I’m going to try to cover three events today in the ministry of Jesus which spans two chapters in Mark. That’s maybe an optimistic goal for me to accomplish in the time I have. But I think all three of these events have a common theme as I hope to show you. And what they have in common is Jesus’ dismissal of ritualistic, ceremonial laws which purport to have their basis in scripture, that purport to be the proper exercise of religion, but in fact are man’s additions to the law of God.

The first event is found starting in chapter 2 vs 18; “John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and they came and said to Him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?’

It’s not clear from Mark’s gospel who is asking the question here. Matthew’s gospel though indicates that it is the disciples of John who come to ask Him. Whoever asked it is not really the point though, rather the question is why are they fasting? The law of God only prescribed one fast per year, and that is found in Leviticus 16, which is a fast on the Day of Atonement. So the law didn’t require fasting other than that day. But over time, fasting began to be practiced on other occasions and for other purposes. By the time of Jesus’ ministry, the Pharisees boasted of the fact that they fasted twice a week.

In regards to the disciples of John fasting, we are not really sure why they are doing so. It may be that they had adopted the fasting practices of the Pharisees, or they might have been fasting in conjunction with their prayers about John the Baptist, who was imprisoned. But the bottom line is that we are not told why. One thing we do know, the Pharisees fasted to be seen of men. They put dust on their faces and clothes to draw attention to the fact that they were fasting, because they wanted to be seen as holy and righteous people.

It just so happens that we are in the middle of the season of Lent. And it is customary for some churches to practice that. One of the things they traditionally do is mark their forehead with ashes in the sign of a cross so that people will know that they are fasting. Of course the Bible speaks nothing about Lent or 40 days of fasting. They somehow associate Lent with the period of testing that Jesus went through in the wilderness where He fasted for 40 days. But the scripture never tells us that we are to do that.

However, what Jesus does teach about fasting in the Sermon on the Mount is in direct opposition to the way most churches are practicing it. Jesus said in Matt. 6:16-18 “Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites [do,] for they neglect their appearance so that they will be noticed by men when they are fasting. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face so that your fasting will not be noticed by men, but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees [what is done] in secret will reward you.”

So I am not opposed to fasting if it is done as Jesus spoke of it. But I am not interested in practicing Lent which I think has as it’s only basis the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. And I for one do not want to follow their lead in regards to fasting or practically any of their religious traditions.

But notice Jesus’ answer to their question. Vs 19 And Jesus said to them, “While the bridegroom is with them, the attendants of the bridegroom cannot fast, can they? So long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day.”

Jesus compares His presence with His followers as being like a wedding feast. Again and again the scriptures compare the relationship between Jehovah and His people, or Christ and His church with that of the relationship between a bridegroom and bride. The idea that the friends of the bridegroom would be fasting while the the wedding feast was in progress is simply incongruous. In the same way, would it not be ill-fitting if the disciples of the Lord were to be mourning while He is with them, performing miracles of deliverance and granting salvation? This is a time for joy, for celebration, not for mourning.

But, Jesus says, the time will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. When Jesus died on the cross, when He was taken away from them, then in those days fasting would be appropriate. But as Jesus said in John 16:16, that would be but a little while.

The comfort that we can find in this saying is that for those who are saved, there is not a sense of sadness, of sorrow that we are to embrace, but a sense of joy. There should be no greater joy than knowing that your sins have been forgiven, that you have been betrothed to Christ, and that you are going to inherit the kingdom of heaven. And furthermore, the greatest joy should be in knowing that the Spirit of Christ is in you, dwelling with you, and He will never leave you. So joy and not sorrow should be the hallmark of our faith.

Now to further illustrate His point, Jesus uses two metaphors. In the first, He says in vs 21 “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; otherwise the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear results.” Pretty clear picture, but what does it mean? Well, the second metaphor means the same thing. Vs 22 “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and the skins [as well;] but [one puts] new wine into fresh wineskins.”

The meaning is this; that the new life of salvation which Jesus was bringing was out of line with joyless fasts. Old wineskins cannot contain the new still fermenting wine without bursting. It must be put into a new wineskin. The old covenant of rigid ceremonial laws and rituals cannot contain the new wine of salvation. This new wine must be in new wineskins, or not trying to patch over the old with a new piece of cloth, but a whole new cloth. So all things have become new, as we are told in Heb 10:19-20 “Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh; let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith.”

Now let’s look at the second event, in which Christ deals with another ritual, another law that had been added by the Pharisees. Vs 23 “And it happened that He was passing through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples began to make their way along while picking the heads [of grain.] The Pharisees were saying to Him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?’”

Mark’s not necessarily following the historical events as they happened in chronological order here, but he is showing a connection in subject matter. And as I said, this is another case of the Pharisees adding to the law, and observing and practicing something that seemed religious, but was in fact in opposition to the truth. Commentators tell us that the Pharisees had taken the law of the Sabbath and broken it down into 39 principle works, and then subdivided them into six minor categories under each of the 39. All of that to determine what could and couldn’t be done on the Sabbath. And they had extrapolated it out to ridiculous extremes.

And what they were saying about the disciples is that they were reaping, by pulling off a head of grain as they walked through the grain fields. And they were accusing Jesus of breaking the Sabbath because He was allowing or condoning what His disciples were doing. Of course the original law said nothing against plucking the grain with your hands. That was permissible. But the law did prohibit putting in a sickle to harvest grain on the Sabbath.

But Jesus wants to address the root of the question concerning the Sabbath, not just argue about some branch off the main trunk. So in vs25 He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry; how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar [the] high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for [anyone] to eat except the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?”

At first glance that seems that what Jesus said has nothing to do with the Sabbath, does it? But the application of the law is what Jesus is addressing. What Jesus is saying is that the law regarding the shewbread was able to be put aside in case of need. David and his men had nothing to eat. They were starving and suffering from the effects of a long, forced fast. But the shewbread was supposed to be eaten only by the priests. But Jesus indicates that the need of David and his men was more important than the restrictions upon the shewbread.

So in the same way, was not Christ, who is the antitype of King David, able to set aside a regulation due to the hunger of His disciples and which was actually a totally man made regulation misapplied to the Sabbath law?

And to that point of Jesus being the fulfillment of the promise that the Messiah would be the Son of David, He says in vs 27 “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” Not the Sabbath was made first but man was created first. The Sabbath was instituted to be a blessing for man, to keep him healthy both physically and spiritually. So the Sabbath wasn’t made to be a curse, but a blessing.

Of course, Jesus is the One who ordered the Sabbath. He was the Creator of all things, according to John 1, and without Him was not anything made that was made. The Creator of the Sabbath is without question the Lord of the Sabbath. The sovereign ruler of the world, is rule of the day that He designated as a time of rest.

But in that response, we are reminded of Hebrews 4:9-10 which says, “So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.” The Lord of the Sabbath came to give us a rest that is greater than the rest that was portrayed in the Sabbath. He came to give us a rest from our works, a salvation that is by grace through faith and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast. That is the rest from our labors, the rest from the condemnation of the law, that Hebrews is speaking of. And I believe Jesus is speaking of that same Sabbath rest that comes through Him. Thus He is Lord of the Sabbath. He is the Son of David, the Messiah, who ushers in a new way into the holy place.

One more event which is related to the law is found in chapter 3. Once again, it has to do with the Sabbath. Ch. 3:1-2 “He entered again into a synagogue; and a man was there whose hand was withered. They were watching Him [to see] if He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him.” The reference to “they” which Mark speaks of is the Pharisees. They are always hanging around, looking for something that they could criticize Jesus for, something to condemn Him for.

And it’s the Sabbath day, and Jesus and His disciples follow the practice of the Jews and worship God in a local synagogue. The practice was that when a visiting Rabbi was in attendance, He was given the opportunity to teach. We can assume that Jesus was teaching, and the Pharisees were watching and listening to see what they could find to accuse Him over.

And Mark says there was a man there with a withered hand. That might be an indication that something had happened to the man’s hand, maybe mangled in some accident. I think the cynical side of me can’t help but suspect that the Pharisees had brought the man themselves to see if they could get Jesus to break their Sabbath restrictions. But that’s supposition on my part.

In Matthew’s account, he says that the Pharisees asked Jesus, “is it right to heal on the Sabbath?” They had actually taken the Sabbath laws so far as to say that you could not even heal a person on the Sabbath unless they were in immediate danger of losing their life. I remember reading some time ago about the Orthodox Jews in Israel debating whether or not it was lawful to call 911 if someone’s house was burning. I think I remember the story correctly. I’m not sure what they decided. But how ludicrous is that kind of reasoning? And Mark indicates that it got Jesus angry as well.

So in vs 3 He said to the man with the withered hand, “Get up and come forward!” And He said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?” But they kept silent. After looking around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored.

When Jesus asks them is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill, He is saying that because He knows their hearts. Their heart is not compassionate towards this man. And they are actually planning harm against Christ, even to the point of killing Him, as we will see in the next verse.

I don’t like to always jump back and forth between Matthew or Luke’s accounts in order to fill in the blanks, but I really like something that Jesus said in Matthew’s account that Mark did not mention. Matt 12:11-12 And He said to them, “What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”

Jesus is saying that the Pharisee whose sheep had fallen into a pit would be more concerned about his profit in the sheep than a restriction of the Sabbath. Sheep were their income, and so they were going to make sure that nothing interfered in that. But Jesus says that a man is much more valuable than a sheep. He uses the word valuable because that is the metric of their concern. A sheep is valuable to them, it’s the source of their income. But a man who is disabled, he means nothing to them.

Jesus could have told the man to come back tomorrow and skirted the whole issue. But He knows that they will not be satisfied until they find something to accuse Him of. Furthermore, He is not going to acquiesce to their false doctrine. And so it says that He looks at them with anger, grieved at the hardness of their heart. I think their hypocrisy is what angers him. That they care for a sheep because they see it as valuable. But they don’t value a human life. And He is grieved because their heart is hardened. As I have said before, I think they already had enough evidence to know that Jesus was the Messiah. But they would not have this man rule over them, not even if He was the Son of God. They wanted a Messiah of their own making, and Jesus was not what they wanted.

Well, the cure was instantaneous and complete. The man’s hand was as good as new. I’m sure the man was overcome with joy that he had been healed. But the effect it had on the Pharisees was not one of joy, but only served to make them hate Him even more. Vs 6 “The Pharisees went out and immediately [began] conspiring with the Herodians against Him, [as to] how they might destroy Him.”

The fact that a handicapped man was cured of his infirmity did not affect them at all. They cared not for this man, and cared even less for the Healer. Jesus had not only healed the man in opposition to their law, but He had also discredited them in public. He had exposed their hypocrisy and their hatred.

And so Mark says they immediately went out and started scheming how they might destroy Him, and in that scheming they chose to partner with the Herodians who were known for their worldliness and sacrilege. What an odd coalition. It reminds me of the adage, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Herodians were lovers of the political status quo, of the political party of Herod, and they saw a threat in Jesus and His followers and His talk of the kingdom of God. They wanted to perpetuate the kingdom of the Herods. And the Pharisees were the party of the religious status quo, and they saw a threat in Jesus as overthrowing their authority and privilege and religious power. And so they conspire together as to how they might catch Jesus in something that they can use to put Him to death.

Isn’t that ironic? Jesus came to usher in a new way to be reconciled to God, to be forgiven of your sins, to be set free from the captivity of sin, given a new life, a life of joy and freedom. And the Pharisees and Herodians wanted to keep the people under a system of bondage and despair, a system that could never give them rest, but only condemnation.

Thanks be to God that though it seemed in the short run that the enemies of Christ won when they crucified Jesus and put Him to open shame, yet on the third day He arose from the dead, testifying that God was satisfied with His sacrifice, and because He lives, we can also live by faith in Him, and receive everlasting life, fullness of joy, and an inheritance in the kingdom of heaven. I trust that by faith in what He accomplished, you know the joy of your salvation, the freedom of new life in Christ, and have committed to follow Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath.

The Diagnosis of the Great Physician, Mark 2:1-12 Psalm 130

As most of you know, I’ve been sick for the last couple of weeks. It became pretty obvious to everyone who heard me and saw me, that I had some sort of a virus or something. Just to be careful, I took a Covid test which came back negative. But after about 8 days or so though I decided maybe I should see the doctor and see if there was something they could do for me to help me get better.

I think we tend to give too much credit sometimes to doctors. The problem is that they are limited in what they can see. They look in your mouth, maybe they can see a couple of inches down your throat, look up your nose, in your ears, but basically they have to try to figure out from the outside what’s going on inside. From their observance of you externally, they try to make a diagnosis of what’s going on inside, and then make a prescription to hopefully help you.

My Doctor determined after all the looking, and prodding, and taking deep breaths, she said I was sick and I would have to let it run it’s course. She did give me an anitbiotic, but said it might not help because it may be viral and not biological. What we all really want though is a doctor who can somehow look past the external, and look inside and make the correct diagnosis, find the root of the problem and address that, cure that.

We sometimes hear Jesus referred to as the Great Physician. While it was evident that He was able to heal from any kind of illness or disease, that was not really the purpose for why He came to earth. Back in the last chapter, we read that He had been healing the whole town until late at night. And early in the morning, the disciples look for Him and He’s no where to be found. That’s not logical from a ministry point of view. Everybody is coming to hear you, to see you, and you disappear. You want to keep it going, build on the momentum. Bigger is better, you know.

When they finally found Him and told Him that everyone was looking for Him, He said something very strange; ““Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for.” Jesus didn’t come to heal the world of disease, but to preach the gospel of salvation. That was His purpose. Healing, in fact, was sometimes an impediment to His mission. Mark goes on to say that the news about His healing spread so much that He could no longer go into a city, but He had to stay out in the wilderness.

Well, eventually He comes back home to Capernaum. He has a house there, which we don’t know if He owned it or borrowed it, or rented it. But for a time He lived there and He had come back home from perhaps many days of preaching in the wilderness. Vs 1,” When He had come back to Capernaum several days afterward, it was heard that He was at home. And many were gathered together, so that there was no longer room, not even near the door; and He was speaking the word to them.”

Once people heard that Jesus was home, they started flocking to His house. The crowd might have been as many as a couple of hundred people or more either in the house, or trying to get in, standing in front of windows, and doors. It’s interesting to think that there were not only HIs disciples in the crowd, but some that were His critics. Luke tells us that the scribes and Pharisees made up some of the crowd. So the religious men of the city came in to try to find fault with what He was doing and saying.

But Jesus is preaching the word to them. That’s what He came to do, and He is doing it right in His own house to whoever came to Him, for whatever reason they had come. His priority is to preach the word, the gospel of salvation. It’s important that we as a church keep our priorities right. We don’t let our ministry receive it’s priorities from the world. I’m often asked if we could participate in this cause or that cause, or join this ministry or that. And sometimes it’s not that these causes don’t have merit, but that is not what we are called to do. We are called to preach the gospel of salvation. That’s our priority. And I don’t want to get sidetracked by other peoples political or social agendas that they try to use the church to advance. Jesus was doing what He came to do, preach the word, the gospel of the kingdom.

But while that is going on, there is a small group of men who are determined, or you might even say, desperate, to get their friend to Jesus. But the crowd is so thick outside the house they can’t even get close. Vs3 “And they came, bringing to Him a paralytic, carried by four men. Being unable to get to Him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above Him; and when they had dug an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic was lying.”

