Galatians 3

--- Today, we'll be studying Galatians Chapter 3 in our Women's Bible Study called Finding Grace. I want to begin with a phrase for us to consider as we get started, and that phrase is echo chamber. Now, in the physical realm, an echo chamber is an enclosed space where sound reverberates back and forth. It hits the walls, and so it just bounces back and forth as in an echo. In social life, and maybe in particular in social media life, we sometimes experience the same thing. News and information crosses our path, and it seems like it reverberates back and forth. We're hearing the same thing over and over. That's not necessarily bad or dangerous until it's bad or dangerous, and the Apostle Paul was smart, and I think that he knew that the Galatians were at the point where this was bad and dangerous. Once a certain set of information gets shared and snowballs over and over like an echo, people get worn down. They get worn down about the things that they have known, and their critical thinking can get left behind sometimes. So as Paul started this letter, in the first two chapters, he laid out his own personal history and experience. And now in this section, chapters three and four, that we called Understanding Grace, he is asking them to consider their history and their experience. The Jews among them should have known this, and the Gentiles among them were undoubtedly taught these things by Paul. So all of them should have an understanding of the truth of the gospel from his preaching. So what he's going to do in this chapter is lay out eight questions for the purpose of causing them to think outside of the echo chamber. So let's get started. Galatians chapter three, verse one, it goes like this.

All right, six question marks in as many verses, and most of them are rhetorical questions. He wasn't really wanting them to respond. It's like when I used to ask my kids, what were you thinking? I didn't really want an essay of one, two, three. I wanted them to think. The point of his questions were to get them to think. And so I think the most important question that he was asking is, how did this happen? He started off saying, who has bewitched you? And that who, that personal pronoun, is a singular in the Greek. And so he wants them to think about who is at the base of all of this. Our ancient foe, Satan, is the one who wants you to leave your thinking aside and to embrace this. Now, before we go any further, I want to bring some application to us, okay? Because this book doesn't just relate to ancient peoples who were struggling with, should I be circumcised now or not? So I want to work with this question, who has bewitched you? We naturally think that Satan brings difficulties into our life and God brings blessings. Satan brings difficulties to tear us down. God brings blessings and prosperity to lift us up. That's what comes naturally to us. Anything bad that happens to us, we might be tempted to say, wow, Satan is really trying to bring me down. But that doesn't necessarily make biblical sense. I want to remind us what James said in the opening of his letter, James 1 verse 2.

And he goes on to talk about being complete and lacking nothing. Okay, so if I wanted to emotionally separate God's kids from his goodness, knowing that verse, I would not necessarily bring a trial. I would not necessarily bring a hardship because hardships cause us to reach out to God. This is what's happening right now in this pandemic. We reach out to God, his kids reach out to him during a hardship, and ultimately the effect of that is a steadfastness. It is an increase in our faith. Now, if I were wanting to emotionally come between God's kids and God himself, what I would do is I would bewitch them with the contrary gospel that kept Jesus and then added requirements, added something that seemed to be God's requirements for acceptance, but it would shift the focus from a love relationship to a legal relationship. And it would keep those kids checking the list and looking for the moving target, or it would make them prideful thinking what they had accomplished and they would take credit for it. So next time we have a hardship, let's remember this. Let's remember that is an opportunity to grow in our faith and become steadfast. The next time that we hear that someone tells us something we need to do to be acceptable to God, let's say, aha, that's the enemy. That is the enemy there. All right. The Galatians, like most of us, they were already Christians. Verse five tells us they received a spirit by the hearing of faith, period, done. They had even seen miracles. And then along come the false Christians that say, oh, if you want to be sons of Abraham, then because the promise was given to Abraham through the covenant, the sign of the covenant was the circumcision, so you should do that. And by the way, you should brush up on the laws of Moses as well. What is wrong with that reasoning? Paul's about to remind them that Abraham's relationship with God was never about the circumcision. It was always about faith. So let's catch the last half of verse six again, where it says,

know then that it is those of faith who are sons of Abraham. Anyone with faith becomes a spiritual descendant of Abraham. Verse eight,

So then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. And they should have been able to reason this through, except what had happened to them, the echo chamber. And whenever enough people begin saying the same thing over and over again, we can become blinded to the truth. We can become bewitched. Paul wants to get them unbewitched. And so for the rest of this chapter, I want to break this into three parts. These are the sections that we're going to go through first. He wants them to understand God's unfolding plan through their own history. Then he's going to give them an analogy of something from normal life, a will. And then finally, he's going to review the purpose of the law, all for the purpose of helping them to understand grace. So let's start with the first section, which is helping them to know God's unfolding plan through their own history. And now as we start looking at this, I want you to take note of two contrasting words. That's really a good strategy in studying the Bible. Whenever you see a passage and you see words that contrast like darkness and light or truth and lies or something, we can learn more by looking for those contrasts. In this case, I want us to pay attention to cursed and blessed. Let's look at verse 10.

