This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I delivered this message at Spring Creek Bible Church on October 20, 2019, as part of the Galatians series. It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
Let’s begin in prayer. Father, thank you for this rich and amazing letter you moved the apostle Paul to write to protect your church from losing the gospel, and for preserving it so that we hold accurate translations of his message. Thank you that it’s still relevant to us, even though our situation differs—and in some ways doesn’t. Help us understand this message as it was written to a first-century church, and help us, by your Spirit, to apply it to our own church, families, and hearts—not merely to understand it rightly, but to delight in it. And help me as I try to explain some difficult and debated things; guard us from error and give us supernatural ability to hear from you tonight. In Jesus’ name, amen.
I’m grateful to Pastor Steve for the chance to speak again. My study of Galatians has been especially rich—more than once I was deeply moved to see God’s redemptive plan across history coming together in Christ. There’s far more meat here than we can do justice to in a couple of Sundays, so I’ll move quickly (I’m happy to share my notes and slides so you don’t have to scramble to write).
Orienting Ourselves in Galatians
These chapters get at the heart of the mystery of the gospel—God’s unfolding plan of redemption and how the whole Bible hangs together and climaxes in Christ. No wonder this short letter had such impact, especially in the Reformation. Most students of Galatians divide it into three parts (which is why Pastor Steve gave it to three of us): chapters 1–2 on gospel authority, 3–4 on gospel theology, and 5–6 on gospel ethics—or, put another way, Paul argues against the Judaizers’ false gospel first autobiographically, then theologically, then ethically. Neither scheme is perfect or tidy, but both help us feel the flow. I’ll admit up front that there’s some genuinely tough material in Galatians 3–4—I suspect it’s partly what Peter meant when he wrote that Paul’s letters contain “some things that are hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:16). It encouraged me to see far smarter people struggle here: Douglas Moo, who wrote a commentary and read everything he could find, still calls certain verses puzzling, and John Piper, preaching through the book, came to one verse and said he wouldn’t touch it because he didn’t know what it meant. Paul’s main points, though, are clear, and I want to keep close to those rather than chase every rabbit trail.
Behind Galatians lies the mystery of the gospel—the mystery of the new-covenant people of God, the church: a multi-ethnic community with equal standing before God in Christ by the Spirit, co-heirs with Christ of the promises made to Abraham. No longer must Gentiles become Jews to enter the people of God; Jews and Gentiles now enter alike, by faith, in union with Christ. This mystery, concealed in the Old Testament and revealed in the New, is grappled with across the New Testament—John’s Gospel, Acts, Romans, Ephesians, Hebrews, 1 Peter, Revelation—all wrestling with the transition from a Jewish-centered to a Christ-centered people of God. It’s hard to overstate how important that transition was to what Paul is writing. And note the parallel between Galatians and Hebrews: in many ways Galatians is to Gentile Christians what Hebrews was to a mainly Jewish audience—the same emphasis on old covenant and new, the need to persevere, the danger of turning back, and the supremacy of Christ as the fulfillment of the now-obsolete Mosaic law.
Galatians as Eschatology
I’d also like us to think of Galatians as eschatology—which may sound odd, since we usually connect eschatology with the future (Revelation, the Olivet Discourse, the Thessalonian letters). But “eschatology” simply means the study of the last things, and in biblical terms the last things are broader than what’s still future: the New Testament teaches that the last days dawned with the death and resurrection of Jesus. No text is clearer than Hebrews 1:1–2: “In these last days [God] has spoken to us by his Son”—the Greek is eschatos, from which we get “eschatology.” Peter says the same at Pentecost, quoting Joel: “in the last days…I will pour out my Spirit on all people” (Acts 2:17). So to interpret Galatians rightly we must read it through this eschatological lens—seeing it as part of God’s unfolding plan of redemption worked out through Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, all pointing to fulfillment in Christ in the new covenant. The clearest instance in Galatians is 4:4–5, the “fullness of time” when Christ came, “born of woman, born under the law.” As Moisés Silva says, “we cannot do justice to Galatians if we exclude or even downplay the eschatological dimension.” So watch for temporal words—before, when, after, until, now—and for Paul’s contrast between the old way and the new.