I said these men were desperate. And it’s obvious that they were. They weren’t going to let anyone stop them from getting their friend to Jesus. There is no indication in the scripture of what had caused this man’s paralysis. But if I had to guess it was due to an accident. Most paralytics were resigned to being beggars on the street for the rest of their lives. They lived in the worst sort of squalor and poverty. This man still had friends willing to do this for him, which to me indicates that it was something that happened fairly recently, like an accident had caused it.

It really doesn’t matter how it happened. But to the Jews, such a calamity was an indication of God’s judgement against some great sin of that person. And maybe it’s possible that this man did have some sin that he thought was the reason that he had contracted this disease, or had this accident. Who knows, really? And we are not told.

But for him and for his friends, there is a desperation born out of the knowledge that there is no other hope for this man. He has a life sentence, really a death sentence upon him that can never be changed unless they can get Jesus to see him. This may be this man’s only chance to ever see Jesus, and they are going to do everything possible to get to Him. So unable to enter through a door, they climb onto the roof of the house, and right in the middle of Jesus’s sermon, they start tearing up the shingles to make a hole big enough to let down their friend.

It would be good to have friends like that, wouldn’t it? Friends willing to risk their lives for you, friends who want what’s best for you, even if it means that they have to do something crazy. Jesus told us that we are to love our neighbor as ourself. That’s what it means to be a friend of someone. I wonder how good of a friend are we to others? How much do we love our neighbor? How willing are we to do whatever is necessary to see their greatest need met? How desperate are we to take our friends to Jesus? Or do we really care as much as we would like people to think. Do you recognize that Jesus is the only hope for your friends? That they have the sentence of death upon themselves and they are without hope, unless you can get them to Jesus?

Well, they practically destroy Jesus’ house, and completely interrupt His message, but they get their friend lowered down in front of Jesus. They aren’t recorded as asking for anything. The paralytic isn’t recorded as saying anything either. I guess everyone figures this is self explanatory. It’s pretty obvious what the problem is, and Jesus is the healer. Nothing really needs to be said.

But Jesus is the Great Physician. And He is able to look past the outward appearance of things and see the root of the problem. And the greatest need this man has is he needs to be forgiven. He needs salvation. So it says in vs5 “And Jesus seeing their faith said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’”

It’s unclear from the text whether Jesus is seeing the faith of the friends, or the faith of the paralytic and his friends. I have to assume it is the faith of the paralytic and his friends. What was their faith? I suppose it has to be that Jesus is the Son of God, that He is able to save, to heal, to do miracles because He is the Son of God.

But it’s a mistake to think that faith is required for God to heal. When God raised Lazarus from the dead, Lazarus did not have faith that Jesus could give him life. Lazarus was dead. When Jesus healed many people, they weren’t always even in His presence. He was acting on someone else’s bequest. The demon possessed man didn’t have faith, and yet Jesus healed him.

But to be saved requires faith. Jesus saved this man. His biggest problem was that he was a sinner, with the condemnation of death upon him. All disease, all illness, death, is all ultimately the result of sin. Whether this man lived as a paralytic or not for a few more years was nothing in comparison to the eternal destiny of his soul. And Jesus looked into his soul and saw this man’s greatest need, and He forgave him of his sins. He gave him the greatest blessing, that of being made right with God. And that took away the curse of sin, so that he received eternal life.

This man’s faith was incomplete, perhaps. He had not enough information to believe everything that there was to know about Christ. But there is another component of salvation in addition to faith, and that is the sovereign grace of God. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, [it is] the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” I think the argument can be made that it is by the grace of God that you are given saving faith. All of salvation is of God. And Jesus sovereignly bestowed the grace of God upon this man, giving him faith, forgiving him of his sin, and giving him eternal life. This was the purpose given by the angels to Jesus being born into this world, who said in Matthew 1:21, “you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”

Well, this great miracle of salvation which Jesus does here doesn’t exactly bring the house down, no pun intended. I can almost see people in attendance scratching their heads, wondering how could Jesus have missed the obviously most important need right in front of Him? But among the crowd are His critics. And they seize upon what Jesus said in some sort of self righteous indignation.

Vs. 6 “But some of the scribes were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, ‘Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming; who can forgive sins but God alone?’” Well, they were actually correct in their theology. They are absolutely right. Only God can forgive sins. Because sin is against God, He is the one offended, and only He can expunge it, forgive it, do away with it.

What they are incorrect in is their reasoning. They reason that Jesus cannot be God. He doesn’t come with the right education, the right pedigree. He’s not part of their clique. He actually interferes with their agenda. And so since they have already discounted any possibility that Jesus is God, they assume then that what Jesus says is blasphemous. He is claiming to be able to forgive sins, which is the provenance of God only, and that, in their minds is impossible. In fact, to take it a step further, they won’t let Jesus be God.

Vs8 “Immediately Jesus, aware in His spirit that they were reasoning that way within themselves, said to them, “Why are you reasoning about these things in your hearts?” Notice something here. They had not said anything. He is able to know their thoughts without them saying anything. If they had been willing to consider it, this is yet another indication that He is God. God knows the secrets of the heart. The Lord said to Samuel in 1 Sam. 16:7, “God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”

But unfortunately, the scribes had their eyes blinded to that as well. Jesus continues in vs9 “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven’; or to say, ‘Get up, and pick up your pallet and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”–He said to the paralytic, I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home.”

Notice first of all the strange question Jesus asks of them. Having read their thoughts, that they were accusing Him of blasphemy because He claimed to do what only God could do, He asks, “”Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven’; or to say, ‘Get up, and pick up your pallet and walk’?

Well, to our minds, it’s easier to say “your sins are forgiven” because no one can see whether or not that is true. To say “get up and walk” is something that they could see the result of. And so that is harder.

But I think Jesus is saying that it’s actually harder to forgive sins than it is to heal a body. For in God’s justice system, sin is not merely winked away. In order for God to forgive us of our sin, He had to exact justice upon someone who would bear the penalty for our sin. The penalty for sin had to be paid, in order that the sin might be forgiven.

So which was easier for Jesus? To accomplish atonement for the sins of the world so that man might be forgiven, or to simply restore the man’s nervous and muscle system back to working order. I would suggest the task of redemption was tremendously more difficult. It literally broke the world when Jesus died on the cross. Heaven and earth ground to a stop, the lights went out, heaven went dark, hell broke open, graves were opened, the curse under which the whole world was bound was broken. The world was turned upside down. Oh yeah, redemption was much harder. But the Pharisees could hardly have known that. They couldn’t see the spiritual realm. They only could see the external, the temporal, the physical realm.

So because they were too blind to see, Jesus said, “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”–He said to the paralytic, I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home.”

This is all the evidence you need? Fine. I’ll give it to you. “So that you will know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” Do you think that convinced them? No, I doubt it. The scripture shows that every evidence Jesus gave as to who He was only served to harden their hearts, to make them hate Him more. They began soon after this to plan to put Him to death. That was their answer to His evidence.

So the paralytic got up and rolled up his pallet and walked out in the midst of everyone. And everyone was amazed. But some at least must have believed in who He was because Mark say that they were glorifying God. Unfortunately, I have to imagine most were glorifying God because the paralytic was able to walk, not because the paralytics’s sins were forgiven. I hate to sound cynical, but I think that was the way it was for the most part, and it is born out in scripture. Most people only seem to appreciate what God can do for them in the physical realm. They don’t care that much about the spiritual.

I’m reminded of a pastor’s conference I was invited to attend years ago that was held by a large denomination. They are a little more charismatic than what I prefer and so I no longer attend that conference anymore. But one time we were listening to a missionary give a report of taking the gospel to a part of Africa, I believe, that had not heard the gospel before. At every village, he said, they would preach the gospel and then the whole village would get saved and be baptized. And this happened at one village after another. They were just very receptive to the gospel. But at one village as they were baptizing the new converts, he said a woman began to wail and cry and they discovered that her baby had just died at that moment. She brought the baby to the missionary, and as she handed the baby to him while I believe he was still in the water, the child came back to life. And immediately the men in attendance at the conference jumped to their feet and gave a standing ovation for this baby being brought back to life.

I was really struck by that. A thousand pastors are there listening to accounts of one village after another coming to salvation in Jesus Christ, and there is hardly the grunt of an amen from the crowd. But when a baby is supposedly brought back to life, then there is a standing ovation. I think its human nature to be more concerned about the physical than the spiritual. I suppose that is why the Lord sometimes lets us experience sickness and death and heartache in the physical so that we might be brought to think about the spiritual.

Because the greatest problem of our lives is not our financial situation, it’s not our health, it’s not how soon we will die, or whether we have a loving wife or husband in this life. The greatest problem is the problem of sin. The disease of sin. There is a cure for sin. And you need that cure. All sickness and death and all the world’s problems are the result ultimately of the curse of sin. But Jesus became cursed for us, He paid the penalty, He paid the price, that we might be forgiven of our sins and receive new life. The Great Physician has examined you today and diagnosed your greatest problem. He has the prescription to save you. I hope that you are not blinded today to the reality that Jesus is the Son of God, who came to save the world from their sins. If you trust in Him as your Lord and Savior, He will forgive your sins, and cleanse you from all unrighteousness, that you might have new life in Him. That is your greatest need, and Jesus is the answer. Turn to Him and receive forgiveness of your sins, and new life through Him.

Mark writes in a rather concise style and he moves quickly through events without spending as much time detailing them as do the other gospel writers.  It’s almost disconcerting to notice how often he uses the word “immediately.”  But I guess it’s emblematic of his style to keep moving and give highlights, rather than a lot of biographical details.

I think the thread that ties this next passage together is found in another word used twice in this passage, but implied more often than that,  which is the word “authority.”  In  verse 22, “And they were astonished at His . . . authority”.  And then in verse 27 of chapter 1, you find the word “authority” given again.  And I suppose that it is an appropriate idea for Mark to propose considering that Jesus has been heralded by John the Baptist to be the Messiah, the Son of God, the Lord and King of the kingdom of God. The supreme King of the universe must have authority over His subjects and over everything in this world.

After Jesus was raised from the dead, just before He ascended into heaven, He said, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.”  And so it’s appropriate that He demonstrates His authority at the beginning of His ministry. So there are four events in this passage where He illustrates His authority.

The first one is His authority as a teacher.  Look at verse 21, “They *went into Capernaum; and immediately on the Sabbath He entered the synagogue and began to teach.”  In Jesus’s day there may have been  probably 450 synagogues in that region.  According to the law, they were allowed to establish a synagogue for every ten men who were followers of God.  And so, those ten men and their families were formed as a synagogue with a priest who would oversee or be the ruler of the synagogue, as he was called, a minister of the synagogue.  There were no sacrifices, a synagogue was designed to be a teaching tool in that society.  The children were taught there or catechized.  The adults were taught as they worshipped on the sabbath day.  And the pulpit was basically open to any rabbi who would be available to teach. That’s why, when we study the life of Christ and the apostles, we find them constantly teaching in the synagogue.  It was a great opportunity to present the gospel of the kingdom.  

We find Him in Capernaum, the hometown of Peter,  teaching in one of the synagogues.  Notice verse 22, “They were amazed at His teaching; for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”  Luke, chapter 4, elaborates on this story, and he tells us that Jesus  was preaching from Isaiah, chapter 61.  So He stood and He read Isaiah, chapter 61, verse 1.  And this is what it said,  ““THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS UPON ME, BECAUSE HE ANOINTED ME TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. HE HAS SENT ME TO PROCLAIM RELEASE TO THE CAPTIVES, AND RECOVERY OF SIGHT TO THE BLIND, TO SET FREE THOSE WHO ARE OPPRESSED, TO PROCLAIM THE FAVORABLE YEAR OF THE LORD.”

Then He closed the book and said ““Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

 “And they were amazed at His teaching ; for He was teaching them as one having authority and not as the scribes” Now, we need to answer the question, what made Him so authoritative?  Well whenever the scribes preached or a rabbi preached they always said, “It has been said,” and they would always quote other scribes or rabbis for their authority.  They would always go to some other tradition to give validity to their point.  Why was it that Jesus Christ spoke with authority?  Because when Jesus stood up and He preached, He didn’t quote a scribe, He quoted Himself.  John says that He was the Word made flesh.  He was the word of God and spoke the word of God, and that’s the source of His authority.  Jesus is the supreme authority.  He didn’t need to quote some other man for He is God/man.  And so they were astonished at His authority. 

You know, the word of God is authoritative.  That’s why people really don’t like the Bible, because they want to be the authority.  But that’s why I preach the word of God, verse by verse, chapter by chapter. My teaching is not due to some authority that I have as a theologian, or from a seminary professor.  But my authority is the word of God.  If you think about it, Jesus is the source of the word of God.  He was the author.  And yet He quotes the word again and again as He preaches.  He quoted the word in His temptation. He quotes from the word on the cross.  He quotes from the word constantly, and yet He is the author of the word.  When you speak the word of God you speak with the  authority of God.

The next exercise of this authority that Jesus exhibits is His authority against the demonic world.  Look at verse 23, “Just then there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit; and he cried out,  saying, “What business do we have with each other, Jesus of Nazareth? Have You come to destroy us? I know who You are–the Holy One of God!”  And Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet, and come out of him!”  Throwing him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him.  They were all amazed, so that they debated among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey Him.”

Demon possession, in that culture, was not an uncommon thing.  Perhaps it was due to living in close proximity to pagan peoples that in effect worshipped demons. And so, when Jesus Christ manifested His authority, one of the first arenas whereby He must exercise that is in the realm of the spirit world and authority over the demons.  Notice first of all that the demons recognize Jesus for who He is – the Son of God. How does a demon recognize Jesus and yet those people around Him do not?  I would suggest because being spirits themselves, they recognize HIs Spirit. If you have the Spirit of God in you, then the demons recognize the Spirit of God in you and they know that they cannot possess you, because you are already possessed by a much mightier Spirit who has authority over the spirit world.

Notice what Jesus Christ does, there was no incantation, there was no formula, there wasn’t any exorcism ritual.  He simply says, in verse 25,”Be quiet, and come out of him!” Notice what happened, “Throwing him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him.  They were all amazed, so that they debated among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey Him.” Not surprisingly, verse 28, “Immediately the news about Him spread everywhere into all the surrounding district of Galilee.”

Now before we move on, I want to point out something to you, that there was a man in the synagogue a man who was demon possessed. He’d remained undetected until Jesus Christ arrived on the scene.  He was worshipping.  He was reading.  He was hearing the scriptures.  Who knows, he might have even preached the message on a different occasion.  You know, it is possible to sit in church and belong to Satan.  It is possible to be a member of a church and not a member of the kingdom of God.  It’s possible to come here on Sunday morning and sing about heaven and yet, have a reservation waiting in Hell.  

I will go one step further with that. It goes to show you that everything that happens in church, just because it’s church, does not mean that it is of God nor of the Holy Spirit. This man was thrown into convulsions by the evil spirit.  Have you ever seen a person slain in the Spirit at some of these Pentecostal services? They are being thrown all over the floor like a rag doll, no control, not perhaps even aware of what they are doing.  And yet we are told to believe that this is evidence of a mighty work of the Spirit. I will say what James said on that account, “Test the spirits to see if they are from God, for there are many false prophets that have gone out into the world.”  And you test them by the word of God.  There is no example of a work of God looking like that in the Bible.  The only time you see convulsions and acting like a maniac was when there were demons involved.  So don’t be deceived by some spiritual counterfeit.