That's from Deuteronomy 27, 26. So their own history told them that anyone who didn't abide by all the things in the law would be cursed. The logical conclusion, since we all have sin, we're all cursed. We are guilty, okay? Verse 11.

That's from Habakkuk 2, 4. Our hope lies. in faith, not in doing. Verse 12,

The function of the law was never to justify, it was to point out guilt. And then verse 13,

So that in Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles so that we might receive the promised spirit through faith. All right, here's the point, that what was true of him, his innocence became true of us. We became innocent, not guilty, justified. And what was true of us, our guilt, we are cursed, was then shifted to him. He took the curse. And so this is what Paul is trying from their own history to get them to say, this is your understanding of this. The second thing that he talks about is an analogy from something in normal life, and this really helps a lot when we can draw an analogy. Paul throws back the conversation 2000 years to reason through with them when the promise was given to Abraham and when the law was given through Moses years later. Now, I'm going to translate the word covenant to use the word will. That's what the revised standard version uses. And I like to, I want to do it this time because I think we can all relate to a will and an inheritance and that sort of thing. So let's think along those lines. Look at verse 15.

Now, the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one and to your offspring, who is Christ. And of course, all who will ultimately be in Christ, be united to Christ, which is his bride. This is what I mean. The law which came 430 years afterward does not annul or change the covenant, which we'll call a will previously ratified by God. So as to make the promise void. It's crazy to think that you set a will in place and then hundreds of years later, you change it up, add new requirements suddenly that somebody has to meet in order to receive that inheritance. In verse 18,

The promise is still good today. God keeps his promises. God doesn't change the rules. And so we come to the third part of this particular chapter. And I just want to encourage you to hang with this because it's in, it's a temptation when we get to some of these things to just go, I don't know. I just like, I just love Jesus. I just believe in Jesus. I think this is kind of like too much. We don't need to do it. No, we need to do it. We need to go through this and sharpen our understanding so that we are not bewitched. So here comes the last two questions. Verse 19, just the first four words.

Excellent question. What do we know about the law? We know that God gave the law and we know that it was given for a purpose. Okay. If we could walk back a little bit in history to things that we have studied together, um, there at the base of Mount Sinai, when God gave the law, this was at the end of Exodus, second half of Exodus and the beginning of our wilderness way, Bible study. Once God brought the descendants of Abraham out of Egypt, he desired to dwell with them. That had never happened before. He'd never dwelt with his people before. And so look with me at two passages in Exodus in chapter 25 and 29. Let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst. I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the Lord who brought them out of the land of Egypt, that I might dwell among them. How could God dwell among his people unless he found a way to express who he was, express his holiness, express his character. The law demonstrated to them the character of God. The knowledge of the law wasn't just for information. It was for relation because God ultimately desired a relationship with them. So why was the law then given so many years after the promise? Why weren't they given together? Look at verse 19.

Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one. And so last question of the chapter comes in verse 21,

The giving, giving life was never the purpose of the law. The original purpose of the law was to set up a system so that God could dwell with his people. The ongoing purpose of the law was to instruct man in the character of God and how short he himself fell from the character of God. And to train them to be yearning for the Messiah, the offspring, who would fulfill the law perfectly, who would uphold God's holy character. So verse 22 then says, tells us,

