For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free - Galatians 3

GALATIANS 3

You stupid Galatians!

Who put a spell on you?

You can really hear Paul’s anger in this chapter.

Chapter 3 is one of the more confusing chapters in Galatians.

Paul uses no less than five metaphors to get his point across

and they’re similar to one another and

he weaves them together and it can get confusing.

Paul’s mind is buzzing and it all comes out in knots.

Martin Luther wrote in a similar way.

When he wrote, it was mostly these

wild, emotional letters where he used

circular logic and mixed metaphors

and insulted people left and right.

Then his buddy,

and fellow professor at Wittenberg,

Philip Melanchthon --

Obviously a more even-tempered man --

 took Luther’s crazy emotional writings

and put them into a systematic Theology

which we find in the Book of Concord.

Paul didn’t have that kind of interpreter

or not one that we’ve ever found,

so we just get the raw emotional ,

and kind of confusing part of the letter.

Now if I tried to explain all of the metaphors here, we’d be here all day.

But right now, we’ll just focus on what I think are the most important parts.

I think mostly this chapter of the letter

is spelled out at the beginning,

between insults,

Paul asks the Galatians:

Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard?

Paul reminds the Galatians that he told them

the story of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion

and that’s how they came to believe and follow.

the law was not part of their life before.

They only introduced it afterwards.

Faith or law?

How does God reach us?

Paul starts off in verse 6 by telling us about Abraham.

And saying that we are like Abraham.

Abraham was the father of the Israelites

the original Jew if you will.

The story of Abraham was a foundation story for Jews

and it would have been part

of the stories shared with the Galatians and other Christians.

Abraham was called by God and given a promise.

He was told that his descendants would

number more than the stars in the sky,

more than the grains of sand in the desert.

Even though Abraham was very old and his wife

was very old, he believed God.
And he and his wife were given a child.

Paul tells them that Abraham was given the promise

 before he followed any law.

He just believed in the promise and it was his.

or as Paul writes:

6 Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’

Now after Abraham was given that promise, In Genesis 17,

Abraham was told that he and his offspring should be circumcised.

The Jewish Christians surely would have used this part of the story

to prove to the Galatians that they needed to be circumcised

if they wanted to be part of the promise too.

But Paul is saying that the promise came without the law.

And without the circumcision.

It was given and Abraham believed it.

The promise was given and believed through faith

and Circumcision and following the law came after.

In verse 10

Paul tells us that not only is the law not the way that

we achieve God’s promises, but relying on them is a detriment to us.

“For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse;

 for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not observe

and obey all the things written in the book of the law.’”

I think this is important to explain.

Laws and Rules and traditions and standards can be good things.

They can help us remember important things,

they keep us on track, keep us safe,

they can even help us from killing each other

when sometimes we might really want to.

But in the end, laws, goals and standards,

are no basis for a relationship.

If your relationship with your spouse or your friends,

were just based on a list of things that they

 needed to do to earn your love,

that would not be a good relationship.

We could not fulfill the law and we would fail.

But that’s how many people have understood our relationship with God.

We set unrealistic standards.

We expect ourselves and others to follow religious laws, civil laws,

and we also create arbitrary standards in our society

that we have to live up to on a daily basis

that none of us can live up to.

I want to show you this commercial,

It’s been driving me crazy and I think it

illustrates this point.

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/A5mB/all-powercore-pacs-oxi-let-it-shine

I leave this commercial thinking,

“my child is not the one with the white shirt.”

PS – I do not even have children.

(and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they are singing

what is traditionally a spiritual song.)

I know that some would say it’s just a stupid commercial,

made to make you buy a laundry detergent

but the way it does it is by tapping into this feeling

that we are not good enough.

This is just one message.

There are hundreds of these messages every day,

How else do you see this happen in our world?

How else do we compare ourselves to others?

How do we build ourselves up or tear ourselves down

Depending on an outside standard, or a law?

Our body shape and size,

style of dress or skin color?

Ethnic background or culture?

What we eat, or what we don’t eat?

