Galatians 2:15-16
Amen, you can be seated. Please
turn in your copy of the Word of God to Galatians 2, 15 and
16. The Pew Bible is page number 973, page 973. Galatians 2, 15
and 16 is what we might call a thesis sentence when you’re
in school and have to write papers. Teacher wants to know what you’re
writing about. What are all your supporting
sentences going to be about? What are your arguments going
to argue for? You need a thesis statement.
And if you look at Paul’s letters, you can often find a thesis statement. For example, in Romans, it’s
117 and 18, I believe it is. I am not ashamed of the gospel.
For in it is the power of God. Galatians 2.15 and 16 is Paul’s
thesis statement. He’s been explaining away for
a lot of verses now who he is. He’s Paul the apostle saved by
Jesus and granted apostleship by Jesus. And he’s a gospel preacher,
preaching a gospel not from men, but from Jesus himself. And now
he’s going to say to the Galatian church, You can’t be saved by
works. It can’t happen, it won’t happen.
Can’t do it, won’t add up. You can only be saved by faith
in Jesus. And so we want to think of this
important passage today. And as we do, we have the Lord’s
Supper before us to give us the great picture of the finished
work of Jesus for us. So give your attention now to
God’s word, Galatians 2, beginning at verse 15. Paul speaking to
the Galatian Christians who were Jewish converts says, we ourselves
are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. Yet we know that a person
is not justified by works of the law, but only through faith
in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ
Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ. And not by
works of the law, because by works of the law, no one will
be justified. Amen. The word of the living
God for us. When I was a kid, our family
would go around different places. And as we traveled around, my
parents would pick up little trinkets and things that are
still all over their house. And I remember one particular
excursion as a kid. We would go down on Sunday nights
after evening church, and we would go down to a little cabin
that my grandparents had on one of the lakes of North Carolina. One of my favorite trips to make
on that lake as a kid was from one end where their little cottage
was to the other end where there was a little town. We would dock
the boat, walk to the ice cream store, And then we suffered through
the antique shop that was there. And so on one particular trip,
my dad, who’s a sucker for these sorts of things, he was going
to be here today and had to go fill a pulpit. So he’s not here
to, to, to, to experience the shame of this, but he bought
this huge brass Uh, scale, you know, it had a, had a bucket
on this side and a bucket on that side and it was a real deal
old antique brass scale. He was proud of it. I guess he
twisted mom’s arm into it. Where are you going to put it,
honey? I don’t know, but I just want it. That kind of thing. Well, when
we got back to their grandparents’ cottage, it went on the mantelpiece
for safekeeping. And dad would always put his
wallet and his keys and his chewing gum and whatever on the mantel
when we stayed there. And so we had to play with this
thing. This was the coolest thing we’d
ever seen. And so we put his wallet and keys and we found
other objects around the house and we would learn to tip the
scales and see weights and measures right before our eyes. And we
began to understand you have to have equal weight for the
scale to balance. And if you tip it one way, the
other side goes up. If you tip it the other way,
the other side goes. And so we began to understand how this
thing worked. And I say this to tell you how
I think, how we hear most people believe they’re standing before
God comes. If you just chit chat, even with
church going people, and you ask them the age old question,
how can a sinful person be made right before a holy God? You will hear language, perhaps
Jesus, he’s pardoned my sins, he died for me at the cross.
You might hear a little of that, but then you’ll begin to hear
something about good works. you’ll begin to hear something
about, I have to have some skin in the game in order to be saved. Now, if the conversation’s really
going poorly, you’ll hear something about, as long as my good deeds
outweigh my bad ones. When at the end of my life, and
we always hear people say it, I go through the pearly gates.
and I stand before the judgment seat of God. As long as my good
deeds outweigh my bad ones, I’ll be just fine. And then came along
the Roman Catholic view of purgatory. If you get to the pearly gates
and your bad outweighs your good, you just spend a little time
getting purged in purgatory. That’s why during the Protestant
Reformation, the selling of indulgence was a very profitable business,
a crass business for the church. There was the little jingle of
Johannes Tetzel went into the coffer, a coin doth ring a soul
from purgatory doth spring. And so they raised tons of money
for St. Peter’s. Basilica there in Rome,
if you go to the Vatican city, it’s a very wealthy nation state. It’s full of money and a lot
of money raised through the guilt of sin and the buying of indulgences,
the release of our souls from purgatory into everlasting life. And I want to explain to you,
I want to say to you very loud and clear today, that’s not how
it works. Okay. There is no purgatory.
