A Sermon on Galatians 3:1-14 “Faith and Righteousness”
A Sermon on Galatians 3:1-14 has been lightly edited for ease of reading.
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If you have your Bibles, please turn with me today to Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia. We are in Galatians chapter three, and we will look at verses one through 14. Paul had, this is probably Paul’s earliest letter that he wrote to the churches as he was imprisoned.
It is a very raw letter. He is fighting for the souls of the people in the churches of Galatia, for they have abandoned the gospel. They have abandoned the gospel for law-keeping. The most important thing we can know in our lives is the good news that salvation comes through Jesus and Jesus alone and that law-keeping brings no hope, and that’s why Paul is so passionate in the book of Galatians about what he has taught and is teaching.
With those thoughts in mind, let us look to Galatians three, verses one through 14.
“You foolish Galatians who has bewitched you. Before your very eyes, Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you. Did you receive the spirit by observing the law or believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing, if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law or because you believe what you have heard?
Consider Abraham. He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Understand then that those who believe are children of Abraham. The scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham. All nations will be blessed through you. So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
All who rely on observing the law are under a curse. For it is written, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law. Clearly, no one is justified before God by the law because the righteous will live by faith. The law is not based on faith.
On the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.
He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus so that by faith we might receive the promise of God or the promise of the spirit.”
Let’s pray.
God of mercy, you have promised never to break your covenant with us. Amid all the changing words of our generation, speak your eternal word that does not change. Then may we respond to your gracious promises with faithful and obedient lives through our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.
INTRODUCTION
Throughout the 13 and 1400s, several men set the stage for changes in the medieval European church.
Men like John Wycliffe called for the Bible to be made available in English so that everyone could read it for themselves and would not have to rely upon a priest who read Latin. Wycliffe even went so far as to do a lot of translation work. He put himself at odds with the government in England. He had to flee for a time. Much of his translation work was included in the 1611 version of the King James Version.
Or maybe Jan Hus, from what we call today the Czechoslovak Republic. He embraced some of Wycliffe’s teachings on the Lord’s Supper and made criticisms against the practice of indulgences in the Roman Catholic Church.
Or Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, despite some of his theological problems, called for the church’s authority to be founded upon the scripture rather than the decrees of a pope.
The actions and teachings of these men, and men like them, laid the foundation for an event that occurred on October 31st, 1517 in Wittenberg, Germany.
After wrestling with the doctrine of indulgences, a doctrine in the church at the time that taught that you could pay for credit to get you or your loved ones out of purgatory, after wrestling with the doctrine of indulgences in the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther nailed 95 statements to the door at the church in Wittenberg. And with these 95 statements, he hoped to spark a conversation, not necessarily change the world.
However, this document, these statements, did more than spark a discussion. It ended up changing Luther’s life. If you read biographies of Martin Luther, you find out that three to four years after the nailing of the 95 theses to the door of the church, he actually has a conversion experience in his life.
But it also changed the trajectory of the church. We call this movement today the Reformation. According to the scriptures, it reformed the church or sought to reform it. And the doctrine that mainly drove the Reformation was the doctrine that answered the question, “How are we declared righteous before God? Are we declared righteous because we can keep a set of rules, a set of laws that make God happy with us, and then welcome us into his glorious kingdom? Or is it an act of God and an act of God alone?”
Martin Luther discovered, and we will consider today, that the blessings of salvation come through faith and not the works of the law.
In the book of Galatians, Paul is dealing with the churches of Galatia, churches that embrace the message that salvation comes through faith in Jesus alone. However, after Paul left, men came behind them that convinced them to add parts of the law to the gospel. It was no longer faith in Jesus’ completed work alone, it was faith in Jesus’ completed work plus circumcision, plus eating the right foods, plus your ability to obey. And since there is nothing new under the sun, that is the very thing that Martin Luther was dealing with 1,500 years later, and in many ways it is a temptation that we deal with today. Salvation comes through Jesus plus whatever.
Paul, in this letter, points out that we cannot keep the law perfectly, and then if we are relying upon the law, we are relying, we will find ourselves cursed by God’s righteousness. Before that, he asks them and reminds them to remember where they started, remember where they had come from, and then he goes on to give them an example from the life of Abraham.
Just like Paul and Martin Luther, you and I must never lose sight of the truth that our salvation, our sanctification, and our glorification comes through faith in the completed work of Jesus Christ, not through the works of a dead law.
QUESTIONING SALVATION
First, Paul gives them questions to make them think about their salvation. Now, the passage opens up rather brashly. He says, “You foolish Galatians.” We’ll see as we go why he thinks they’re foolish for turning their back on salvation through Jesus and Jesus alone.