We cannot live up to the standards of the law.
We cannot climb the ladder high enough to get to heaven,

or nirvana, or Mount Olympus, or even the world’s greatest bowler!

There is always someone better, always one more step to go.

Those who rely on the law are under a curse.

There is always someone higher on that ladder,

and always someone lower on that ladder.

And that is the other curse of the law.

The law’s curse on humanity.

With the law, we always have an inside, and we have an outside.

us and them.

Good guys and bad guys.

The sparkling white shirts and the dingy shirts.

The blessed and the cursed.

However you want to say it.

With the law in our hands to judge others by,

and to be judged by,

there will always be division, competition and distinction between humans.

Circumcision was a way to make that distinction.

the circumcised and the uncircumcised.

It enabled the Galatian Christians to say:

 “We are Christians”

And the insinuated sentence following that is,

“And you are not”.

And Thankfully after reading and understanding the letter to the Galatians,

 Christians don’t act like this, right?

Unfortunately, and ironically, Christians are kind of the poster children

for “us and them” inside and outside talk and behavior.

What ways that the Christian church used the law

to create unreachable standards?

What ways has the Christian church used the law

to divide us into “us and them”

There are these obvious ways, and then there are less obvious

ways that are deep inside our denominations,

deep inside of us, that accuse and divide people.

So the law has cursed us  because we can’t ever  live up to it.

And the law curses us by dividing us.

But Christ has freed us from  the curse of the law.

Let me explain:

What assumptions do we have about this person?

Be honest with yourself.

what judgments do we make?

 

He’s wearing an orange jumpsuit. He’s in prison.

He’s  broken the law. He’s mean.

He’s probably murdered  someone or worse.

At least I’m not like him.

Inside and outside.

Us and Them

You might deny thinking this,

but watch the local news

and see how many times

these kind of judgments are made

and how many times you make them too.

The law condemns this man,

The civil law condemns him and our religious law condemns him

and our internalized standards curse this man in our minds

just based on his appearance

But Paul writes in verse 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’—

The way that Jesus did that was through giving his life for us.

SLIDE

Jesus was arrested, tried by law, put on death row, and killed.

Jesus became the man in the orange jumpsuit.

God became the cursed one,

cursed by the law,

put to death by the lethal combination of government and religion

in order to save all the people in the orange jumpsuits

and us all from the curse of the law

And in order to save the world from the curse of

“Us and Them.”

By the way, that man in the orange jump suit,

His name is Michael Shannon,

he was nominated for best supporting actor in 2008

and this was from a wacky 2006 comedy

called “Let’s go to Prison”.

So we shouldn’t judge by appearance.

So The law doesn’t save us, it actually curses us.

And Jesus came to save us from the curse of the law.

The point of Jesus crucifixion was to redeem

those who did not meet up to the standards of the law,

An d to redeem the world from its division

and reconcile all the people of the world.

So to adopt more laws in order for people to become

a follower of this one who was cursed by the law would be

contradictory to God’s whole point in coming here.

Paul wanted to create a church

and make a society that shared Jesus vision.

That didn’t live by a hierarchy of rules and status,

that didn’t see people as inside and outside,

that didn’t see some people as better than others.

That didn’t believe in “us and them”

We are not a people of the law, we are people of faith and trust.

Back in verse 6 paul said

6 Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’,

⁷so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham.

We are the descendants of Abraham not because we follow the law.

but because we believe and trust.

We are all children of God through faith.

Now through faith we are one family brought together by Jesus Christ.

Not a bunch of little tribes or nations.

There is no distinction made by the law

Because God has been cursed by the law,

no law can curse us anymore.

So those divisions of inside and outside,

of nationality, of gender, and of class are null and void.

There is no more “us and them”

As Paul writes:

²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Greek,

there is no longer slave or free,

there is no longer male and female;

The family of Christ cannot be divided.

And the family of Christ includes everyone.

Because we are all  Abraham’s offspring,

we have all inherited the promise of God.

All of us are one in Christ Jesus.