Notice the next incident whereby Jesus Christ exercised His authority.  Verse 29, “And immediately after they came out of the synagogue, they came into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.  Now Simon’s mother-in-law was lying sick with a fever; and immediately they spoke to Jesus about her. And He came to her and raised her up, taking her by the hand, and the fever left her, and she waited on them.  

Luke, who was a doctor, indicates that this fever was severe. A high fever in an adult can be fatal.  But I think that this healing indicates Jesus’s authority over physical life.  He has demonstrated His authority over the spiritual world, and now He demonstrates His authority over the physical world. He is able to give life to that which is dead or about to die.And notice that her response after being healed was to serve the Lord.  When the Lord gives you new life, even eternal life, it should go without saying that you would serve the Lord with your life.

Another small point to make here is that this is Peter’s mother in law.  Peter is considered to be the first pope of the Catholic Church and they believe every pope since is appointed by divine succession from Peter.  I’m sure Peter has rolled over in his grave a few times over that one. But the point I want to make is that Peter was married.  And yet they forbid priests to marry.

Now the Catholics would try to say to that, well Peter may have been married at one time, but she had obviously  died before he became the pope.  Well then, if that’s true, they might try explaining what Paul says about Peter (Cephas) in 1Cor. 9:5 “Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” Peter was obviously married and taking his wife on mission trips with him.

Now all of this happens on the same day, the Sabbath.  Jesus is working on the Sabbath, preaching and healing and delivering people from demonic spirits.  And it continues after dark.  The Jewish Sabbath started at nightfall on Friday and ended at nightfall on Saturday.  So once the Sabbath restrictions on travel had expired, everyone from the surrounding area wanted to see Jesus to be healed or delivered from demonic spirits.  

Vs32-34 “When evening came, after the sun had set, they [began] bringing to Him all who were ill and those who were demon-possessed.  And the whole city had gathered at the door.  And He healed many who were ill with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and He was not permitting the demons to speak, because they knew who He was.”

Jesus wasn’t ready to announce to the world who He was at this point.  And when He is, He doesn’t want it to be by a demon.  But what is evident in this account is the compassion of Jesus.  He said in John 6:37 “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.” He has the authority to save all that come to Him.  There is no mention of the people’s faith, just the sovereign authority of the King of Kings to heal and deliver.

Then, the source of Jesus authority is seen in vs35-39  “In the early morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left [the house,] and went away to a secluded place, and was praying there.  Simon and his companions searched for Him;  they found Him, and said to Him, “Everyone is looking for You.”  He said to them, “Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for.”  And He went into their synagogues throughout all Galilee, preaching and casting out the demons.”

Jesus’s authority came out of His being One with the Father.  His prayer life was the source of His authority and the means of His communion with the Father.  If anyone had an excuse not to get up early to pray, it should have been Jesus. He must have been up until very late the night before, healing the whole town.  They hadn’t  been able to travel to him until after sundown. And He had  already had a very busy day.  But HIs prayer time was a priority. We see that again and again in the gospels, that Jesus went out by Himself to pray, many times all night.  

We wonder why we have little power over temptation, or little results in our ministry, and yet I wonder how many of us make prayer a priority.  I think Jesus knew that being alone early in the morning He would have undisturbed time to commune with His Father.  You may say well I’m not a morning person.  But I suggest that you become one.  Because if you wait around until mid morning to pray, you’re likely to get sidetracked by everything that starts to happen as the day goes on.

Abe Lincoln is reported to have said, that if you only have eight hours to cut wood, spend 7 of it sharpening your axe.  Or something like that.  Prayer is our preparation. It must be our priority.  It is the source of our power. Not praying some formula or prescribed prayer.  But earnest communion with God our Father.

Prayer is the means by which our will is aligned with the Father’s will.  A lot of people get that backwards.  They want to align God’s will to their will.  It would seem more logical that Jesus should have had a week long healing campaign.  But He doesn’t.  He goes out to a lonely place by Himself to avoid the crowds.  And the result of that communion with the Father directs His ministry.  Jesus says the priority of His ministry was not to heal, but to preach the gospel of the kingdom throughout all of Galilee.

“Simon and his companions searched for Him;  they found Him, and said to Him, ‘Everyone is looking for You.’ He said to them, ‘Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for.’”  What He came for, what was the primary purpose of His ministry, was to preach the gospel. The world wants physical healing.  The world wants physical blessings. God’s priority is spiritual.

You know, a close examination of the scripture reveals that Jesus did not heal everyone.  But He healed in the context of manifesting His deity as the King of Creation. And those people who tell you that it is God’s will that everyone will be healed of every disease and sickness are simply not basing that on scripture, but on their desire to force God into their own will.

Now having said that, we return to our text to see another example of Jesus healing, on another day, in another town.  And this is the fourth illustration of His authority.  Vs 40 And a leper came to Jesus, beseeching Him and falling on his knees before Him, and saying, “If You are willing, You can make me clean.”  Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, and said to him, “I am willing; be cleansed.”  Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed.”

Leprosy was a terrible disease that was prominent in Jesus’ day.  Moses had prescribed a system for determining if someone had leprosy, which was done by the priest, and he had also prescribed what to do if you had it and you were somehow healed of it.  But no one was ever healed.  It was a progressive disease, starting with small white scales, but eventually covering the entire body. Not only was it progressive, it was a death sentence.  These poor people were really the walking dead. And as the eventual end came, more and more of their skin and body parts, nose, ears and so forth, were eaten away by the disease.

Moses had established a quarantine and protocol for lepers, but the Jews had taken it even further.  The leper had to constantly announce himself in public by shouting “unclean, unclean.”  Jews were forbidden to touch them, or even get near one.  And what was even worse, perhaps, was that they considered these poor lepers as deserving of this vile disease because they were somehow worst sinners than everyone else.

So this leper, who was in the advanced stage of the disease according to Luke, breaks protocol and prostrates himself before Jesus, saying, “if you are willing, you can make me clean.”   Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, and said to him, “I am willing; be cleansed.”  Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed.”

Jesus was moved with compassion. That’s such an interesting phrase.  Compassion comes from a word in Latin, I am told, which means to suffer with. We think of it as sympathy.  But it’s more than sympathy. It’s a willingness to take their suffering on yourself.

What I think this is picturing is Jesus’ authority to cleanse from sin. And He did that by taking our sins upon Himself and bearing our punishment. I think that’s why Jesus did the unthinkable and reached out and touched this decaying, rotting flesh.  He was showing His willingness to suffer for us, so that we might be given life.

You see, sin is a lot like leprosy.  It starts small, but it’s progressive. It spreads.  Once Adam and Eve had committed just one little sin, they had caught the disease of sin, and it would not stop until it destroyed them and killed them. Sin corrupts, it infects, it’s communicable, it’s deadly.

But thankfully, Jesus came to save sinners.  He came to forgive and be the substitute for our penalty of death, that we that had the sentence of death upon us, would be given new life. You know, when Jesus healed this leper, I imagine that his features were restored, his skin became new like a baby, his nose and ears reappeared.  He was a new creation.  This wasn’t some symptomatic illness that no one could see the results of, it was evident to everyone who had previously been acquainted with him that he was a new man.

But Jesus doesn’t really want that kind of publicity.  Too much of that kind of fame would interfere with what He had come to do, which was to preach the gospel of the kingdom.  So in vs 43 we read, “And (Jesus) sternly warned him and immediately sent him away,  and He said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”  But he went out and began to proclaim it freely and to spread the news around, to such an extent that Jesus could no longer publicly enter a city, but stayed out in unpopulated areas; and they were coming to Him from everywhere.”

Moses had said, if a leper were supposedly cleansed, somehow, he brought two birds to the priest.  They would kill one bird and they would shed his blood in a little basin.  They would take another bird, they would dip him in the blood of the deceased bird and they would let that living bird go free. I think the symbolism that in relation to Jesus’ atonement should be obvious.  And while Jesus didn’t want him to broadcast being healed, He did want him to obey the law of Moses, and also be a testimony to these priests who had to admit something supernatural had happened. 

We can assume that the leper did what Jesus asked in regards to the priests, but he could not help himself from broadcasting the good news of how Jesus had saved him. To be fair, he couldn’t really hide it. You know, this should be a challenge to us.  Here’s a man told to keep quiet and he blazes it abroad.  And you and I have been commanded to broadcast it abroad and yet we keep quiet.  He had been commanded to be quiet, not to spread the news yet we’ve been told to share the news and we’re quiet, we say nothing.  I wonder, if we had been a leper or sick with a serious fever or one of these individuals whom Jesus Christ touched, could you keep us quiet?  We too easily forget that we have been touched by the grace of God.  Can we keep quiet?  Can we do anything less than shed abroad the news that Jesus Christ has forgiven our sins and given us new life?  

We are continuing in our study of Mark and we left off last time in vs 13 with the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.  That temptation happened directly after he was baptized by John the Baptist.  Today we pick up in Mark’s account with vs 14, which begins with the phrase “Now after John had been taken into custody…”  What that indicates is that there is an interval of about one year in between vs 13 and vs 14.

So Jesus’s ministry began with His baptism, and He has been preaching and teaching for about a year in both Judea and Galilee.  But after John the Baptist was taken prisoner, Jesus went into Galilee to preach the gospel, and will only travel to Jerusalem at certain times.  So Mark says in vs 14,  “Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God,  and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

So Mark says Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God. He was publicly proclaiming the good news of salvation as God’s gift to mankind. Salvation is of the Lord.  Man by his own efforts was unable to attain to the kingdom of God, so God came down to man, and made it possible for man to be reconciled to God.  And He that proclaimed this good news of salvation, was also the same who made it possible, by presenting Himself as the atoning sacrifice for sin.  

The scriptures tell us that if we believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall become sons of God. To believe requires that we know who He was, and what He accomplished.  And so we study the account of the gospel of Mark so that we might learn the truth about Him, and having learned it, we believe in Him unto salvation.  The truth then about Jesus Christ is the gospel of God which Jesus was preaching.

This manifestation of the gospel of God was appointed for a specific time and place in history.  And that was fulfilled with the coming of Jesus Christ.  As Jesus said, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand…”. It was the time prophesied in Isaiah 9:1-2  which says, “But there will be no [more] gloom for her who was in anguish; in earlier times He treated the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali with contempt, but later on He shall make [it] glorious, by the way of the sea, on the other side of Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. The people who walk in darkness Will see a great light; Those who live in a dark land, The light will shine on them.”

Jesus preaches that the kingdom of God is at hand. The King of the kingdom of God is revealed. Matthew speaks of the same events by saying the kingdom of heaven.  Both phrases  mean basically the same thing. What Jesus is proclaiming is that God’s reign in the hearts and souls of men would be manifest more clearly than ever before.  The supreme blessing of life in the kingdom of God will be given to all who  would confess Jesus as Lord and forsake their sins and live in service to God.

It’s important to understand correctly the concept of the kingdom of God. It could just as correctly be translated kingship of God.  It speaks of the rule of God in one’s heart, the sovereignty of God over the lives of His people and ultimately God’s sovereignty over the world.

There are really four concepts implied in the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven. First, God’s kingship, rule and sovereignty over the individual.  I think that is what Paul was referring to in Romans 10:9, “that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”  That Christ is your Lord, your sovereign. This is the immediacy of the kingdom of God being in you, or near you.

Secondly, it speaks of complete salvation.  When the scripture speaks of blessing, or blessedness it often is synymous with salvation.  When God is king in our hearts, all the blessings of life in His kingdom are imbued to His people. 

The third application of this concept is realized in the church.   The church is the kingdom of God, the community of people who recognize God as king in their hearts. The church is the called out ones, the people of God’s kingdom. The church is not an edifice, not an institution, but the people of the kingdom, called out by God to live under His reign.

And fourthly, the kingdom of God speaks of the future redeemed universe.  Peter said we look forward to a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, or reigns. Jesus spoke in Matthew’s account of us inheriting the kingdom which God has prepared for us.  At the second coming of Christ, He will usher in the eternal kingdom of God in a new heaven and new earth.

But these four meanings are all related to the central idea of the reign of God, and His sovereignty in salvation.  It is an eternal kingdom; past, present and future.  Jesus preaches that the kingdom of heaven is at hand in order to teach the supernatural character of our salvation.  Salvation is of the Lord. Our salvation begins with the purpose of God, it is proclaimed in the preaching of the gospel, it is delivered by the call of God, believed on in the hearts of men, and lived out in the discipleship of those that believe in Him.

Let’s consider though what else Mark includes in his summary of Jesus’s message.  The first two points of Jesus’s message, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” speaks of the sovereignty of salvation.  The third and the fourth points, “repent and believe in the gospel” speak of man’s responsibility to respond to the preaching of the gospel.

Some commentators say that the word rendered repent would be better translated as be converted.  Repent only stresses the negative aspect, looking backwards, whereas be converted is positive, looking forward, and indicates a radical change of heart, a complete turnaround of your life. Repentance then is a confession that you are a sinner, in need of forgiveness, in need of being changed, converted, made clean, made new.  So though it is the responsibility of the sinner to repent, it is God who converts, who forgives, who cleanses, who changes the heart.

And that positive side of conversion is given more emphasis by the phrase, “and believe the gospel.” To believe is to put your trust in someone.  Believing includes three elements; knowledge, assent, and trust. Not just having the knowledge of the truth, nor just giving an intellectual assent to the truth, but a commitment to and a confidence in the one trusted.  A person truly believes when he acts upon the message.

And that commitment is what is pictured in the next section, in which Mark tells of the calling of  four of the disciples.  Vs 16, “As He was going along by the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen.  And Jesus said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.”  Immediately they left their nets and followed Him.  Going on a little farther, He saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who were also in the boat mending the nets.  Immediately He called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went away to follow Him.”

It was not uncommon for rabbi’s or teachers in those days to have disciples. John the Baptist had disciples.  It was even true in the pagan world – philosophers like Socrates had disciples for instance.  The Lord had even a more particular point to calling His disciples.  They were to eventually become His apostles, and after His death they would be the foundation of the church, and the primary source of the writings of the New Testament, by which we can know the truth about Christ.

However, it’s important to understand that Mark does not include all the events that have occurred prior to this calling of the disciples to follow Him. A year earlier, Andrew and another disciple had been invited to come and see where Jesus was staying.  They had at that time become His followers. And then Andrew brought his brother Simon, who becomes known as Peter, to see Jesus. It’s possible that John might have done something similar for his brother James.

So now about a year later, Jesus calls them to a closer walk with Him, and they are made conscious that He has a plan for them to take on a greater ministry.  That ministry is what Jesus refers to as “fishers of men.”   These men are to be trained by Jesus to be like Him, to speak what He speaks, to do the works that He did, to be the ones who will continue HIs ministry when He is taken away into heaven.

It’s interesting to note that Jesus calls common fishermen to become the ministers of His kingdom, the foundation of His church.  It is not in accordance with pedigree, nor education, nor wisdom, nor attractiveness, nor charisma that God chooses His ministers.  But as Paul said in 1Cor. 1:26-29 “For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,  and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are,  so that no man may boast before God.”  And yet these uneducated, common fishermen would turn the world upside down.

The four fishermen that Mark mentions are Peter, Andrew, James and John. Peter we all are very familiar with.  He was the impetuous one.  Without a doubt, he was the leader of the twelve.  In every account of the disciples, he is always listed first.  Jesus changed his name from Simon to Peter, which means Rock.  Peter was the one who cut the ear off of the servant of the high priest with a sword at the Mount of Olives.  I can relate to Peter more so than any other. I’m constantly having to quell the urge to swing a sword at people.  Peter had a lot of faults, but he had a great love for the Lord.