But he opens up with a set of questions, and this first question is bold, because he asks, “Who has bewitched you? Who has cast a spell upon you to make you turn your back on salvation as I presented it to you?” “Someone,” Paul says, “must have done something to twist your thinking and your reasoning for you to fall so far short of where you started.”
Have you asked somebody a question, maybe one of your children or grandchildren? You’ve asked them a question about something they did, and they give you a response that just kind of makes you go, “What?!?!” That’s what Paul is saying here.
“How can you do this?” Paul says, “I have clearly and boldly proclaimed Jesus and Him crucified to you when I was there.” The word that he uses where he says “clearly portrayed,” before your eyes, Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed is a word that if it was still in use today would mean that something had been plastered across a billboard. That’s how clear it was.
Just a block or two up the road here behind Chris and Missy’s house, there’s that wonderful electronic billboard. And at night, sitting in my living room, we can see an edge, a corner of that if we’re looking out the window at just the right angle. And every now and then, it will go to what seems to be the brightest, most blinding white light that comes off of that billboard.
That clarity, that blindingness, that brightness of the light is what Paul is saying here. “I proclaimed Christ to you in such a blindingly clear way that you are fools for missing it.”
In other places in his writings, like 1 Corinthians 2, two, he tells the Corinthian church as he’s getting ready to deal with all of their issues, he says, “Look, the only thing I knew when I was with you was Christ and Him crucified. That is all that I preached to you.”
He goes so far in 1 Corinthians 15, verses one through nine, to say that that is the most important thing you could ever hear, that Jesus died for our sins, He was buried and He rose again on the third day.
And so Paul is confused. Why would you fall so far short of where you started? Because I gave you everything you needed to know. I gave you all that you needed to know to live a life of faithfulness before God.
The rest of the questions that he’s asked throughout this passage go on to point out what they have tried, the rest of the questions point out what they have tried to trade for the comfort of salvation through the cross of Jesus. What they have tried to trade for the comfort of the cross of Jesus is the keeping of the law. Specifically, they were convinced to add circumcision to the keeping of the law.
And Paul goes on to ask, “Did you begin by the Spirit or did you begin by keeping the law?” And the implied answer to that is you began by the Spirit. And going further, he said, “If you started with the Spirit, why not finish with the Spirit? Why take back control and activity into your own hearts rather than leaving it there in the hands of Jesus and the Holy Spirit?” He even goes so far as to say all the suffering you experienced, was it because you were merely a moral law-keeping person or because you believed in Jesus?
Brothers and sisters, the church will come under suffering, but the church doesn’t come under suffering for keeping the rules. The church comes under suffering because it says “Jesus is Lord and nobody else.”
That is why the church suffers. If we were just moral people, we’d fit right in. But we are not merely moral people that keep the law. We are people who proclaim Jesus is Lord.
The temptation that creeps into the church over and over and over again is saying God saves me through faith, but it’s up to me to keep myself saved through works. Brothers and sisters, it doesn’t work that way. Perseverance of the saints is as much an act of God as salvation of the saints is an act of God.
It crept into the church during Martin Luther’s time, it creeps into some false Christianities that we have in our world, and it creeps in here as well. Yes, God is making us more holy, and yes, the law teaches us how to live as children of God, but our salvation, our ongoing walk, and our future glorification are not dependent upon our holiness. They’re dependent upon Christ’s righteousness.
So Paul tells the Galatian Christians, if you began by Spirit given faith, you will continue by Spirit given faith, and you will make it to your glorious end by Spirit given faith. And so he starts out by asking them questions leading them to that conclusion.
THE CURSE OF THE LAW
Then he highlights for them the curse of the law. There is a problem, Paul says, in seeking to keep the law as the basis of your salvation. And the problem is this, you can’t do it.
You cannot keep the law perfectly because even where you violate even the smallest degree of the law, you’ve broken the whole thing, James tells us. Ultimately, the law brings curses upon people rather than life. Now, the law is there to point that out to us, to point us to our need for a savior.
Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount expounds upon the law. He says, “You haven’t committed adultery, that’s a good thing, but if you’ve ever looked at someone other than your spouse with lust in your eyes, you are guilty before God of adultery. You haven’t murdered anyone, that’s a really good thing, but if you’ve gotten so angry with someone that you have called them a name, you are guilty before God of murder.”
He goes on to do the same with idolatry, with worry, with truth-telling, with breaking promises. The point is this, if your hope is in the law to save you, to keep you saved, or to see you onto your eternal hope, you’re in trouble, but Paul returns them, refocuses them on the clear proclamation of the cross as our only hope for salvation and perseverance.