There is no scales where God puts your good and your bad and
weighs it. That is not how it works. And
Paul is very exercised when he writes to the Galatians because
he spent some time there on his first missionary journey, preaching
to them the gospel of Jesus Christ, where we are saved by faith alone. We are not saved by the works
of the law. We are not saved by the works
of our hands. We are not saved by having more good deeds than
bad deeds and tipping the scale the right way. That’s not how
God works in saving people. It’s a wrong view of self. It’s
a wrong view of God. It’s a wrong view of the Bible.
And it’s a wrong view of the sin that we bear because of Adam’s
original guilt. And then the sins we actually
commit. And I want to suggest to you,
Well, suggest is a rather weak word. I want to implore you to
have a right view of God from the scriptures. God is a holy
God, a just God, a righteous God. He is a God who will by
no means clear the guilty. The scripture says, he is a God
who cannot stand the imperfection of sin and unholiness and unrighteousness. And so when we have a proper
view of God, we then have a proper view of ourselves. For we read
in the scriptures, we were made in his image, but because of
sin, we fallen, we are unrighteous, we are unholy. And we begin to
have a right view of sin. Sin is any want, of conformity
to. It’s not measuring up to the
standard of God. It’s transgressing his laws,
his commands. And we need to have a right view
of what must be done for an unholy person to be made right before
God. And we see that most clearly
in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Think back to creation. God made
the world and everything in it. God made it perfect. It was a
beautiful place. It was the theater for his glory.
And he put Adam and Eve in this garden, in this creation to work,
to make it flourish. He put them in the garden to
keep it, to protect it, to keep it a holy precinct. And he put
them in the garden to have dominion over everything in it. commanded
them to be fruitful, to multiply. He commanded the plants of the
earth to be fruitful and multiply. He commanded the same of the
birds and the beast and the fish. And so the whole earth was to
extend from the garden of Eden across the whole globe until
the glory of God, the righteousness of man covered the face of the
earth. But Satan, who had already fallen
in heaven, the devil who said, I’d rather be the ruler of hell
than a servant in heaven, had rebelled in heaven. And he, so
he came slithering into the garden of Eden and he, he gave Adam
and Eve a false view of God’s word. God didn’t really say,
God’s not really blessing you. God’s holding back on you. So
he tempted them with the forbidden fruit. And so Eve saw it. It was a delight to her eyes.
She took it. She ate. She gave some to her husband
who was there with her and their eyes were opened. They saw right
and wrong. They saw good and evil. They
also saw that they were naked. and that they were ashamed because
they were now unclothed. They had been righteous. They
had been covered. Now they were unrighteous and
exposed before God. And so they hid among the trees. And while among the trees, they
sowed fig leaves together and they did what people have been
doing ever since. They try to cover their sin They
try to cover their shame, they try to cover their nakedness,
they try to cover up with anything they can, but what does God say?
It won’t do. And so God in his mercy came
looking for Adam and Eve. He sacrificed an animal. Without
the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. And
he gave them the skins or the coat of that animal to cover
their sins. And we think of what happened
then, not only to Adam and Eve, but to the whole human race.
The fall of man, the fall of man into sin through Adam, our
first parent, through Adam, our first representative. I believe
y’all studied this in Sunday school a week ago. It ought to
be fresh on your minds. His original sin came to us. It was imputed to us. Every single
human being after Adam born by ordinary Generation is born in
sin. King David says this in Psalm
51, I was conceived, I was born in sin. And so we believe that
this original sin comes to every one of us. And from that original
sin proceed actual sins. We’re, as it were, a sin factory. Our corrupt hearts are led astray
and we are wholly inclined without Christ. before the Holy Spirit. We are wholly inclined to only
sin, only do unrighteous things. There’s a famous theologian or
preacher from the Scottish church named Robert Murray Machain.
He was well known as a good, diligent, faithful pastor. He
died at a pretty young age, I think maybe the age of 30. And people
love to read his biography because he was a very godly man, a very
godly pastor, very effective. But when you read his biography,
you realize he struggled with remaining sin in him. And there’s
one stretch in his book where he says something very interesting
that I think every one of us ought to take home with us today.
And he says of every person, every believer, there is the
seed of every sin in you, which could flow out of that corruption
that remains. That’s a rather scary thought.