Andrew, Peter’s brother is known for always bringing people to Christ. That’s such a valuable characteristic, to be able to point people to Christ.  Most Christians have no trouble talking about themselves, and bringing attention to themselves.  But having the ability to bring people to Christ, to point to Christ is a great attribute. That’s what made John the Baptist great.

James the son of Zebedee was the brother of John. To John and James Jesus would late give the nickname Boanerges, which means “Sons of Thunder.” That’s a pretty cool nickname. I can almost imagine it emblazoned on the back of a motorcycle jacket, “Sons of Thunder.”  So far you got the Rock and the Sons of Thunder. 

But James has another distinction, that of being the first martyr of the disciples.  Acts 12:2 says that Herod had James put to death with a sword. I imagine that meant he was beheaded.  That seems to be a popular method in those days of killing the prophets of the Lord. John the Baptist would soon be beheaded. Peter, we know, was eventually  hung on a cross upside down because he did not think himself worthy of being crucified like Christ.  These guys knew the cost of following Jesus.

And then John, the brother of James, one of the Sons of Thunder, who became known as the one whom Christ loved.  Of course, Jesus loved all his disciples.  But there must have been a special relationship between Jesus and John.  Some Bible scholars have said that it’s likely that they were cousins.  

So Jesus, walking along the beach at Galilee, sees two brothers fishing, throwing a net in the sea.  It might have been one of those nets you see where they throw it out and it makes a large circle and then they pull a string or rope and it gathers it up.  Sometimes you see guys doing that at Indian River. They use it to catch bait fish.

Mark says, “they were fishermen.”  I really like the fact that Jesus chose real men to be the leaders in His kingdom, not some limp wristed academics, or pious prunes, but just regular working class guys. I’ve known a few commercial fishermen in my time.  Just looking at their hands you realize that these guys are gnarly. Maybe that’s where the word gnarly comes from, the gnarled, arthritic hands of these guys that constantly use them to pull heavy nets and ropes out of cold water. 

These men had known Jesus for about a year.  They had believed in Him, they had a relationship with Him, but not of the type to which He was calling them.  Jesus was calling them to a deeper relationship, a relationship of trust, of trusting Him with their life, even to the point of leaving their livelihood.  So Jesus says, “Come, follow me.”  And they dropped what they were doing and followed Him.  They left their nets.  They left their source of income, their livelihood.  Instead of catching fish to feed their families, they would catch souls for the kingdom of God.

James and John were a little further down the beach mending their nets with their father when Jesus called them.  And at once they left their father in the boat with the hired men and followed Him.  They weren’t fishing like Peter and Andrew, but it’s a certainty that they knew one another.  Maybe they were sort of rivals, two brothers trying to out fish the other two brothers.   It sounds like James and John might have come from a little more wealth than Peter and Andrew.  Their father was also a part of their crew as well as hired men.  

And yet without seemingly much concern for what they were leaving, these men dropped everything and followed Jesus.  They too begin their training for a leadership position in the church,  of becoming apostles.

At the end of Jesus’s ministry, He would task the apostles with making more disciples. In Matt. 28:19-20 Jesus said,  “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,  teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

I would suggest that the call of Jesus to be HIs disciple is made to all who have believed in Him.  To not just have the knowledge of the truth, nor just give intellectual assent to the truth, but to trust in Him enough to follow Him, to walk with Him, to learn from Him so that we might carry on HIs ministry on earth.  That we might participate in fulfilling  the prayer He taught us to pray – “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

To be a disciple is to walk with the Lord, to be conformed to His image, to walk in the paths of righteousness, to commit your way unto the Lord, to walk in the Spirit, to walk according to His word.  It’s an active lifestyle, a manner of life that emulates the life of Christ.  And if we are walking as He walked, and walking with Him, following Him, then we will also be fishers of men.  We will be catching souls for the kingdom of God.  

I can assure you that there is no higher calling than to be a fisher of men. There is no career with any greater reward than to be a fisher of men.  It is worth it all to leave everything behind for the greatest blessing of being counted a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ.  I pray that you hear His call to follow Him, and that you will count all that this world offers as loss for the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ your Lord.

Galatians is Paul’s dissertation, from a judicial standpoint, on the doctrine of salvation. And he has spent the brunt of his argument delineating the merits of grace versus law. He has shown in detail the difference between salvation by grace alone, as opposed to salvation by faith plus works. In particular, he was answering the Judaiser’s teaching that you needed to be circumcised and follow the dietary and ceremonial laws of the Jews in order to really be saved.

Paul called such legalism “slavery.” And he described salvation by grace through faith as “freedom.” But some of the difficulty comes partly in defining our terms, and also in extrapolating certain outcomes from those doctrines. A faulty understanding of the nature of these terms can lead you to a wrong outcome.

And so I want to review some of these key terms for a moment, because I think they are sometimes used interchangeably, when in fact they mean different things. The first term is mercy. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. Mercy is forgiveness. You were found guilty of a crime, and the penalty was death, but the judge gives you mercy. You are forgiven by the courts and not held accountable for your crime.

So mercy is not getting what you deserve. Grace, on the other hand, is getting something you don’t deserve. Do you see the difference? Grace means a gift. It’s getting something you don’t deserve. You don’t work for. In salvation, not only do you receive mercy, but you receive grace. God gifts you His righteousness, eternal life, and His Spirit to dwell in you.

Now when Paul talks about freedom in the verses before us today, some people might be confused and think he is speaking of grace. But actually, freedom is being set free from the penalty of sin, and the captivity of sin. Paul says in vs 1, “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.” So Christ set us free from the condemnation of the law, and the captivity to sin, so that going back under the law would be akin to a free man going back to slavery. You would be now required to keep all the law, which would only condemn you, and you would eliminate salvation by grace.

That being understood though, the question arises, then do we have no obligation to keep the law in any respect? Are we able to sin with impunity? Are we, as Paul himself asks in Rom 6:1 “Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” Is grace then a license to continue in sin? Does freedom mean that I am free to live any way I want, to do whatever I want?

Well, Paul answers that question of Romans 6:1 by saying in vs 2, “May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” Actually I prefer the KJV on that, which says, “God forbid!” It’s a much more strident answer. Why would Paul be so strident, so concerned that the church not continue in sin? Because it is contrary to the will of God. It’s contrary to the plan of God. And its’ contrary to the purpose of our life that we have been given by God. So what I think we will find in this next section is that the law of God is more closely related to the will of God than we might realize.

So to that question of law versus grace, of grace being a license to sin, Paul says in Galatians 5 vs 13, “For you were called to freedom, brethren; only [do] not [turn] your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, “YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.”

Now notice that suddenly Paul seems to be saying that there is still a law that is in effect. There is still a law that we are to be subject to. And this law, the law of love, Paul says, is the consummation of all the law of God. Now let’s try to break that down and make sure we understand correctly what he is teaching here.

So first notice this concept of freedom. Back in vs 1 he said “It was for freedom that Christ set us free,” then in vs 13 he says, “For you were called to freedom.” He is speaking of our salvation, through Christ we are set free from the captivity of sin, set free from the condemnation of the law. That’s why Christ saved us. That’s why Christ died on the cross – to pay the penalty for our sin so that we might be set free. We are justified, set free, not by what we have done, not by keeping the law, but by what He has done for us.

Notice also the element of predestination in his statement. God called us to Himself. The call of God in salvation is from the Lord. And those whom He predestined to salvation will hear His call and come to Him. Rom 8:30 says, “and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.” Notice all those elements of salvation are accomplished by the Lord. We do not participate in our predestination, we do not participate in our calling, we do not participate in our justification, we do not participate in our glorification. Salvation is of the Lord. That’s the mercy and grace of God towards us.

So then salvation is a spiritual transaction that happens for us, and in us, which also produces a physical change. That’s an important point. Salvation is spiritual. We are born again spiritually. But if that is so, then the spirit will change the way the physical lives. That is what Paul was teaching in the Romans 6 passage I read earlier. In salvation we die to sin. And so we live by the spirit and not according to the flesh. That new spirit produces a different way of living, a different purpose for living.

That’s what Paul is saying here. “You were called to freedom, only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh.” Now that we are set free from the captivity to sin, now that we are set free from the condemnation of the law, how are we to live in light of that freedom? Paul says don’t use your freedom to go sin again. I am reminded of the woman that was caught in adultery and brought before Christ. The law required that she be put to death. But Jesus said “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” She had been set free by the mercy of Christ from the condemnation of sin. So then to continue in sin would have been a travesty.

Back in Romans 6 Paul says in vs17 “But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.”

Now in our text Paul characterizes sin as an opportunity for the flesh. The flesh is contrary to the will of God. Going back to that passage in Romans 6 which we referenced earlier, Paul continued in that argument to say in 6:12″ Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body [flesh] so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body [flesh] to sin [as] instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members [as] instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.”

All sins of the flesh are at the root a desire to please self. It’s serving myself and my desires and my interests and my pride. The sin is serving myself and my desires above anyone else. Righteousness on the other hand can be characterized as serving God first, and serving others. All the law does is put limits on me, in order to protect others.

So Paul says if we willfully submit our flesh to sin again, are we not in effect putting ourselves back under the law and the condemnation of the law? So do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God, and your body as instruments of righteousness.

So we are called to freedom, to live in the Spirit and not to live in captivity to the flesh. I want to read from Romans 8 again, in which Paul speaks to this change from living according to the flesh to living according to the Spirit. There is so much there, I can’t really exegete the whole passage. But perhaps if I read it, the Lord will give you understanding. Romans 8:5-8 “For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able [to do so,] and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”

So this is speaking of the same thing as Galatians is speaking of. An opportunity for the flesh, is the same as setting your minds on the things of the flesh. And notice that Paul says that such a mind set on the flesh cannot subject itself to the law of God, and those in the flesh cannot please God. So he is saying that the law of God is still something that we are to be subject to. But when you are focused on fulfilling your fleshly desires, which is sin, then you cannot please God. So as Christians under grace, not the law, we are no longer serving the desires of our flesh, but our desire should be to please the Lord, which is to subject our bodies to the law of God.

Now admittedly it feels like we are splitting hairs in trying to delineate the difference between law and grace. I suppose you might say that under the law we are condemned, but under grace we do the works of righteousness. The difference between the old covenant of law and the new covenant of grace is that in the old covenant we are given the law but we are not capable of keeping it, and so it only condemns us. But under the new covenant, we are given the power over sin, which results in righteousness, and that power is the presence of the Spirit within us.

Let me ask you something. Define righteousness without referencing the law of God. I don’t think it is possible. The law of God not only defines sin, it defines righteousness. Righteousness is by definition a state of being moral and ethical. When you try to keep the law in the flesh you cannot do it, resulting in sin. But when you follow the Spirit you do the works of righteousness by the power of the Spirit within you. The difference between the old and new covenant is we that are saved have the Spirit of God in us who enables us to do the works of righteousness.

I might try to illustrate it this way. Imagine the word LAW written as a giant sign. On one side of the sign is the word sin and flesh. On the other side of the sign is the word righteousness and Spirit. The same law produces either result. The difference is that sin is the result of the flesh and righteousness is the result of the Spirit.

Now let’s go back to our text. Gal 5:13-14 “For you were called to freedom, brethren; only [do] not [turn] your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the [statement,] “YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.”

But through love serve one another and love is the fulfillment of the law. Now we have heard that all of our Christian lives, but how is that true? How does that work? Love, first of all, is not a sentiment. It’s not an attraction you have towards your neighbor. Or a feeling you have towards the Lord. Love is not based on attraction. Love is not based a feeling. Sometimes love may be accompanied by a feeling, but you must not rely on a feeling in order to act in love. Love is a commitment to put another’s needs above your own. To serve another before yourself. That is love. And my apologies to those who can only see love through a romantic lens, but there may be more times in your marriage when you will choose to love your mate when you feel like wringing their neck, than there will be times when you will love your mate because you feel so warm and fuzzy about them. In good times and bad, in sickness and in health, in ups and downs, in financial woes and financial bliss, whatever happens, whatever their response may be, you choose to love them.

But that being said, you cannot really legislate love, can you? You can’t make laws and write them on the doorposts of your house and on the walls that say “you must love me and obey me.” You can legislate obedience, but not love. But if you have a mate that loves you, you won’t have to say “obey me.”

Jesus said, “if you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” See, the issue is not that the commandments have been done away with and you are free to live like you want. The issue is that captivity to sin has been done away with, and you choose to love the Lord, which is to keep His commandments. And what is the commandment? “YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.” Your neighbor is anyone within the sphere of your world. That includes your husband or wife, or kids or friends, or coworkers, or in-laws or outlaws, or anyone that you come into contact with. In salvation there is a change from loving yourself first, to loving the Lord first and loving your neighbor as yourself.

If you love your neighbor, you will not bear false witness against him. If you love your neighbor, you will not murder him. If you love your neighbor, you will not steal from him. If you love your neighbor who are your parents then you will honor your mother and your father. If you love your neighbor, you will not commit adultery with his wife. If you love your neighbor, you will not covet his stuff.

Romans 13:10 says, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of [the] law.

So the difference between law and grace is that we have a change of heart. When we are saved by grace, forgiven of our sins, given a new spirit and everlasting life, we are given a new heart. I mean by that, we are given a new nature, new desires. And that happens by the indwelling of the Spirit of God. If you are unsaved, you do not have the Spirit of Christ in you. You cannot please God. You cannot do the things of God. You cannot work the works of righteousness. You certainly cannot do it in the power of your flesh. You can only do it by the power of the Spirit in you.

So key to our new life in this covenant of grace is that we have the Spirit of God indwelling us. Empowering us, changing our heart, so that our desire is to please the Lord. And we please the Lord by being obedient to His commands.

Paul qualifies what not acting in love is like in vs 15, “But if you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” That needs very little exposition, doesn’t it? We call it back biting today. Slander. Bearing false witness against one another. Hateful speech. Speaking ill of one another. The result of that is to devour one another. To murder one another. That’s the opposite of love. That’s the result of the flesh. We that are saved still have our flesh. But we are to die to the desires of the flesh, and operate under the control of the Spirit.

Let me close by reading the promise in the Old Testament, that God would give a new covenant to those whom He called to be His people. It says in Jer 31:33 “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the LORD, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” Instead of being subject to the law written on tablets of stone, we are now subject to the law written upon our hearts.

And God tells us how that will be accomplished in Ezekiel 36:25-27 “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. “Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.”

Let me ask you this morning, have you been born again? Have you had your sins forgiven, and a new spirit put within you, and do you have the Spirit of God dwelling in you? You cannot become a Christian through observance of the law, or by attending church, or by being baptized, or by taking communion, or by any work of the flesh. But you need to be changed, you need a new heart, and a new spirit, and the Spirit of Christ in you. You can have that salvation as a gift of God, if you will simply call upon the name of the Lord, confessing Jesus as Lord of your life, trusting in Him as your Savior who paid for the forgiveness of your sins, and receive the Spirit of God to reign in you. Call on the Lord to save you and change you, and live in you.

Paul has reached the last stage of his legal argument for the doctrine of justification by faith.  During his missionary journey’s to the region of Galatia he had preached the gospel, and the Galatians were converted and he had established churches there for them.  But then not too long afterwards certain men from Jerusalem had come to those churches and began to teach these new converts that they were not fully saved until they had become circumcised and adhered to certain ceremonial and legal requirements of Judaism.

So Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians refuting that false teaching and trying to set straight the ensuing confusion about the basis of salvation.  And the gist of his argument is to correlate the false teaching of adding to salvation certain laws with slavery or bondage.  And the truth of the gospel he correlates to being set free from that slavery.  Now Paul takes 4 chapters to teach that, and we have discussed those chapters in detail, and I cannot possibly review all that has been said in our introduction today.  But suffice it to say that Paul says that salvation is equivalent to being set free from slavery.

And to that point, he continues in chapter five vs one by saying, “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.”  Salvation has always been by faith.  Abraham was saved by faith.  The scriptures say, “Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.” So from the beginning, the only way to God was by faith.

But God gave the law to His chosen people to be a tutor to teach them about God, to teach them about sin,  to teach them about righteousness, and to teach them about the need for sacrificial atonement.  The law was never given as a means by which to be made right with God.  But the Jews had taken the law and tried to develop a system of law keeping by which they thought that they could be right with God, whereby they deserved special favor with God.

But when Christ came, the way to God was made clear.  It was by faith in Christ as the lamb of God who by His sacrifice takes away the sin of the world as our righteous substitute, through His atonement on our behalf, by which we are made right with God.  And through Christ’s death and resurrection, that which was taught by the law was fulfilled in Christ, so that we are no longer under the condemnation of the law.  Those laws which could only condemn us, were fulfilled for us by Christ, so that we might be made righteous by faith.

So that is how Paul is able to say that Christ has set us free.  He has set us free from the condemnation of sin, the condemnation of the law, and thus, the legal requirement of the law. Salvation then is really a tremendous gift of freedom.  Human slavery represents but a poor illustration of this truth.  But when slavery was abolished in the United States, it was done so by a war, and an emancipation proclamation made by the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.  He had the power and authority to make that proclamation because of His position as president.  But it took winning the war to make that proclamation a reality.

In a far greater sense, Jesus Christ, as the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, has the power and authority to set men free from slavery to the law and sin.  But it took a spiritual war which He waged in which He shed His blood in death and rose from the grave in victory before He could make that proclamation a reality.  But just as it was in the case of slavery here in America, it was possible for the slaves to be set free, but yet not realize their freedom and remain enslaved. It was possible for slaves to prefer the security of slavery to freedom and remain enslaved. It was possible for slave owners to deceive some slaves and say that freedom could not be given to them and thus keep their slaves enslaved.  And all of that is possible with spiritual slavery as well.  And that is the point of Paul’s letter, to let these Galatians know that they had been set free, and they should not remain or return to slavery.

Now please understand that Christ did not die on the cross so that we might be set free to do anything we want with impunity. Grace is not a license to sin. Rom 6:1-2 says, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?  May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” We are not set free to continue in sin, or to practice sin, but we have been set free from the penalty of sin, and the power of sin over us.  We have been set free from sin so that we might love God and follow Him.  Not by following the letter of the law, but following the Lord from a changed heart that wants to do His will.

It’s also interesting to notice that Paul’s language in this verse is reminiscent of Peter’s statement in Acts 15:10, in which he was addressing the same situation, that of certain Jews requiring Gentiles to become circumcised in order to be saved.  He says in Acts 15:10-11  “Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are.”  

So this is not just a Pauline doctrine which was at odds with the apostolic doctrine in Jerusalem. But I think Paul deliberately uses those words to remind his readers that the matter had already been settled in Jerusalem when the same false teaching had been encountered in Antioch, and they had brought the discussion to Jerusalem to be settled by the apostles.  Peter calls the law, particularly the laws pertaining to Jewish customs and ceremonies, as a yoke which we were not able to bear. He uses a metaphor to describe the way an ox pulled a heavy load, or carried a heavy load by means of a yoke.  And when the ox is free from the yoke the burden is lifted and he is free from it.  So it was with the law.  It was something they were yoked to that was a burden that they were unable to bear.  Now that they are free from that yoke, why would they want to go back under it?

Not only is it not practical or reasonable to go back under that yoke, but Paul says it has an even greater danger.  Vs 2, “Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you.” This is a shocking statement that reveals the danger of legalism.

This is the danger: it’s either salvation through Christ or works.   It’s either all Christ or no Christ. It’s either by faith alone or no salvation.  Paul isn’t saying that there are two ways to God; one through Christ and one through works, and if you choose works then you have to go all the way with keeping the law.  Not at all.  Because there is no salvation through works, no salvation through the law.  There never was.  All that the law does is condemn you.  Only faith in Christ, and Christ alone, can save.

When Paul says,  “If you receive circumcision” that indicates that those who attempted to be justified before God on the basis of the law were in effect cancelling out the grace that was given through Christ.  And grace is only  one way to be saved according to Eph 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, [it is] the gift of God;  not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.”  

There is another consequence of putting yourself back under the yoke of the law, and that is if you do that, then Paul says you are obligated to keep all of the law. Vs 3 “And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law.” In other words, you don’t get to pick some to keep and some to discard. If you’re going to  chose the law, then you are under obligation to all the law.  Someone has added up all the laws given to Moses and came up with the total number as 613. And then the Jews even added some more to those. 

There are a lot of various churches out there that prescribe certain things as necessary, certain laws that we are required to keep. For instance the Seventh Day Adventists teach it’s necessary to keep the Sabbath. But these churches invariably choose to keep some laws and not others.  Paul says that if you choose the law then you must keep all the law.  And we know that no one is able to keep all the law perfectly.  There was only one person who kept the law perfectly, and that is Christ.  James says in James 2:10 “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one [point,] he has become guilty of all.”

Then Paul makes this graphic, shocking statement in verse 4: “You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.” That is just a shocking way of saying it, especially in the context of speaking about circumcision. You who are seeking to be justified by keeping the law, you have been severed from Christ. You are cut off from Him.  You’re going to be judged by your works, not justified by Christ’s work.

What Paul is NOT saying is that you will lose your salvation.  But that if you choose works you have fallen from grace.  How are we made right with God? On the basis of grace through faith. Grace means gift.  Salvation is a gift of God.  Jesus was God’s gift to mankind.  And those who by faith believe in Jesus as the Son of God, as their substitute, as their Savior and Lord, are given the righteousness of Jesus Christ.  His righteousness is given to us.  That’s grace. 

What Paul is saying then is if you are standing at the judgment throne of God, and your eternal fate is at stake, you either claim the righteousness of Christ which was given to you, or you claim your works as the basis for your standing. If you choose works, you have fallen from grace, you’re dependent upon your works. And the Bible clearly teaches that no man will be justified by their works. 

Romans tells us in chapter 3: 20 that “by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law [comes] the knowledge of sin.  But now apart from the Law [the] righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets,  even [the] righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction;  for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.”

If you go back to the law to try to be justified, then Christ profits you nothing, you’re a debtor to the whole law, you’re severed from Christ, you’re fallen from grace and  finally in verse 5, you’re excluded from righteousness. The very righteousness you seek you will be excluded from because righteousness comes from the Spirit and not by keeping the law. Vs 5 “For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness.”

Those walking in the Spirit wait for righteousness which comes as a result of their faith. They are converted, they are changed, they are given the Spirit of Christ to lead them in the paths of righteousness.  They are not trying to earn their righteousness by keeping the law. No one becomes a legalist through the leading of the Spirit.

The word “waiting” speaks of an attitude of intense yearning and an eager reliance upon  something. Here it refers to the believer’s intense desire for and eager expectation of a practical righteousness which will be constantly produced in his life by the Holy Spirit as he yields himself to Him.

There is a faith that works.  There is a faith that is justified by their works.  In other words, their faith is proven by their works.  And those works are the works of righteousness which are the result of a Spirit filled life.  Paul says in vs 6, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.”

If you are in Christ, that means if you belong to Christ, you are truly saved by faith in Christ and His righteousness, then neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything.  Paul himself had been circumcised, but he knew that he had been unconverted while circumcised, and he was saved only by faith in Christ. So in justification the works of the law accomplishes nothing.

But being saved, being in Christ does produce works of righteousness.  It produces works born of the Spirit.  The Spirit in us produces both a judicial righteousness and a practical righteousness.  Judicially we are made righteous by being credited with the righteousness of Jesus Christ.  But practically we do works of righteousness.

Ephesians describes this apparent dichotomy this way in Eph 2:8-10. “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, [it is] the gift of God;  not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.  For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”

So our good works do not save us, keeping the law does not save us.  But our faith which does save us produces works of righteousness in us by a new spirit, a new love for the Lord, and a new desire to serve the Lord and please the Lord.

Jesus said “if you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” So as Paul says, faith working through love is the evidence of being in Christ Jesus.  Not keeping ceremonial laws that restrict the flesh, but doing the work of the Spirit who is in us is the evidence of our regeneration.  If you love the Lord, you will want to obey Him.  And the Spirit will lead you into good works, which God has prepared for us beforehand so that we would walk in them.

Finally, let’s briefly consider the last paragraph of this section as a summary of his argument. Vs 7, “You were running well; who hindered you from obeying the truth?  This persuasion [did] not [come] from Him who calls you.  A little leaven leavens the whole lump [of dough.]  I have confidence in you in the Lord that you will adopt no other view; but the one who is disturbing you will bear his judgment, whoever he is. But I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished.  I wish that those who are troubling you would even mutilate themselves.”

This last section really addresses the teachers of this false doctrine.  Paul says they are not spokesmen for Christ. They had put a stumbling block before the Galatian Christians which had hindered them  from obeying the truth. See, the putting away of the law does not negate the necessity to obey. We are to obey the truth.  But a little leaven leavens the whole lump.  What that means is that it doesn’t take much of a false doctrine to distort and corrupt the entire gospel.  It’s so important that we preach the truth of the gospel and nothing but the truth.  That every tenet of the gospel is correct.  Because what seems to be but a small variance on your spiritual compass can actually end up taking you to the entirely wrong destination.

Paul says if he were preaching circumcision, then he would not be enduring persecution.  The stumbling block of the Jews  was the cross.  And there was no need for the cross if justification could come on the basis of keeping the law.  The whole point of Jesus dying on the cross was to say, “You can’t save yourself. I must die in your place or you have absolutely no hope at all.” When we trust in keeping the law, then we believe that we can, at least in part, save ourselves. The legalist’s view takes away the offense of the cross, the need for the cross, and the accomplishment of the cross.

Paul hated false doctrine so much that he spoke in what may be the harshest of terms in his last statement.  He said rather than just be circumcised I wish these false teachers would actually castrate themselves. Paul knew that the worst thing for the church was to have this false doctrine give birth to what amounted to complete apostasy. 

With such a dramatic statement, Paul has made one thing clear: legalism is no little thing in the eyes of God. It takes away our liberty and puts us into bondage. It makes Jesus and His work of no profit to us. It puts us under obligation to the whole law. It violates the work of the Spirit of God. It makes us focus on things that are irrelevant. It keeps us from running the race Jesus set before us. It isn’t from Jesus. A little bit will infect an entire church. Those who promote it will face certain judgment, no matter who they are. Legalism takes away the glory of the cross. In light of how serious all this is, it is no wonder that Paul says he wishes they would even cut themselves off!

But on the other hand, faith produces belonging to the Lord on the basis of the gift of His righteousness.  We have a wonderful inheritance as the children of God, which is given to us a gift of God.  We belong to Him, and He lives in us, so that we might work the works of faith through love. I hope that if you’re here today you are not trusting in any work of your own, no work of the law for your salvation.  But trusting only in the finished work of Jesus Christ on your behalf.  Salvation is a gift of God. Believe in Him and receive His righteousness and His Spirit and everlasting life.

Paul has reached in this passage the final part of his argument for the Galatians to turn away from the legalistic teaching of the Judaisers. Paul has appealed to them on so many levels, using various scriptures and illustrations to show that our salvation is by grace through faith, not faith plus the law. Paul had even appealed on the basis of his relationship with the Galatians as the founding father of their churches in order to encourage them to abandon the Judaizers teaching.

But the final argument has the authority of scripture as Paul goes to the very law that they wanted to go to. He uses the account of Abraham’s sons as an illustration of the gospel of grace versus the law. The apostle concludes his argument by calling the Galatians, who had begun to think that justification must include adherence to the Mosaic law, to look to the Law itself in order to evaluate the wisdom of flirting with legalism.

He says in vs 21, “Tell me, you who want to be under law, do you not listen to the law?” Do you understand what the law teaches? He uses the term nomos, the Greek word translated “law,” to refer not only to the actual commandments of Moses but which also referred to the first five books of the OT traditionally called the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy). When the Jews referred to the law, they considered the entire Torah as the law. So Paul is calling those desiring to be justified by the commandments of God to listen to the whole testimony of the five books in which these regulations are found. 

Paul says if you are living under the law then you are living in bondage. They were acting like the people of Israel, who had cried to God to be set free from bondage to the Egyptians, and God heard them and by a miraculous deliverance set them free. And yet they had not been many days in the wilderness before they were longing to go back to Egypt for the leeks and the garlic and the cucumbers.

So Paul gives them an illustration from the law about Abraham and his son Ishmael, and his son Isaac. He says in vs 22, “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free woman. But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise.”

Paul expects his readers to know the law, the whole story of the law of God, which includes the story of Abraham. And I would hope that you are very familiar with the story of how Abraham was given the promise of a son. God came to Abraham in his old age, and God told him that he would have a son. That Abraham would be the father of a great nation, and his descendants would be more than the stars of the sky and that through his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed. When Abraham told that vision to his wife Sarah, she laughed. The Hebrew word for laugh is Isaac.

But Abraham believed that God would keep His promise. The scripture says that Abraham believed God and He credited to him as righteousness. God justified Abraham because of his faith in the promise of God. We are saved by the same faith as Abraham. The scripture tells us that the just shall live by faith. The Old Testament saints were saved by faith, just as we are saved by faith. I would remind you, as I have said repeatedly, that faith is believing in the promises of God. We believe in the word of God and that faith is counted to us as righteousness.

But I would also caution you that faith does not give you license to apply every thing that is written in scripture to you, and then call that faith, and expect that God will fulfill that promise to you. By that I mean that you should not claim the promise that God gave Abraham, that he would have a son in his old age, and claim that promise for yourself. God did not give you that particular promise that you will be able to father or bear children in your old age. I think most of you recognize that would be silly, or at least I hope you would.

But I say that because those of the word of faith movement, the name it and claim it crowd, are constantly taking promises that God made to someone specifically in the Old Testament, and applying it to themselves, and then going about claiming this “promise” that they say God has given them in His word. 

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day after a surf session and we were bemoaning the fact that we were getting older. And in surfing that means slower, and having less endurance, and a lot of other things that keep us from surfing as well as we would like. And my friend said he didn’t expect to live much past 70, as most of his family had died young. I tried to encourage him by quoting Moses who said the years of a man’s life are 70, but if due to strength, 80. I said he needed to keep working out and maybe he would get to 80.

But then I said for my part, I’m claiming the promises to Abraham. Abraham got a new lease on life at 99 years old. He went from his body being as good as dead to not only fathering a child at 100 years old, but when Sarah died, he married another woman and had even more children. And Abraham lived until 175 years old. That illustrates that when God gives you a gift, as Romans 11:29 tells us, that the gifts of God are irrevocable.

It would be nice if I could claim that promise God gave Abraham for myself. But I cannot. It was made specifically to Abraham. But I am making such a big point of this because I hear Christians making similar claims all the time. And then they expect that God has to give it to them because they believe it. But the problem will be when God doesn’t give it to you and you die at 65 years old then the testimony of your life calls into question God’s faithfulness. So don’t claim promises that are not intended for you.