Galatians is a book of contrasts—false gospel and true, the Mosaic covenant versus the Abrahamic and new covenants, law versus promise, works versus faith, flesh versus Spirit, slavery versus freedom, curse versus blessing. Keep those in mind as you read. And I’m more convinced than ever that Galatians is one continuous argument from start to finish; many treat chapters 5–6 as a separate turn to “practical living,” but those same contrasts carry the one argument about the true gospel all the way to the end. One last caution: Galatians has been the subject of several false dichotomies—setting two things as mutually exclusive when they’re really both/and. In recent decades the “new perspective(s) on Paul” have cast the letter differently, and people line up as though it must be either the Reformation reading or the new-perspective insights. In reality, the Reformation perspective (which I fully embrace) and some genuine insights from the new perspective are compatible: paying attention to the Jew–Gentile dynamic doesn’t mean surrendering justification by faith. As Silva notes, scholars who focus on the Jew–Gentile issues often minimize or deny Galatians’ relevance for personal justification, falling “into dichotomies that are totally foreign to Pauline teaching”—yet a full appreciation of the letter’s redemptive-historical foundation “does not entail abandonment of the traditional Protestant understanding.” Let’s see both sides and benefit from both.
For context leading into chapter 3: at the end of chapter 2 Paul recounts rebuking Peter for hypocrisy—forcing Gentiles to live like Jews though he, a Jew, lived like a Gentile—and then turns to the theology behind it. Verses 15–16 are probably the core of the whole letter (we’re not justified by works of the law but through faith in Christ), followed by the famous 2:20 (“crucified with Christ…Christ lives in me”) and 2:21: “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” To cling to the old covenant now that Christ has come is to nullify grace—and to make Christ’s death pointless. The law cannot gain you righteousness; it can only expose your unrighteousness.
The Text: Galatians 3:1–22
Tonight we’ll read Galatians 3:1–22 and pick up next week with 3:23 through chapter 4. Paul writes: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?…Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” He points to Abraham, who “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness,” so that “those of faith…are the sons of Abraham,” and the gospel was preached beforehand to him: “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” He warns that “all who rely on works of the law are under a curse,” since “the righteous shall live by faith,” while “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us”—“cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”—“so that…we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.” He argues from a human covenant that the law, coming 430 years later, cannot annul the promise God made to Abraham and his “seed” (singular—“who is Christ”); the law was “added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come,” and, far from opposing the promises, it “imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise…might be given to those who believe.”
The title of the message is “Living in the New Way of Faith,” and the big idea is that we must begin, continue, and end the Christian life the same way—through faith in the promise of God’s blessing in Christ by the Spirit—and that a right grasp of the biblical covenants is crucial to guarding us from the false teaching that would draw us off that path. So the message has two parts: verses 1–14, Paul’s appeal to continue in the way of faith and not turn back; and verses 15–22, the call to understand God’s covenants—the latter being the way to the former. What’s “new” about this way of faith? Faith itself isn’t new—Abraham and all the saved of the Old Testament were justified by faith. Rather, this new way of faith is the culmination of the previous covenants in Christ, in the fullness of time, where faith moves back to the forefront as the fundamental way of relating to God and inaugurates the age of fulfillment.
You Must Not Turn Back to the Old Way (vv. 1–14)
The word “faith” occurs ten times in this short section—plainly the heart of what Paul is after. At one level this is the perseverance of the saints (the fifth point of Calvinism), a major theme of Hebrews too—but there’s more: there are many ways we can fail to continue and try to move “beyond” the gospel. In Galatia, the Judaizers were adding elements of the Mosaic law to the gospel—insisting Gentile Christians be circumcised and keep the law—because they didn’t grasp that the law was temporary; they thought being a Jew was still required to belong to God’s holy people. Paul gives five reasons we must continue in the new way of faith and not turn back.
First, the old way and the new way are incompatible (vv. 1–3, 5). Paul treats them as two separate roads: “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?” The Judaizers claimed you could have both—Christ and elements of the Mosaic law—but Paul says they’re diametrically opposed. That phrase “works of the law” is important (it appears eight times in the New Testament, several here): it refers to the requirements of the Torah given through Moses, the very thing Peter was “compelling the Gentiles” to adopt. Why did Paul oppose the works of the law? Some say because they had been distorted into a way of meriting God’s favor (the Reformation answer); others say because they were now outdated as a way of relating to God since Christ had come. I’d argue both: the works of the law were no longer valid both because Christ had come and the law’s purpose was fulfilled, and because relating to God by law often led sinful hearts to distort it into a way of earning favor. This is one of those false dichotomies—we mustn’t choose. As Douglas Moo says, the phrase’s focus “obviously is on obedience to the Jewish law,” but it “ultimately includes a broader reference to doing…works of other kinds.” Paul’s message has both redemptive-historical overtones and faith-alone undertones, and we need both.