That’s a rather scary thought. You know, we watch the news and
say, oh, I would never do that. Or we read in the Bible and say,
I’d never be King David. Or we look at a friend or whatever,
and we say, no, not me. And this pastor, I think, was
wise to say the seed of every sin is in every one of us. And
it ought to make us take great care in the Christian life. But we are unable because of
Adam’s sin. We are wholly inclined to only
evil. and we want to self-cover, we
want to self-justify ourselves. And God says it will not do. Well, after Adam and Eve, after
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses, we see a stretch through
the scripture where God sets up a sacrificial system. He sets
up a set of laws for purity and holiness. He sets up a civil
law for Israel. So within boundaries, within
the nation of Israel, You will be holy people. You will live
in holy ways. You’ll be pure. You’ll be exact
about it. And on this day, you’ll offer
this offering and you’ll offer the offering that way. And the
priest shall do this. And you remember there were times
when people didn’t do, as God said, there were priests who
offered strange fire and God killed them. There were people
who touched the Ark of the Covenant, God took their life. And on and
on, we see God was exact about how one could be made right before
him. You could obey the moral law,
you could obey the civil law, you could obey the ceremonial
law. Problem is you’re born in sin. And so for centuries, you
see the people of God offering these sacrifices, doing these
things. And it wasn’t that in the doing, they would become
righteous. No, it looked forward to Jesus
who would fulfill all righteousness. So how did the old covenant people
have salvation? They had faith in the Messiah.
It wasn’t faith in the sacrifices as it wasn’t faith in their own
working hard. It was faith in the Messiah who God promised
to Adam and Eve would come and he would crush the serpent’s
head. And so when we become Christians,
When we come to Jesus by faith, our sin is pardoned. When we
come to faith in Jesus, our sin nature is subdued. Yes, there’s
remnants of it. Paul calls it the flesh. But God says of us, we are a
sanctified people. We are a holy people. And we
have to be careful because when we come to faith in God, we can
become box checkers. Well, I went to church. I wrote
my tithe check. I went to Sunday school. I did
my quiet time. I sang all the verses of just
as I am, which we’ll do before long. That’s a real good one
to get you into heaven, isn’t it? And we start checking our
boxes and box checking is not how it works. It’s faith in God. It’s faith in Jesus. It gets
in our bloodstream and we look only to Jesus. We look only to
Christ. And so our passage tells us,
We don’t have a standing before God because of the works of our
hands. Our hands are filthy. Our hands are tainted with sin.
Everything we do before God is defiled. Anything he accepts
is only through the blood of Jesus. But we put our faith in
Jesus. And Jesus is the object of our
faith. We believe that he, was born
of the Virgin Mary, which meant he was not born with original
sin. We believe that he lived a life of obedience to the father.
We believe that when the sins of the people were put on Jesus,
as if he were the scapegoat of the old covenant, that our sins
really were imputed to him and that when he died on the cross,
as first Peter told us, after our confession of sin this morning,
he really did bear in his body On the tree, our sins, our sins
were really and personally paid for by Christ. Our faith is in
Jesus, his life, his death, his atonement, his resurrection,
his being ascended up to heaven. Our faith is in him finishing
his work and sitting down as a high priest, having made the
once and for all sacrifice for our sins. Our faith is that our
high priest was faithful, his work was accepted. Our faith
is that he ever lives above to make intercession for us. And so our faith is an object,
but what is our faith? Well, faith has three real components.
It’s knowledge, the Bible is true, God is holy, sin, is not
living up to God’s standards. God punishes sin and he punished
it, not in you because you could not atone for your sin, but he
punished it in Jesus Christ, really and personally for you
at the cross. And so we understand these things. It’s why we’re teaching the Union
with Christ class during Sunday school. It’s why we go through
the confession of faith and the catechisms in an ongoing way
through the life of the church. We want you to know the nuts
and bolts of who God is and how he works in your life, because
it’s important in the life of faith to know things that are
biblically true. And then you begin to know these
experientially. Oh, Lord, your word says I’m
a sinner. I know it to be true. Lord, your word says Jesus is
a savior. I’m not it, so it’s gotta be
him. And we rationalize these things, we reason through them,
and then we assent to them. Because the Holy Spirit testifies
to each of us in our own minds and in our own hearts. My word
is true, this is who I am, this is what you are, like it or not,
and this is what I’ve done to rescue and redeem you from sin
and death and wrath. And after we know these things
and assent to these things, We then trust. It’s why every single
Sunday after our confession of sin, I say, brothers and sisters
in the Lord Jesus Christ, who received Jesus and who rest in
him alone for your salvation, I’m reminding you, this is for
those who trust in Jesus. You know, you assent and you
trust. You’re resting in him alone for
your salvation. This is important for us to understand. Faith in Jesus Christ is what
saves, not works of our hands, not the labors that we offer,
not our tears, not our, we could build a tower up to heaven and
never reach God. It’s only in Jesus. I wanna mention
something about justification by faith. This is the theme of
Galatians. This is the article, Paul says,