But God did give the promise to Abraham that he would have a son in his old age. But the years went by and Sarah and Abraham were getting older and older and that which had seemed impossible now seemed completely unrealistic. And so Sarah and Abraham hatched a plan to help God out. Sarah gave her handmaid Hagar to Abraham to see if Abraham could have a son through her as a surrogate mother for Sarah. And Hagar conceived, and bore a son they called Ishmael.

But Ishmael was not the son of promise. He was the son of slavery. Vs23, “But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise.” God had not forgotten the promise that He made to Abraham all those years ago. And so it came to pass when Abraham was 99 years old that Sarah became pregnant, and she had a son, whom they called Isaac.

So Paul speaks of this story from Jewish history and he infers a special meaning to it which he refers to as an allegory. Many commentators and Bible teachers in dealing with this passage spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the fact that this is not really an allegory, and that we should not look for allegories in the Bible because that is a dangerous way of interpreting the scripture. The point they make is that an allegory is a fictional story designed to teach something. But the difference in the story of Abraham is that it is a true story. And so they say that it would be better to look at this story as typology, and not an allegory.

I don’t think that it really makes a big difference what you call it. I suppose that it’s possible for an allegory to be a true story as well as a fictional one. But I would urge you not to lose sight of the point Paul by an undue focus on the semantics of his statement. Paul says in vs 24, “This is allegorically speaking, for these [women] are two covenants: one [proceeding] from Mount Sinai bearing children who are to be slaves; she is Hagar. Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free; she is our mother.”

Mt. Sinai of course was in the wilderness of Egypt where Moses received the law from God. Hagar is associated with slavery, and thus Mt. Sinai, which in turn Paul says corresponded with the present day Jerusalem, because the Jews were still living under the law. And those under the law Paul says are under their mother Hagar, who is in slavery with her children. The Jews were in bondage to the law. .

But Paul says the Jerusalem from above is free, and she is our mother. Paul speaks of the heavenly Jerusalem. Those born of the promise are miraculously born of the Spirit, not of the flesh and so they are free.

The scriptures have much to say about slavery and freedom, or bondage and freedom. Some have taken such scriptures out of context and espoused what is called liberation theology. I’m not going to take the time to go into that, other than to say that it is an erroneous interpretation of scripture that doesn’t seek individual redemption from the gospel, but a gospel of divine racial liberation.

Jesus said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. Freedom as the gospel speaks of it is freedom from the captivity to sin. We were born naturally in bondage to sin. The seed of the original sin is in each of us from birth so that we do that which is contrary to God.

We used to sing a song in grade school in chorus class, called “Born Free.” Lions may be born free, but humans are not born free. We are born in captivity to sin as the product of original sin which was passed on from father to father all the way back to Adam. That gives rise to another false assumption concerning free will. That man is able, with equal inclination, to decide whether to do good or evil. He can choose to be sinful or choose to be obedient to God.

But there is a difference between natural ability, what I am equipped by nature to do, and spiritual ability, what I am inclined by God to do. I don’t have the natural ability to fly, or the natural ability to live under water. But we do have the natural ability to make choices. We have a will whereby we choose to do somethings and choose not to do somethings. What we don’t have is the spiritual ability to do the things of God. That’s why it is imperative that we are born again of the Spirit. Only the power of God in us can set us free from the bondage to sin. You can choose God if you want to. The problem is before conversion our heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, and is at enmity with God. God has to change our heart in conversion so that we can choose the things of God. We choose to do what we want to do, and only God can change our desires.

So here were these Galatians who had known the joy of their salvation, of being set free from the captivity to sin, of having the freedom of the Spirit working in them. But then these Judaisers had came with their message that said in order to be right with God you had to live like a Jew, you had to go back under the ceremonial laws like circumcision and dietary restrictions and observing certain days and months and years. And they had resignedly said, “ok, we’ll obey the law.” But Paul is asking them, “are you crazy? Why would you want to become a child of slavery again when you have been made a child of promise?”

And then he quotes from scripture again, saying in vs 27 For it is written, “REJOICE, BARREN WOMAN WHO DOES NOT BEAR; BREAK FORTH AND SHOUT, YOU WHO ARE NOT IN LABOR; FOR MORE NUMEROUS ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE DESOLATE THAN OF THE ONE WHO HAS A HUSBAND.” What he basically is saying through this quote is that we can rejoice in the freedom of being children of the promise because of the supernatural divine intervention in our regeneration. Those born of the Spirit are the children of promise, who are free from slavery to the law. But the ones born of the woman of bondage are more numerous. Most people in our culture choose to live under bondage to sin, than to be set free from it. Just like the Israelites that said that they were happier when they lived in Egypt, and wanted to return there. They preferred bondage to freedom.

You know, this is true not only spiritually but politically. I hesitate to get political from the pulpit, but you have to recognize that our society in America seems to prefer bondage to freedom. The laws that are being passed by the lawmakers that we have elected are designed to take away our freedoms and enslave us to a government that tells us what we can and cannot do, and is attempting to control even the way we think. It’s pretty amazing. And yet millions of people are going along with it, and even advocating for slavery over freedom.

Paul says in vs28 “And you brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him [who was born] according to the Spirit, so it is now also.”

Paul calls Galatian Gentiles and all believers “brothers,” saying they are “like Isaac,” and, as such, are “children of promise.” We that believe by faith are all spiritual children of Abraham and Sarah. We have become “children of promise,” descendants of Abraham “like Isaac,” not through natural birth, but spiritual rebirth; not by keeping the law, but by promise; not by works, but by faith. “If you are Christ’s,” Paul wrote back in chapter 3, “then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Gal. 3:29).

That’s a great promise, but there is a catch. As wonderful as it is to be “like Isaac,” a “child of promise,” there is a downside. If we are “like Isaac,” then we can expect to be treated like Isaac by the unbelieving. Vs29 “But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him [who was born] according to the Spirit, so it is now also.“

The apostle Paul doesn’t take the believers’ identification with Isaac where we might have expected him to go. We might have expected him to speak of the blessings of the covenant, or elaborate upon the gifts and privileges of salvation. Instead, he says being “like Isaac” means persecution. The one born “according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit.” The apostle is referring to the “mocking” of Isaac by Ishmael recorded in Genesis 21:9. Ishmael was “born of the flesh,” that is, through human devising, whereas Isaac was “born according to the Spirit.” This mocking by Ishmael of Isaac corresponds to the persecution of believers by those who profess to know God but are ensnared in legalism. Remember, Ishmael was circumcised, a member (by analogy) of the visible church. “So also it is now,” Paul says. This explains why in the early years of the church Judaism persecuted Christianity and why so often the persecution of the church arises from within the church. Christians are often persecuted by their half-brothers — the unbelieving but religious people in the nominal church.

Consequently, being “like Isaac” means separation. The truth of the gospel must not have fellowship with the false gospel of the legalists. What should we do about this conflict between law and grace? The apostle Paul cites the precedent of Genesis 21:10 in which Hagar and Ishmael are “cast out” and not given an inheritance with Isaac. His meaning is clear: both legalism and the legalists are to be excluded from the fellowship of the church. 

Vs30 But what does the Scripture say? “CAST OUT THE BONDWOMAN AND HER SON, FOR THE SON OF THE BONDWOMAN SHALL NOT BE AN HEIR WITH THE SON OF THE FREE WOMAN.” So then, brethren, we are not children of a bondwoman, but of the free woman.

The law keeps you in bondage. We are not of bondage, but children of the free woman. And our inheritance as children of the promise is in the heavenly Jerusalem. Our citizenship is there. Our eternal home is there. Paul draws a contrast between Christianity and legalism, between inheriting all and inheriting nothing. While the “Isaacs” of this world may be persecuted, they are promised a glorious inheritance that the “Ishmaels” of this world will never attain by their works. We are made heirs of God through the principle of grace, not by works, because we are the children of God by faith and not by keeping the law.

I want to take a diversion of sorts this morning from our normal verse by verse exposition of Galatians.  But I do so having been provoked by Paul in chapter 3 of Galatians.  If you will remember, in his argument of faith vs works, Paul introduces the example of Abraham in chapter 3 vs 6.  And throughout the rest of that chapter, Paul makes the point that it is those who are of the faith of Abraham who are the sons of Abraham. 

Now he is making this point because the Judaisers had come into the churches of Galatia and started teaching that you had to keep the law in order to be saved. Particularly, they were concerned with Jewish ceremonial laws, and even more to the point, the law of circumcision. According to the Jews, circumcision was the physical sign that you were a child of Abraham, a child of promise.  And so the Judaisers were teaching that irregardless of what you had done in regards to Christ, you must still be circumcised according to the law in order to be saved, in order to be of the people of God.

So Paul, on the one hand acknowledging that Abraham was the father of the faithful, rebuts the Jews reliance upon the law for merit, and instead goes to what preceded circumcision in Abraham’s life, which had found favor with God. And so he goes to the statement from Genesis 15:6 where the Bible says, “Even so Abraham BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS.”  That’s the quote from Genesis that Paul records in Galatians 3:6.

And then he gives another important statement about faith in vs 11 “Now that no one is justified by the Law before God is evident; for, “THE RIGHTEOUS MAN SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.”  That is a very pregnant saying, for it emphasizes many facets of salvation.  First it indicates that the dead will be made alive by faith.  And secondly it means that we are sanctified by faith.  We live day by day, hour by hour by faith.  Faith is not a one and done proposition, by which we say “I believe in Jesus Christ” but it’s only a very superficial type of intellectual assent to a doctrinal truth.  But we haven’t had to put real trust in Jesus Christ in regards to life and how we live. To trust Christ in life or death situation is really the test of faith. And the scriptures say the righteous man shall live by faith.

Paul goes on to speak in chapter 3 of Abraham’s faith as the critical gate by which Abraham received the blessings of God and given the covenant of God.  He then extrapolates from that, that we who believe in Christ by faith, with the same faith as Abraham, becomes sons of God, vs 26, and are made descendants of Abraham, and thus heirs according to promise. Vs 29.

Now that illustration of Abraham’s faith is instructive if you are well versed in the Genesis account as most Jews would have been, but it seemed to me that it behooves most 21st century Christians to take a refresher course on the life of Abraham that we might understand the kind of faith that Abraham had, if we are to have all the promises and blessings of God hinged upon our faith, which is to be the same kind of faith of Abraham.  

So I wanted to take the time this morning to go back to Abraham’s life and see what we can learn by his example what constitutes faith.  The first example I want to look at is found in Genesis 12.  God appeared to Abraham and said “Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you;  And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing;  And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”  So Abram went forth as the LORD had spoken to him; and Lot went with him. Now Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.”

Now this is the first recorded example of Abraham’s faith.  The scripture doesn’t specifically say there that it was  on account of this faith in this example God credited him with righteousness.  But it is evident from Hebrews 11 that this was the first evidence of his faith. Heb 11:8 “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going.”  And Abraham’s faith in this case is made evident by his obedience.  God told him to go, He made certain promises to Abraham, and Abraham obeyed and did what God said for him to do.   

So faith is being obedient to what God says.  Faith is more than just an intellectual assent, it’s trusting in what God said enough to be obedient to it. In Abraham’s case it meant leaving his home, taking his family and all his belongings and heading out to a place where God told him to go. Faith is being willing to change course, to follow the Lord.

Let me briefly explain the theological basis for faith. The Protestant Reformers recognized that biblical faith has three essential aspects: Latin; notitia, assensus, and fiducia. Notitia refers to the content of faith, the things necessary that we are to  believe. Assensus is the conviction that the content of our faith is true. Fiducia refers to personal trust and reliance.Knowing and believing the content of the Christian faith is not enough, for even demons can do that (James 2:19). Faith is effectual only if one personally trusts in Christ alone for their life.  Now in Abraham’s case, his obedience was evidence that he trusted in God.

The second prime example of faith in Abraham’s life is found in Genesis 15. “After these things ( after settling in Canaan and the war of the kings) the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Do not fear, Abram, I am a shield to you; Your reward shall be very great.” Abram said, “O Lord GOD, what will You give me, since I am childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?”  And Abram said, “Since You have given no offspring to me, one born in my house is my heir.”  Then behold, the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “This man will not be your heir; but one who will come forth from your own body, he shall be your heir.” And He took him outside and said, “Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.”  Then he believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.” 

So Abraham believed in the word of the Lord and He reckoned it, or credited it to him as righteousness. Faith is believing in the promises of God.  That which has not yet come to pass. That which cannot be ascertained by human methods of reason.  Yet he believed.  Notice something about the revelation from the Lord.  The Lord appears in a dream or vision or by some other means again and again to Abraham. And each time the Lord speaks to him, he gives him more revelation.  It’s what is called progressive revelation.  We believe what the Lord reveals to us, we obey His word, and then the Lord leads us further.  He gives us more revelation as we are obedient to the revelation given. 

We often want to see the final outcome before we make a commitment.  Or we don’t want to make a commitment without a guaranteed outcome. That’s not really faith. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” That’s not a riddle, that’s a definition of faith. Faith that is seen is not faith.  That’s the trouble with the teaching of the charismatics who love to talk about faith.  But they always want their faith to be given evidence.  And yet evidence is rarely given, otherwise it is no longer faith. And as the scripture says, the righteous shall live by faith.  Not the righteous shall live by sight.

So Abraham believed that God would give him a child according to the word of the Lord.  And yet ten years went by and still no child came.  So Abraham did what most of us would have done after even one year of waiting – he tried to help God out.  He took matters into his own hand. And he and Sarah took her handmaid Hagar, and Abraham had a son by her that they named Ishmael. But Ishmael was not the son of the promise.  It was the son of Abraham’s folly.

Finally after waiting for 25 years, and after being reminded again and again of God’s promise, Sarah conceived.  Paul spoke of it in Rom 4:19-22 saying,  “Without becoming weak in faith he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb;  yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform.  Therefore IT WAS ALSO CREDITED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS.

I think Paul makes it clear there that it wasn’t just a one time faith that Abraham had but a continued faith, an unwavering faith over 25 years of being told the promises of God that God rewarded.  Finally though with the birth of his son, Abraham could believe all that the Lord had promised him because he had seen God do a miraculous thing by giving him a son in his old age.  Nothing was too difficult for God. The birth of Isaac was undoubtedly on a mountain top experience in the faith of Abraham.

A lot of people today expect that sort of exuberance and joy of seeing God fulfill His promises to be the predominant experience of faith.  But they fail to realize that Abraham waited 25 years for that promise to be realized.  But as a people who have been trained by the culture to expect instant gratification we have a desire to see God do the miraculous.  And if we are truthful, our faith is dependent upon God doing the miraculous in order to keep our faith going.  But if the miraculous doesn’t come, or at least come in our time frame, then what happens to our faith? What kind of faith do we really have?

So sometimes God tests our faith.  Not to make us fail, but to prove our faith, to make evident our faith, and to grow our faith. Jesus rebuked the disciples once for being of little faith. Our faith must grow if it is to be living faith. And part of the way our faith grows is by testing. 

Turn to the final primary example of Abraham’s faith, which is found in Genesis 22. And I believe this example is the pinnacle of Abraham’s faith and one to which we would do well to contemplate.  

Gen 22:1-8 “Now it came about after these things, that God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”  He said, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.”  So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son; and he split wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.  On the third day Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from a distance.  Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go over there; and we will worship and return to you.”  Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together.  Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”  Abraham said, “God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.