Second, turning aside means falling away from the gospel (v. 4): “Did you suffer so many things in vain?” The stakes are high—believing “in vain” means a dead faith, not a saving one. Paul returns to this fear in 4:11 (“I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain”) and 4:19–20 (perplexed, wondering whether he really saw God’s work in them). He opened the letter pronouncing a curse on any who preach a false gospel—and those who believe a false gospel are cursed as well. Good starts are not enough; there’s a deadly easy-believism, a decisionism, that treats how you start as all that matters—I know well-meaning people whose whole hope rests on a date written in the front of their Bible. Paul says the opposite: “you are being saved…if you hold fast…unless you believed in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:2). I can’t help thinking of the tragedy of a well-known pastor like Josh Harris renouncing the faith—a vivid illustration of believing in vain. I wonder what Paul would say to him: “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the spirit of this age—of tolerance and acceptance without the truth?” May God keep us from that path.
Third, God’s promised blessing begins and ends with faith (vv. 6–9). Paul turns to Abraham. The Judaizers built their message on God’s covenants with Abraham and Moses—but they missed the forest of faith for the trees of circumcision and law. Abraham was justified by believing God, and if we want to be children of Abraham, that comes through faith—not circumcision (given after the promise) or the law (given 430 years later). And the gospel was actually preached to Abraham beforehand: “In you shall all the nations be blessed” (v. 8). The good news that Gentiles would be justified by faith was there in seed form all along; the Judaizers, with blinders on, had missed it—faith alone is enough to receive the blessings of Abraham, equally for Jew and Gentile.
Fourth, the law brings a curse (vv. 10–12). To go back to the law is to return to God’s curse and reject the only escape from it—“Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law” (Deuteronomy 27:26)—because no one keeps the law completely, and “the righteous shall live by faith.” Fifth, Christ took the curse to secure the promised blessing of the Spirit (vv. 13–14). “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” (Deuteronomy 21:23). The flow is a chain of questions: Why did Jesus take the curse? To redeem us from the curse of the law. Why? To bring the blessing of Abraham to the Gentiles. And what is the blessing? “The promise of the Spirit”—not merely a promise that comes from the Spirit, but the promise that is the Spirit. Where was the Spirit promised to Abraham? You won’t find him named in the Abraham narratives—but “promise” is a major theme in these chapters, and everywhere else it refers to the promises made to Abraham, so I take 3:14 the same way. Paul, reading Genesis through the finished work of Christ, saw the justification of the Gentiles baked into “in you shall all nations be blessed”—and I think he means us to see the promised Holy Spirit there too, unfolded through the prophets (Joel 2:28–29; Isaiah 44:3, tying Spirit and blessing together) and poured out at Pentecost. As Ronald Fung says, in Paul’s thinking “the blessing of justification is almost synonymous with the reception of the Spirit.”
Don’t Move Beyond the Gospel
Let me pause on application, because there are many ways we drift from the gospel, some more dangerous than others but all serious. From my own upbringing: I grew up in a solid, independent, fundamentalist Baptist church in Findlay, Ohio, and—as best I recall—the gospel was presented mainly as how to get in, a message for the lost. Once you were saved by grace through faith, the focus shifted to what you should do: how to live, please God, avoid sin, put up guards for holiness—all good things the Bible teaches, but those imperatives were disconnected from the indicatives of the gospel. The gospel was important, but chiefly as a message to tell others, not to live on ourselves. I remember a fellow student in a preaching class lamenting that he’d heard someone “preach the gospel to Christians—what a shame; that’s not what they need.” That captures a wide swath of evangelicalism—treating the gospel as the message of how to get saved and then moving on to the “bigger” things of the Christian life, as if they didn’t flow from the gospel. Thanks to the ministries of people like John Piper and R. C. Sproul, and movements like Together for the Gospel and the Gospel Coalition, there’s been a healthy recovery of the gospel as the core of the Christian experience, something we never move beyond. Let the gospel be the heart of your relationship with God—how you see each day, parent your children, and preach to your own heart.