Referencing the Old Testament, I’m always astounded every time I read this passage and much of the letters of Paul, how often he references the Old Testament in his arguments. It’s the same Bible.
But he goes back to Deuteronomy where Jesus says, or God says, don’t allow somebody to hang on a tree because cursed is the one, everyone who is hung on a tree. And Paul says, the curse that you and I deserve, Jesus Christ became by hanging upon the cross.
And that is where salvation lies. It is in him and in him alone. This distinction and the law, this distinction between the cross and the law comes down to the distinction as well between work versus faith.
Can you work hard enough to earn your salvation? Or is it only hope in the finished work of Jesus? Paul says that it is faith in Jesus alone that saves. And since it is faith alone that saves, why would you think that you have to work to keep yourself saved?
THE EXAMPLE OF ABRAHAM
He goes to the example of Abraham. Beginning in Genesis chapter 12, we see that Abraham is called out of his home.
God tells him, “Hey, pack all your things, get up, leave this land and go to the place where I will show you.” Abraham makes it a little bit of the way. And then he and his family stopped for a time until his father passes away.
Then they get up and they continue their trek and they end up in the promised land. And when they get there, God gives Abraham three promises. He said, I will give you descendants that outnumber the stars in the sky and the sands on the seashore.
He says, I will give you possession and your descendants possession of this land that I have brought you to. And I will make you a blessing to all of the nations. All of this hinged on the promise of descendants.
But Abraham and Sarah were old and they had no children. And so in Genesis 15, God comes to Abraham to remind him of the promise that the promised land would be his and that he would have innumerable descendants. And Abraham responds, “God, I’m old, my wife’s old and we don’t have any children. Customs says that my most trusted servant will be my heir. Is that your plan?”
And God says, “No, you Abraham, you and Sarah will have a child. Even though all the biological odds are stacked against you.”
And in Genesis 15, six, we have Abraham’s response to this declaration from God. And it is this, “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Notice what it doesn’t say.
And this is Paul’s point. It doesn’t say Abraham went out and built an altar and it was credited to him as righteousness. It doesn’t say in the immediate context of Galatians, it doesn’t say Abraham went and circumcised himself and God credited to him as righteousness.
Abraham believed that God is a God who does what he says. And even though that belief was faulty, even though that belief was weak at times, it was still credited to him as righteousness.
Brothers and sisters, it’s not the strength of your faith. It’s not the power of your belief, but the infinite power and strength of the one in whom you believe. God will not break his promises. And so when we believe God, even with the weakest of faith, he has promised to justify, to declare righteous, to save.
And Paul is telling the Galatian Christians, “Don’t get the cart before the horse. Look to Abraham. You now, even as Gentiles, are the promised seed of Abraham because Jesus is the blessing to the nations.”
And it is faith in Jesus that allows you to receive the blessings that God promised through Abraham and makes you the true descendants of Abraham. It was Abraham’s seed, the crucified savior, who brings righteousness through faith to all of the nations so that we no longer live under the curse of the law.
CONCLUSION
In his early life, in his early ministry, as a monk and a priest, Martin Luther was tormented by the depth of his sin.
The more he studied for the ministry, the more he studied the Scripture, the more he understood the law, the more he realized he had no business standing before God as a priest, as a teacher, as a human being. And he was tormented by it. And yet, as I mentioned earlier, sometime after nailing those statements to the door of the church, after studying Romans and Galatians and other letters of Paul, he finally came to the realization that he was right.
He could not keep the law. He could not be righteous enough for God. And yet God gave him a righteousness through Christ that he embraced by faith.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy for you, for me to fall into the temptation to do and act in a way that says my salvation is based on my works. When you live this way, you cheapen the work of the cross. You declare that you are righteous enough to sway God’s opinion of you.
But if you rely on your righteousness, you are under the curse of the law. The only way to avoid that curse is to place your faith, your hope and your trust in the one who became a curse for you.
Do you struggle with sin and feel defeated by it? Look to Jesus, look to the cross.
Find your hope and peace in him and in him crucified.
Let’s pray.
To the great God above, we do thank you for this glorious truth that I have been purchased by the blood of Christ that my personal righteousness, which means nothing to you, has been covered by his perfect righteousness so that I might stand as a holy, chosen and beloved child before you. Change us and change the world by that truth. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
We are called to go out from this place, but God doesn’t leave us on our own as he sends us out.
He sends us out with his blessing. So take this blessing upon you: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen, come Lord Jesus.
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