Now a couple of things that we should notice to start with.  First note that God tested Abraham. Tested is not the same as tempted.  James 1:13 says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone.”  But God does test people for the purpose of proving their faith, of building up their faith, and of giving evidence of their faith. When we are tested and come through it, our faith is stronger, it’s more sure and certain.

Secondly, God made it clear that He considered Isaac as Abraham’s only son. If Abraham had a choice, he would perhaps have offered up Ishmael.  But God did not consider Ishmael to be the son of promise, as God had made to Sarah and Abraham. And we don’t know exactly how old Isaac was when Abraham was given this command. But if you took an average from what most commentators and Bible scholars have suggested, then it’s likely he was a young man of about 22 or so.  So he is no child.

Another important illustration of Abraham’s faith in this example is his willingness to obey. It’s understood from the context that Abraham received the word of God at night, perhaps in a vision, and he arose early in the morning and started on the journey.  He didn’t procrastinate. He didn’t make excuses why.  He didn’t pray about it.  That’s a good excuse a lot of Christians use to keep from obeying the Lord. They sanctimoniously say, “I’ll pray about it.”  If God said it in His word, you don’t need to be acting like Balam the wicked prophet and try to talk God out of it. Abraham didn’t delay, he got up early and took two servants and his son Isaac and started a three day journey to Mt. Moriah.

Then Abraham makes two statements which give evidence of his faith.  The first is when they arrive after 3 days near Mt. Moriah, Abraham says to the servants, “”Stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go over there; and we will worship and return to you.”  Some theologians have suggested that Abraham said this with his fingers crossed. I don’t think so.  I think this was an assurance of faith on Abraham’s part.  He could not have known how God would do it, but he knew that if God was going to keep His promises, then Isaac was going to have to live long enough to get married and have children.  I think he really thought of it that way and so he said that one way or another, he and his son would come back to them.

There is so much in this story of Abraham’s faith in sacrificing Isaac, that I wish I could speak to this morning.  But I really wanted just to focus on the faith of Abraham.  But I can’t help but point out something that I have stated before.  This is the first time the word “worship” is found in the Bible.  And if you follow the rule of hermeneutics, this is an example of the rule of first mention; which indicates the meaning of a word as it is used for the first time in scripture.  And you will notice that worship is equated with a sacrifice.  I think contemporary Christianity has dumbed down worship to the point of being nothing but a surge of emotion. No, according to Abraham, worship is to offer to the Lord God a sacrifice.

Paul thinks the same, saying in Romans 12:1, “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, [which is] your spiritual service of worship.”  Think about that.  I don’t have the time right now to spend on it that it deserves.

But we know that Abraham had faith to believe that God would somehow restore Isaac even though He had told Abraham to sacrifice him.  And we know that because of Heb 11:17-19  which says, “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was offering up his only begotten [son;]  [it was he] to whom it was said, “IN ISAAC YOUR DESCENDANTS SHALL BE CALLED.”  He considered that God is able to raise [people] even from the dead, from which he also received him back as a type.” So Abraham believed that if necessary, God was able to raise Isaac from the dead.  And he believed it because of the promise of God.

That word type found there in Hebrews indicates that this story of Abraham and Isaac is a prefigurement of God sending Jesus Christ to die on the cross for us.  And we see that illustrated even in details such as Isaac carrying the wood for the sacrifice, just as Jesus bore His own cross.  But then Isaac asks the question, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

And Abraham’s response is a tremendous statement of faith and at the same time a Messianic prophecy.  He said, “God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” 

You know, in all the years I have read about this subject, and heard messages on this subject, I don’t remember hearing too much about the faith of Isaac.  But I think that there is a silent message of Isaacs faith and submission and obedience to his father and ultimately to God that what He has promised is true.  Abraham’s probably around 120 years old by now.  Isaac is around 22 years old.  I think that would not be much of a contest under most circumstances, if the young man knew his dadW was going to sacrifice him on an altar.  But Isaac obviously submitted to his father and was obedient, and by extension showed that he had faith in God as well.  

Faith in God? What does that mean? Faith that God was good.  That God’s word was true and could be trusted. That if God promised it, God would accomplish it. Faith that they could trust their very lives to God.  Faith that if Isaac died, God would raise him up again.  Faith that God would provide.

And we know that God did provide a substitute for the sacrifice.  As Abraham raised his knife to slay his son, God said “Stop!”  “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”  Isn’t it interesting that God considers Abraham’s faith to be obedient as fearing God. Revering God above all else is to fear God. Obeying God is to fear God.

Gen 22:13 “Then Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind [him] a ram caught in the thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of his son.”

And Abraham called that place, Jehovah-Jireh, which means, the Lord will provide.  And God said because you have done this thing, you didn’t withhold your only son, not only will I bless you exceedingly, but  “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.”

And Paul tells us in chapter 3 vs 16, that the seed, singular, referred to Christ, though whom the nations who believe in Him by faith will be blessed.  And God kept his promise.  Two thousand years after Abraham God took his only begotten Son, the Son of God and descendant of Abraham, the Son whom He loved, and offered Him up on that same Mt. Moriah as a sacrifice, a substitute for sinners.  Only this time, no one yelled “Stop”.   God carried out HIs wrath against sin by crucifying His Son, so that we that believe in Him might be given life and receive the blessing of God.  That blessing is life, even eternal life through Jesus Christ.  

I hope that you have trusted in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as the atonement for your sins, that you may be credited with the righteousness of Jesus Christ and be given the blessing of God, which is life forever with Him.  

One of the dangers, I suppose, of putting my address on public announcements or advertising, is that people know where you live. I had a visitor a few nights ago who I hope was not prowling about my house after dark. He did however leave a letter on my mailbox addressed to me. So it was evident that he knows me, but he didn’t sign it, which is kind of concerning that he wants to be anonymous.

The bottom line of the letter he left was to inform me that generations of Bible teachers and scholars have gotten wrong the date of the Sabbath. I didn’t want to waste my time reading all the information there, but the gist of it was that if you recalculate the Sabbath based on their calendar, then you come up with another day for the Sabbath that we are to worship on, which is the correct day. And their opinion was that worshipping on the proper Sabbath was the missing key to spiritual knowledge and power.

But as I said, I didn’t want to waste time reading about moon cycles and all that sort of thing because it was evident that they got the basic principle of the gospel wrong. Their idea was that if you keep the law of the Sabbath, then you unlock the blessing of God. And so once I realized that was the gist of the letter, I discarded it. The apostle Paul has been making arguing this principle in his letter to the Galatians, that there is not salvation by faith plus keeping the law. We are not under the obligation to keep the law of the Sabbath. There is no benefit to keep the law of the Sabbath, or as Paul was arguing here in Galatians, to keep the law of circumcision, or any of the other ceremonial laws. Paul has argued conclusively that the law is not a means of righteousness, nor of salvation. So no matter what sort of pseudo science, or Biblical research, or whatever else they might use to try to entice you with, if it speaks of the necessity for keeping some point of the law, then they are of a false doctrine, and we need to disregard it and not let it upset our faith.

Now in regards to arguing that doctrine of salvation by faith alone, in Galatians chapter 3, Paul is giving a scholarly treatise on the purpose of the law, versus the promise of faith. It’s almost like when the Supreme Court makes a decision on a law, and then one of the leading judges writes an opinion. Paul is using a very technical, almost legal argument to establish the purpose of the law as a means of refuting the false doctrine that had pervaded the church. These false teachers were legalists, and so Paul uses a legal argument to defeat them.

But I will say that his message is difficult to comprehend sometimes. I have heard that supposedly there are 300 or so interpretations of this passage that have been broached over the years. So even Bible scholars are not always in agreement as to what Paul is saying exactly in some cases. However, I think we can focus on what is clear and plain, and perhaps what is unclear will be explained by the context.

So we’re picking up his argument in the middle of the chapter, vs 15, and I don’t want to have to regurgitate everything that has been said up to this point. But it is important to look back to vs 8 and following and remember that Paul has used Abraham as an illustration of faith in contrast to the false teachers reliance upon Moses and the law. Paul isn’t saying that Moses or the law was bad, but he points them back to Abraham to show that salvation by faith preceded the giving of the law, just as Abraham’s salvation was by faith before he was circumcised.

He says in vs 8, “So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer.” And he concludes that argument in vs 14 saying, “in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” Now that phrase “In Christ” is a very important phrase that Paul is going to use again in this next section. Being in Christ is the means by which we are made the children of God, and the children of Abraham, and the inheritors of the promises or the blessing.

So let’s continue now in vs 15, Paul says, “Brethren, I speak in terms of human relations: even though it is [only] a man’s covenant, yet when it has been ratified, no one sets it aside or adds conditions to it.” He says in other words, I am speaking in human terms, but in men’s covenants, once a covenant has been ratified, no one can change it or add to it. A covenant is a legal agreement between two parties. And ratified means it has been agreed to, or signed by both parties. Once a legal covenant has been ratified, you can’t just arbitrarily add to it or take from it. That’s pretty much common to law everywhere.

Vs16 “Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as [referring] to many, but [rather] to one, “And to your seed,” that is, Christ. 17 What I am saying is this: the Law, which came four hundred and thirty years later, does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise. 18 For if the inheritance is based on law, it is no longer based on a promise; but God has granted it to Abraham by means of a promise.”

So the first thing Paul does here is apply the principle of a human covenant to the covenant God made with Abraham. And in vs 15, he is identifying who is involved in the covenant. And what he says it is was made by God to Abraham and to his seed. And Paul gives us some insight there that may not have been clear in the Genesis account, and says that it wasn’t given to Abraham’s seeds, plural, but seed, singular. He then tells us that signifies that the seed was Christ, the Messiah, through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. And according to vs 4, what God promised Abraham constitutes the gospel.

Then what he adds in vs 17, is that the Mosaic law, which came 430 years after Abraham was given the covenant, does not invalidate the covenant made to Abraham and his seed. It had been ratified by God, and thus the law cannot nullify the covenant promise made to Abraham that through Him all the nations would be blessed.

Vs 18, For if the inheritance is based on law, it is no longer based on a promise; but God has granted it to Abraham by means of a promise.” So in other words, the inheritance promised to Abraham was not based on keeping the law. The law didn’t come for 430 years later. God gave His promise based on Abraham’s faith, not on the condition that Abraham kept the law. So the illustration shows that salvation is based on faith, not on law. The law cannot affect salvation by faith.

The question then on the minds of the legalists would be, then what was the purpose of the law? We know that God gave the law to Moses at Mt. Sinai. What purpose was there in giving the law, if it wasn’t to provide a path to salvation?

Paul answers that question in vs19 “Why the Law then? It was added because of transgressions, having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator, until the seed would come to whom the promise had been made. Now a mediator is not for one party only; whereas God is [only] one.”

I think what Paul is saying in “the law was added because of transgressions,” is that because of sin, God gave the law to elucidate sin more clearly. Sin existed before the law, of course. But sin became clearer, more condemning if you will, after the law was given. The law clarified sin, it made it more apparent, it made it more condemning. The law showed the extent of sin and how sinful man really was. I think the law also revealed God’s standard for righteousness more clearly. But basically Paul says the law made sin more sinful.

Paul says the law was given until the seed would come to whom the promise had been made. The law was given until Jesus came, who then fulfilled the law, and He became the curse of the law for us, that we might be sent free from the condemnation of the law.

Now vs 20 talks about angels and mediators and is really one of the most confusing and obscure texts in the NT. What it might be referring to, is that the Mosaic law was given through a mediator, which is typical in a two party covenant. But in a unilateral covenant, such as God made with Abraham, there is no mediator. But that still doesn’t answer all the questions about this verse. However we will press on to plainer things and leave the not so plain things for God to reveal as He sees fit. The plain thing to remember is that the law was given to make sin more sinful, more apparent, more clear. It was to make man more aware of his sin.

Paul continues with a question of his own regarding the law in vs 21 “Is the Law then contrary to the promises of God? May it never be! For if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law. But the Scripture has shut up everyone under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.”

Paul says that the law is not something evil, in opposition to God’s promise. The problem with the law is found in its inability to give life. In reality, the law brings death because it shows that man is sinful, and the wages of sin is death. If the law could have given life, then it could have produced righteousness. But the Law of Moses brings no life; it simply states the standard of God, tells us to keep it, and tells us the consequences if we break the command.

Paul uses in vs 21 the idea of imprisonment as an illustration of the law. Sin, brought about by failure to keep the law, holds us captive. The law then put us in prison, because it pointed out our sinful condition. So we sit imprisoned by sin, and the law can not help us, because the law put us in the prison. Under the law, there is none righteous, no not one. We are all sinners, condemned to death and held captive.

Only faith can break us out of our imprisonment to sin. The Law of Moses can show us clearly our problem and God’s standard, but it cannot give us the freedom that only Christ can give. That freedom is given to those who believe.

Vs.23 “But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. 24 Therefore the Law has become our tutor [to lead us] to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.”

What I think Paul means there is before faith in Christ came. Faith existed since the beginning. But faith in Christ was not revealed util Jesus came. Until that time that Christ came, we were kept captive under the law. Paul says one of the most insightful comments about the purpose of the law in vs 24, “Therefore the Law has become our tutor [to lead us] to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.”

That’s the purpose of the law, to teach us that we need a Savior. It’s to show us our sinfulness, to reveal our hopelessness, so that we might come to Christ who is our satisfaction of the requirement of the law. And by believing in Him, we are justified by faith. We believe in who He is, in what He has done on the cross, and by believing, our sin is transferred to Christ, and His righteousness is transferred to me.

Vs25 “But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.” The illustration Paul is using there of a tutor is someone who was given responsibility for the proper upbringing of a young person. He was a school teacher, but even more than that, he was responsible for training and development. A lot of times in that culture he would have been a slave, but a very educated slave. However, in Paul’s simile, when the boy becomes a man, the need for a tutor is done away with. When the perfect comes, the partial is done away with. When salvation through faith in Christ is realized, then there is no longer any need for the tutor.

When Paul says you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, he is establishing two important distinctives of our faith. One is our standing before God. To be considered the sons of God means that we have a special relationship with God as a loving Father. Our standing with God is a place of intimacy, a place of affection, a place of special care and attention.

And the second thing Paul establishes is the method of becoming sons of God. It is by faith. To become a son of God through faith in Christ Jesus means much more than believing that He existed, but in who He is, what He accomplished for us on the cross, and trusting in Him for life now and for eternity.

Then in closing, Paul tells us what it means to be considered “in Christ.” He says in vs27 “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Notice that Paul doesn’t say we were baptized into water, but baptized into Christ. Just as in water baptism a person is immersed in water, so when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, we are immersed in Jesus. We put on Jesus. We are in Jesus, just as when you put on clothes you are in your clothes. That’s the analogy that he is making, as evidenced by the phrase, “have clothed yourselves with Christ.”

It’s like the song we sing, the Solid Rock, where it says, “dressed in His righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne.” So when we were saved by faith, we received the righteousness of Christ, so that we are in effect baptized into Christ, clothed with Christ. That’s what it means to be in Christ. When God looks at us, He sees us dressed in Christ’s righteousness.

Then Paul addresses the blessings of being in Christ. He gives the first benefit in vs 28” There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” We all belong, irregardless of race, of sex, of social status or heritage. All of us who have confessed faith in Jesus Christ are one in Christ. We are all equal. No distinctions. No one is less a possessor of the promise because they are not a Jew by birth.

