because of Jesus’ atoning work, and it’s just as if you’ve always
obeyed. When God looks at those who have faith, he sees you as
if you’ve never sinned because of the pardon, the atonement.
But he sees you as he sees Jesus, perfectly obedient. And what a great blessing that
is. Where first Adam failed, second
Adam succeeded. And that leads us from plan A
and exhibit A to option A. And I want to press in upon every
one of you in your minds and hearts. It’s only Jesus that
can save you. It’s only his perfection, his
obedience, his person, his work, his atonement, his making satisfaction
for your sins that can save you. It’s not Jesus, mostly, and a
little bit you. Your works, though perhaps run through the
spirit, though perhaps covered in the blood of Jesus, are still
as filthy rags in God’s sights. The only reason God accepts our
works is through Jesus. And so it’s not a little you
and a lot of Jesus. It’s not a 50-50, an 80-20, a
70-30. It’s a 100% Jesus, 0% you. Otherwise you have the Galatian
problem. Otherwise you have the problem
of every other religion that does not accept the atoning work
of Jesus as the means, the only means of salvation. So brothers
and sisters, option A is it. Option B, you don’t want to go
there. Because the Bible says option
B is a curse. You wanna rely on yourself, you
wanna rely on your own strength, you wanna do it your way and
see if God accepts it. Well, he’s telling you he won’t.
I think of people who climb rock faces. They’re crazy. Even with a rope. But you hear
of people and you see people, they’re gonna climb it free-handed.
Well, what if they slip? Or what if they blackout? Or
what if the rock breaks that they’re holding onto while they
find their next spot? One slip, one fall, dead and
gone. Do you wanna freehand the Christian
life? Or do you wanna trust in Jesus?
Do you wanna go it your way, And one slip, one mistake, one
not keeping the law wholly and perfectly and entirely, you will
fall to your death, your eternal death. And so option A, trusting
in Jesus alone, is the only option for salvation. And Paul so wonderfully
shows from exhibit A, the scripture, that if you want to try the law,
that’s a curse. But if you wanna rest in Jesus,
he took the curse for you. And he quotes Deuteronomy 21,
curse it is everyone who hanged on a tree. So take the two things
that Paul has said from the Old Testament here. You can’t do
the law, you can’t rely on the law, but Jesus did. And curse
it is everyone who has hanged on a tree. And you take Jesus’
perfect obedience, the spotless lamb, and you hang him on a cross.
And you take the covenant keeper and you put all the sins of the
covenant breakers on his head like the scapegoat of the Old
Testament at Yom Kippur. And you take Jesus outside the
camp like the scapegoats and away with the sins and you hang
him on a cross and you make this covenant breaker a spectacle
of what happens when you disobey God’s law. And God says, look
to the cursed one and live. Look to the one hanged on a tree
and live. For Jesus became a covenant breaker
in your place. Jesus became a curse in your
place. He became a spectacle in your
place. You’re the cursed one. You’re
the covenant breaker. You’re the one that deserved
to be hanged from a tree so that all would see what happens when
you break God’s law. Let that sink in. This is the
grace of God in Christ. You know, we have made salvation
in America so crass. You don’t wanna go to hell now,
do you? Pray this prayer, sign this card, walk forward the aisle,
sprinkle a little Jesus on your crummy American life, and that’s
Christianity today. No, you’ve gotta take all the
junk out of your life that does not merit anything before God
and replace it with Jesus and Jesus. alone. And so how wonderful
it is to hear this passage today and to come to the Lord’s table.
We come to the Lord’s table where Jesus pours out his blood before
his disciples eyes. Jesus takes the bread of the
supper and breaks it and gives it to his disciples. And he says,
take and eat, take and drink. This is my body. This is my blood. This is the new covenant. Someone
obeys in your place. You have an outside righteousness,
an alien righteousness. You have someone who has died
in your place, someone who is forsaken and cursed by God, you
know, every single Sunday. Well, I should say not every
single, most Sundays. We say the number six benediction, the
Lord bless, keep, shine face, look towards you, give you peace,
lift up his countenance, those words. You think of what Jesus
endured on the cross when he became a curse for you. The Lord
did not bless him. Now the Lord cursed him. The Lord did not keep him. He
abandoned him. The Lord did not turn his face
towards his son. He turned it away from him. In
fact, it made Jesus One of his last words, my God, my God, why
have you forsaken me? And so in order for you every
Sunday to hear the word, to be in worship, to partake of the
Lord’s supper, to receive his benediction and to go out in
the world, it took one being cursed in order for you to be
blessed. He could obey the law, you can’t.
And he is saying to you, receive and rest in him alone for salvation
and you’ll receive the blessing of the spirit. you’ll receive
the promise of Abraham. Let’s do pray together.