Now, before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. So we see the positive role of the law here. And in order for us to, I guess, get a maybe a more rich understanding of that, I want to come up with an analogy of my own. And since I have an adorable two-year-old grandson, I am going to use that. We were web chatting here about a week or two ago, and he was telling me all kinds of stories. And all of a sudden I hear his daddy's voice say, Benjamin, tell grandma what happens when you throw rocks up in the sky. And so then he began to demonstrate for me this whole series of what happened. And I could see the idea in his eye. And then he pantomimed throwing things up in the air. And then he demonstrated the discipline that his daddy brought for that. And then he demonstrated the crying that happened after that. And then I hear his daddy's voice say, so Benjamin, are we going to throw rocks in the sky anymore? And he says, no, rocks, sky. And it was adorable. You know, it melts a grandma's heart. But listen, it really plays into this is the law as a guardian. When he was born two and a half years ago, there was no thought that first week about laying down a law about rocks in the sky. The law was added later because of transgression. It was needful. It needed to be a guardian to say, this isn't going to be good for you. This isn't going to be good for people around you. Look at, daddy doesn't do this. Do like daddy. Don't throw rocks up in the sky. It helps us understand that the law is good as it is a guide. And think about Israel. They were heading into a situation where they were going to be mixing it up with all kinds of people who did pagan, who did bad things, that maybe Israel had never thought themselves about doing. And God was instructing them how life was going to be better if they would follow this guardian that was put in place, that was brought to them way after the promise, but when it was needed and only until such time as the Messiah would come. All right, the last set of verses starting at 25.

All right, that's a great chapter. Paul asked great questions there to try to bring them out of their echo chamber and cause them to think about their own history and experience. Now, probably none of this is super new information for anyone watching this, but we still want to ask, what does it mean to me? How does this chapter instruct me in understanding grace? So I want to give a definition of grace again. I'm not sure I've given you this exact one before, but listen to these words. Grace is God's kindness and love shown to us even though we don't deserve it. God's kindness and love shown to us. Those are relational words, okay? Demands and rules are legal words, but God wanted to show his kindness and love to us even though we didn't deserve that from him. God deals with us on the basis of kindness and love. We need to hear that. We need to remind ourselves of that. And since that's the case, I want to wrap up this lesson with three aspects that I want us to keep in mind. They are protect, praise, and promote. Protect our understanding of grace, praise God for his grace, and then promote God's grace. Let's quickly just see what that means. Protect our understanding of grace. We too have an ancient foe that desires to bewitch us. Our ancient foe desires for us to see God as a judge in a legal way. Now, it is true that God is the judge of all the earth, but yet this judge has determined to deal with us on the basis of kindness and love as a father would. That has been his choice. He wants a relationship based on love. Have we done anything to deserve that from him? No, but that is still his choice to deal with us in that way. Second thing, to praise God for his grace. And this really hit me as I was preparing for this. Since God has chosen to deal with us as a father, I need to come to him with gratefulness on a regular basis and thank him for that. Praise him for this grace that he has bestowed. So wherever you're at listening to this, I want to encourage you to add some elements of praising God into your prayers in the coming days, weeks for his grace. It is an amazing thing that he would choose to deal with us based on kindness and love. And then the last thing that I want to bring to our attention is for us to promote God's grace, promote an understanding of God's grace. We can do this in our homes, with our children, with our grandchildren, with our friends, with our co-workers. Our words will either promote an understanding of God's grace or they can promote an understanding of law. Let me give you an example. As a mother, if you say to one of your children, Jesus doesn't like it when you hit your brother, which one is that promoting? That is promoting an understanding of law. That is bringing into mind the fact that Jesus likes me if I'm good and maybe he doesn't like me if I hit my brother, if I'm not being good. Again, this lesson reminded me of something that God was gracious to show my husband and I way back in the day when our kids were little. And I just praise him that he gave us the understanding so early. We said to our kids over and over and over again, we told them, God loves you when you are good and God still loves you when you are naughty. He didn't start loving you when you started being good and he will not stop loving you if you start being naughty. Now, we might have a happier day if you are good and not naughty, but that's beside the point. God loves you because he chose to love you. I don't think kids can hear that enough. I don't think you can overdo that message. God loves you regardless of what you do. Maybe we need to preach that to ourselves. Maybe we need to turn the mirror around and just say that to ourselves. Look in the mirror saying, God didn't, you know, stop. God doesn't stop loving me when I go my own way. Well, I want to tie up this whole chapter in a bow with Hebrews 13 verse 9, which I think just summarizes everything that we have studied.

And Father, we thank you for this chapter. Help us, Lord, to just digest this. Help us to live in that understanding that you want to deal with us as a father and not a judge, that you have chosen to deal with us out of kindness and out of love, and that there are so many beautiful aspects to that that will enrich our understanding, that will strengthen our hearts by grace. And Lord, I pray that you would protect us from our ancient foe that will come and tell us that you are harsh, you are the judge, and that we would take these scriptures in and understand what you have done for us to allow us to be near you, to allow us to flourish in your kingdom. Lord, we thank you for it. And we just pray that going forward, you would show us what we need to see in the remainder of the study. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. you ---