Another story: a seminary friend served as a military chaplain in Iraq. Far from family, surrounded by death and injury, the one friend who could encourage him there was a Roman Catholic chaplain—and he emailed to say he intended to come home and become a Roman Catholic priest. I was dumbfounded, but in God’s providence I had the chance to speak boldly into his life and challenge him to see the truth clouded by emotion and circumstance. Praise God, he came back embracing the true gospel and is still a chaplain preaching it today. So I ask you: have you moved beyond the gospel, or is it truly the center of your Christian experience? Do you need to recommit yourself to meditate on this rich gospel and view all of life through it? And if you know someone at risk of turning away, take these words from Galatians to heart—this is serious; abandoning the one true gospel for a false one is deadly—and perhaps God would have you speak up in gospel boldness: “Dear friend, are you so foolish? Have you believed in vain?”
Understand the Covenants (vv. 15–22)
In the second half, Paul wants us to understand the covenants—what God has been doing across history in saving his people, all leading to Christ. As Tom Schreiner says, if we don’t understand the covenants we can’t understand the Bible, because we won’t see how the story fits together. A few high points. First, the Mosaic covenant did not invalidate the Abrahamic. The Abrahamic came first; the Mosaic law came 430 years later and couldn’t annul God’s prior promises, because an established covenant can’t simply be set aside—and because the promises were made not only to Abraham but to his “seed,” Christ. (It’s worth noting the layers of Abraham’s “seed.” As Gentry and Wellum put it, it’s biological—all born through him, including Ishmael and Esau; biological-special—Isaac and Israel; typological—Christ; and, as we’ll see next week, spiritual—all believers.) Paul also stresses the order of events: circumcision and the law came after the promise, and the promised inheritance can’t depend on the law without losing the gracious character of the promise—you can’t have both; promise preserves grace.
Second, the Mosaic law was additive, temporary, and preparatory—added to the promises (not replacing them), until the fullness of time when Christ came, pointing forward to him. Third, the Abrahamic covenant was superior to the Mosaic law. Here is the trickier material (the part John Piper skipped): Paul says the law was “put in place through angels by an intermediary” (compare Acts 7 and Hebrews 2 on the law given through angels)—this was the rabbit trail I chased for hours, and I’m glad to say more afterward. Fourth, the law didn’t take over as the way to inherit the promises. When Paul asks whether the law is “opposed to the promises,” his answer is no—the law was never meant to invalidate the promise or replace faith as the way to the inheritance, because it was never given to impart righteousness and life, but to lead us to the fulfillment of the promises by faith. Jews and Gentiles alike now come to God and receive the promised blessing through faith in Abraham’s ultimate seed, Christ, in whom they too become Abraham’s seed.
Let me conclude. In the fullness of time, in these last days—this new age of faith in the Spirit—God calls all believers, all children of Abraham, to begin, continue, and finish on the path of faith, and not to turn aside to the old and obsolete ways or to any way that exalts human doing above faith in God’s gracious promises. Paul’s dire warning about distorting the gospel stands, and one remedy he presses on us is this: God gives us his covenants, his unfolding plan, to help us understand what he’s doing so we’re not led astray—the better we grasp his redemptive plan, the better we resist false gospels. So what is your fundamental posture toward God—one of faith, trusting his promises and living in the new way of the Spirit? Or one of doing, following rules, living in the old way of the flesh? A right understanding of God’s covenants also fuels missions: if God promised Abraham that all nations would be blessed in him, and is now fulfilling that through the church by creating a people from every language, tribe, and nation, that shapes how we pray and evangelize. Israel was called to be a light to the Gentiles and failed; Jesus did not fail, and he is fulfilling through his church all that Israel failed to do—even using the salvation of the Gentiles to graft the Jews back into his people.
Let’s pray. Father, there are deep and mysterious things here—we’re probing the depths of your eternal plan, worked out in history through your people, fulfilled in Christ, and extended to us by faith and in union with him. It is all going exactly according to your plan, accomplished in ways no one could have foreseen—even the heavenly hosts look on in amazement at what you’re doing in the church and stand in awe at your manifold wisdom. We join them tonight. Illumine our minds and move our hearts to embrace and live in this new way of faith, and to live out your purposes as you build your church from every tribe and language and people and nation. In Jesus’ name, amen.