on which the church will stand or fall. We’ve talked about this
for several weeks now. Why is Paul beating a dead horse,
you might say? It’s because we like to do things
with our hands. We like to have some skin in
the game. And the doctrine of justification is so wonderful. It’s a legal term. Justification is literally being
made righteous. We don’t have it in our English
Bibles, but we would do better. I don’t know why they haven’t
done it, but we would do better, I think, to have an English word,
righteous thought. Right? We’re making up words
these days. All these little text words now get into the Oxford
dictionary. Why can’t us Christians get righteous-fied
in there? You’ve been made righteous. You’ve
been righteous-fied. What does that mean? Justification
is a legal declaration by God. He pounds his gavel and says,
you are righteous in my sight. His righteousness comes to us
by faith. But it comes to us by two virtues
of Jesus, his obedience and his atoning sacrifice. And so we
say in justification, as the Heidelberg Catechism so warmly
says, God sees us just as if we’ve never sinned. That’s the
pardon. That’s the atonement side of
things. But he also sees us just as if
we’ve always obeyed. When God looks down from heaven
at you, he sees you as if you’ve always obeyed. Now you, I know
we’re thinking Christians and you say, well, I don’t always
obey. We’re going to talk about that when we get to the spirit
and the flesh. We’re talking about that in Sunday
school. We’re talking about that. And the confession of faith class
is a good bit, but stay tuned. It does come up in Galatians. But brothers and sisters in Jesus
Christ, when God declares you righteous, when you are made
just or righteous side, that is a legal declaration that cannot
be changed, it cannot be altered. That’s why Paul says in Romans
chapter eight, therefore, there is now no condemnation for those
who are in Christ Jesus. You could say it this way, there
is no condemnation for those who are justified. Those who
are righteous by those who God has declared righteous in his
sight. When you come back to the Galatian
problem here, they’re wanting to do something. In fact, the
Judaizers have come from Jerusalem and said, okay, you Jewish Christians
in Galatia, yes, trust in Jesus. He’s wonderful. He’s beautiful.
He is our savior. He is the Messiah, but you need
to be circumcised. but you need to keep the dietary
laws, but you need to keep the civil laws or the ceremonial
or the purity laws. You need to do that plus Jesus,
and then you’re good to go. Well, we’d have to change the
song, wouldn’t we? Something in my hands I bring,
sort of to the cross I cling. I don’t come empty, I come half
full or a third full or whatever Arminian understanding we would
have. That’s been the age old argument throughout the centuries.
And the Bible says you have nothing to offer God and whatever you
do offer to God, he can’t accept it. Some will say, what do we
bring to salvation? You bring your sin. God brings
his atonement, God brings his satisfaction. And so when Paul
is speaking to the Galatians as he now speaks to us, he’s
saying, you need to know of the inadequacy of the work of your
hands. You need to understand your pedigree,
whether you’re Jewish by birth, or you had the covenants and
the promises, or perhaps you were a covenant child, you grew
up in a Christian home. Those things don’t do anything
for you, only faith in Jesus does. Well, those things are
advantages, right? It’s like getting a headstart in a race.
But it’s only faith in Jesus that works. There is no advantage,
there is nothing that will avail salvation for you It’s simply
the work of Jesus and you receive it by faith. You know, a simple
way to think about this, we love to do things. We love our little
to-do list. How can I please God today? How
can I please others today? How can I get the grocery list
done? How can I, we make lists, do, do, do, do. And so when we
come to our faith, our life in Jesus, we want something to do. And so maybe it’s been benign
or not, I don’t know, maybe not so big a deal, but we think,
oh, I didn’t have my quiet time today, I’m going to hell, right?
That can cross our minds. I don’t think it’s that drastic.
But we can say, I didn’t do my works today. And we can begin to be people
that need to do in order to feel right before God. But I want
you to look at the table. I know it’s covered, but as we
prepare to meet with God at his table, while you think do is
important, as one theologian well said, when we look at the
cross and when we look at the Lord’s supper and we see Christ,
we see the words done, done for you, in your place, in your behalf. and you simply receive it by
faith and trust and rest. Let’s pray together. Lord, we
thank you for the chance to be in your house with your people
and under your word. And perhaps some of the things
that have been said today from your scriptures have not been
things that we’ve heard or believed or trusted or thought about.
But Lord, these things are so basic to the Christian life.
We are only saved through faith in Jesus. And so, convince and
convert sinners in this room today, those who’ve not yet believed
in Christ, convince them of their sin, of their misery, and of
the wrath of God that is to come, and convert them by your Holy
Spirit, by your word, by your grace, to receive and rest in
Jesus alone and live a godly life. And for those of us who’ve
been in the faith a while, perhaps we’ve been born into the covenant,
we’ve been in church, we’ve heard the gospel, even professed our
faith. Comfort and build us up through
the truth of the doctrine of justification. Lord, let us remember
that great truth that if we are in Christ, there is no condemnation.
Help us to receive and to rest in these truths. We pray in the
strong name of Jesus, our great savior, amen. To prepare for
the Lord’s table, we want to sing number 453, Just As I Am,
and we’ll stay seated to sing.