Vs29 “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.” Paul comes full circle, back to Abraham, the father of the faith. Those who have come to Christ by faith, belong to Christ, and we all can claim Abraham as our father. And as spiritual descendants of Abraham, we are heirs according to the promise.

Paul describes this in Romans chapter 4:13, 16-17 saying, “For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith. … 16 For this reason [it is] by faith, in order that [it may be] in accordance with grace, so that the promise will be guaranteed to all the descendants, not only to those who are of the Law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, 17 (as it is written, “A FATHER OF MANY NATIONS HAVE I MADE YOU”) in the presence of Him whom he believed, [even] God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.

The crux of the argument then is whether or not you are in Christ. This is the issue. The issue is not “Are you keeping the law?” The issue is not “Are you a Jew or a Gentile?” The only issue is if you are in Christ. Do you belong to Him? Have you accepted Him by faith as your Savior? Are you clothed in His righteousness? If so then you receive the promise of blessing that God gave to Abraham and to His seed. You receive eternal life. You receive forgiveness of your sins. And you become a child of God, an heir of God. You receive an eternal inheritance. Trust Jesus today that you might be found “In Christ.”

Paul has written this letter to the Galatians to counter false teaching which has entered the churches in Galatia.  He had founded these churches, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe and others during his first missionary trip.  But in no time at all, Jews from Jerusalem had come to the churches and spread a malicious doctrine that you had to conform to Jewish law, particularly that of circumcision and other ceremonial laws, in order to be truly saved.

So Paul spent the first two chapters of his letter reestablishing his apostleship and authority in giving them the gospel.  Now he adds to that the argument against this false teaching by means of theology.

There are three arguments that we are going to look at in the message this morning, and the first is an argument from Christian experience. Paul asks the Galatians to look back over their past and to analyze some of the things that happened to them as the apostle preached the gospel to them.

The first is a question regarding the reception of the Holy Spirit. He says in vs1 “You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed [as] crucified?” The KJV, which I prefer in this case, adds the phrase; ”Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth?  They had deviated from the truth of the gospel because they had been bewitched.

The word foolish there does not mean they were mentally deficient.  Instead, Paul used the ancient Greek word anoetos, which had the idea of someone who can think but fails to use their power of perception. Paul uses a lot of word play in this passage about eyes, or seeing.  So he is accusing them of being spiritually blind.

He also accuses the Galatians of being bewitched. This Greek word that is used here is a rather interesting word. It was used of individuals who had magical powers. In fact, it was often the equivalent of what we mean when we speak of someone casting an evil eye upon someone else. The Greeks had a great fear of the “evil eye.” I am sometimes accused of giving other surfers who want to take my wave the stink eye.  That’s not a very loving thing to do to your neighbor, and I’m sure I am not guilty of it as frequently as I am accused of.  However, I think the stink eye and the evil eye are not the same thing.

The evil eye was thought to work in the way a serpent could hypnotize its prey with its eyes. Once the victim looked into the evil eye, a spell could be cast. Therefore, the way to overcome the evil eye was simply not to look at it. In using this phrasing and the word picture of bewitched, Paul was urging the Galatians to keep their eyes focused steadfastly upon Jesus.

The trouble with the Galatians, to put is simply, was “eye trouble.” They had been bewitched by the Judaisers who had a laid and evil eye upon them so to speak.  They had turned from the sole-sufficiency of Jesus Christ, and were attracted to the doctrine that one must not only believe in the Lord Jesus but also be circumcised in order to be saved.

Now what makes it even more ridiculous is that the apostle says that he had publicly portrayed the Lord among them. The idea behind publicly portrayed is something like “billboarded,” to publicly display as in setting on a billboard. Paul wondered how the Galatians could have missed the message because he certainly made it clear enough to them. He had billboarded the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Paul plays on the idea of eyes and “evil eyes.” He says, “Who has laid an evil eye on you? Before whose eyes Jesus Christ has been publicly portrayed as crucified.” The emphasis is on a crucified Jesus. He proclaimed him as crucified in the sense that his sufferings were looked at as atoning sufferings.  Christ’s crucifixion was proclaimed as the sole-sufficiency for human salvation.  If salvation came through the law, then it would not have been necessary for Christ to be crucified.

Now he asks another question of the Galatians in vs 2 “This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?” Of course, the answer to that was very simple, because the Galatians were Gentiles and did not have the Law of Moses, and chances are that they didn’t know a great deal about the Law of Moses. And so, when they received the Holy Spirit it could only have been by the hearing of faith, not by doing the works of the Law. 

It’s also important to understand that when he says received the Holy Spirit he is talking about salvation.  Salvation is being born of the Spirit.  You cannot be saved without the Holy Spirit entering in a person.  Rom 8:9 says “However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.”  To be born again is to be born of the Spirit.  You received the Spirit when you are justified by faith.  So the answer to that question is they had received the Spirit by faith, not by keeping the law.

Then he asks them another question. He says in the third verse, “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” In other words,  you received the Spirit by believing in the Lord Jesus, and now are you to take the second step in salvation by being circumcised?  Is salvation really a two step procedure, faith and then the observance of the rite of circumcision? And the idea of perfection there means simply completion. As if there was something not yet completed that was necessary.

When a person comes to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and is born into the family of God, he does not need to take other steps in order to complete his salvation. He does not need to believe in Christ and then be baptized, or be circumcised, or keep the Sabbath, or take communion, or any such thing.  The Spirit is the means by which we are born again, saved, and there is nothing that you can add in the flesh that will complete salvation.  You were born complete, in the sense that you have all that is required for new birth.  You were justified by receiving Christ’s righteousness applied to your account.  You have received a new nature.  You have received the Spirit of Christ. And all of that is by grace, the gift of God. There is nothing else that must be added to be a complete, new creation.

Now, that third question is one that concerns the manifestation of the Spirit. Vs4-5  “Did you suffer ( a better translation might be experience) so many things in vain–if indeed it was in vain?  So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?”

You remember if you turn over to Acts chapter 14 and read that chapter, that when the apostle was in Iconium that God testified to the work, to the preaching of the word, by “signs and wonders.” Those are the specific words of Luke when he wrote the 14th chapter of the Book of Acts. So when the apostles came there, they manifested the signs of an apostle, the miraculous gifts. Paul says in 2 Cor. 12:12  “Truly the signs of an apostle were accomplished among you with all perseverance, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds.” Signs and wonders were the evidence that they were apostles.  And Paul says they came by the Spirit as they were preaching Jesus Christ.

 Paul asks, “So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Again, the Law was unknown to these Gentiles in Iconium and Lystra, and Derbe, The answer was obvious. These mighty works were done through the hearing of faith, not through the works of the Law. So the apostle, then asking the Galatians to look back over their past experience, has in effect said to them, “There is no indication that the spiritual life into which you have been brought came from works of the Law at all. It has come on the basis of grace through faith.”

Now the Galatians had been taught to recognize the fact that in the final analysis, an argument on spiritual things must be grounded in the word of God, because that’s the final proof of all of the truth. So now he turns to the Scriptures. And you probably have noticed in reading through these verses that the apostle cites about six passages from the Old Testament in this next section. In most Bible versions the Old Testament references are in capital letters or in italics so that you can recognize them.  In verse 6, there is a quotation from the Old Testament, “Even so Abraham BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS.”

Let us make sure that we don’t rush past the word faith. Faith is believing.  Believing is faith.  But notice Abraham is not justified because he believed in God.  As in he believed that God existed.  The Bible says that the devils believe and tremble, but they are not saved.  Simply believing in God does not save you.  Notice Abraham believed God. He believed  God’s word.  He believed that what God said was true. He believed that what God said He would do, He did.  That’s what it means to believe on Christ.  It’s not just to believe that Jesus walked the earth, otherwise thousands of Jews who saw Him during His earthly ministry were saved.  But those who were saved believed Him. They believed  who He claimed to be. What He did.  They believed His word. So we need to make sure we know what constitutes faith in God.

Now among the Galatian Christians, the push towards a works based relationship with God came from certain other professing Christians who were born as Jews and who claimed Abraham as their spiritual ancestor. Therefore, Paul used Abraham as an example of being justified before God by faith and not by faith plus works. So he’s arguing from the word of God now for his truth.

It’s interesting to notice the man Paul turns to for illustration more than anyone else, other than Christ. He turns to Abraham. Abraham is the perfect illustration of a man whose life rests upon faith. God appeared to him as an act of sovereign grace, turned him to Himself, brought him to faith in Him, and his whole life is an expression of a life of faith. 

The Judaisers had a favorite OT character as well; they favored Moses. And Moses was important. You certainly cannot understand the Old Testament if you don’t understand the contribution that Moses made. But in the final analysis, Moses was a man who introduced a system, which was a temporary system. It was a system that foreshadowed what was to come.  But Moses’ system was not the final solution.  Abraham, of course, preceded Moses, and in a sense Moses emanated from Abraham.

Now, the reason why Abraham is such a beautiful illustration is, because when a person believed in the days of the Old Testament, he became a true member of the covenant. Ideally all of the children of Israel belonged to the covenant, and in a symbol of that, they gave testimony to it by circumcision the males on the eighth day. That was a sign and a seal of the righteousness, which came by faith. But as so often happens, the sign and the seal became the primary things. And men were identified as the possessors of righteousness if they had been circumcised. But the essential inward necessity of faith was forgotten.

Even in the Christian church, the fact that a person is a member of a Christian church does not mean that he is a Christian, except in a superficial sense only. A true Christian is a person who has believed in our Lord Jesus Christ and who has a personal faith in the Redeemer, the Messiah.  And in the Old Testament, no man was a true Jew, a true Israelite, who did not also have faith in the Messiah who was to come. “Not all who are of Israel are Israel,” the apostle states. So it is important for us to remember that in the Christian church, one must have a faith in Christ before he is a true Christian, and in the Old Testament dispensation one must have a true faith in the Christ (Messiah) to come before a Jewish man is really a covenant Jew in the spiritual sense. 

Now, Paul makes an argument similar to this in Romans chapter 4, and he asks the question, “Does justification come by circumcision? No,” he says, “it’s very simple; all you have to do is look at Genesis chapter 17, and Genesis chapter 15.” In Genesis chapter 15 Abraham is credited with righteousness, but in Genesis chapter 17, he is circumcised. And so, since chapter 15 precedes chapter 17, and a man, such as Abraham is pronounced righteous in Genesis chapter 15, it’s not because he was circumcised, which is not recorded until chapter 17. 

That’s what he’s talking about in vs7 when he says, “Therefore, be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham.” If you, sitting in this audience today, have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore, are of faith, you are as he says, a son of Abraham.

And then in vs 8, he says, “The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, [saying,] “ALL THE NATIONS WILL BE BLESSED IN YOU.” Notice all the nations, in other words, the Gentiles were blessed in Abraham. Do you realize that you are a son or daughter of Abraham? You are, if you have believed in Jesus Christ unto salvation.  Vs9, ”So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer.”

This would have been a shocking challenge to the thinking of these Judaisers. They deeply believed that they had a standing before God because they were genetically descended from Abraham. Jewish Rabbis taught that Abraham stood at the gates of Hell just to make sure that none of his descendants accidentally slipped by. John the Baptist dealt with this same mindset when he said, “Do not think to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones.” (Matthew 3:9). Paul here debunks their reliance on their genetic relation to Abraham and showed that what really mattered was those that shared in the faith of Abraham. 

Now, finally the apostle will argue from the negative. He will argue from the curse of the Law. And he will show that if a man does put himself under Law, he puts himself under the curse, a curse that can only be cured by our Lord Jesus Christ. Look at the 10th verse, in which he speaks of the condemnation of the Law. “For as many as are of the works of the Law are under a curse; for it is written, “CURSED IS EVERYONE WHO DOES NOT ABIDE BY ALL THINGS WRITTEN IN THE BOOK OF THE LAW, TO PERFORM THEM.”  He is appealing to Deuteronomy chapter 27, vs 26, “‘Cursed is the one who does not confirm all the words of this law by observing them.’  All the words of the Law. You cannot pick some to keep and some to disregard.  You are under the curse of all the law.

The legalist’s view is do and live.  Not that they can keep all the law, of course.  But the Christian’s view is believe and live.  John 20:31 says,  “but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.”  And 1 John 5:13 says,  “These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.”  It should be clear from scripture that spiritual life comes through faith.  

Verse 11 and 12 says, “Now that no one is justified by the Law before God is evident; for, “THE RIGHTEOUS MAN SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.”  However, the Law is not of faith; on the contrary, “HE WHO PRACTICES THEM SHALL LIVE BY THEM.” If you’re going to try to gain heaven by keeping the law, then you need to understand that the standard for acceptance is 100% perfection.  Not that your good deeds and your bad deeds are put on a scale, and if the scale tips on the good side then you get in.  That’s not how heaven works. You must keep the entire law perfectly, which no man can do.   So if you are at this moment not perfect, what you need is a remedy for a law breaker, because that’s what you are.

Now fortunately, Paul, in the 13th verse, gives us the remedy. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us–for it is written, “CURSED IS EVERYONE WHO HANGS ON A TREE.”   The idea of redemption came from the practices of ancient warfare. After a battle the victors would take captive those who were defeated. Among the defeated, the poorer ones would usually be sold as slaves, but the wealthy and important men, the men who mattered in their own country, were held for ransom. When the people in their homeland had raised the required price, they would pay it to the victors and the captives would be set free. The process was called redemption, and the price was called the ransom.  The price for breaking the law was death, and Christ paid that price for us. He redeemed us from the curse of the law.

So when he says that he has been made a curse for us, it is evident that he means that Christ has paid the penal judgment for our sins. And when he says that Christ has borne the curse for us, he means that Christ has borne the penalty of the broken Law for us. As Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:21, “God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” 

Someone has said that the story of substitutionary atonement is shown in three prepositions here in this passage. Verse 10 says, “For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse.” This is the curse, and this is I. I am under the curse. Notice the preposition under. Then in the 13th verse we read, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.” Now the word “for” is a Greek preposition which really has the idea of over. So here am I under the curse, but Christ has been made a curse for us, over us, so that now he has intervened between the curse and myself, so that the curse, when it falls, falls upon him, and it does not fall upon me. Further, he has just said, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law,” a preposition that means “out from.” So that as a result of the curse falling upon him, I am out from under the curse. Theology in three prepositions, under, over, out from. Christ became the curse for us. ”For it is written, Cursed is every one that hangs on a tree.” 

And the consequences of Jesus becoming cursed for us is  that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. What’s the blessing of Abraham? Well, justification first and foremost. I stand before God credited with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. I have a righteousness that is acceptable to God, by virtue of what Christ has done. In addition, I have been given life, “For the just shall live by faith.” And that life is by and through the possession of the Holy Spirit.  And thirdly, as it says in James 2:23 “AND ABRAHAM BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS,” and he was called the friend of God.”

We are made the friends of God by virtue of Christ’s righteousness.  We are born into the family of God.  We receive an inheritance that will never fade away.  We gain citizenship in the kingdom of God.  We receive everlasting life.  That’s just some of the blessings of Abraham that we  also receive.  1Cor. 2:9 “but just as it is written, “THINGS WHICH EYE HAS NOT SEEN AND EAR HAS NOT HEARD, AND [which] HAVE NOT ENTERED THE HEART OF MAN, ALL THAT GOD HAS PREPARED FOR THOSE WHO LOVE HIM.”

I hope that if you are here today and have not believed on Jesus Christ for the remission of your sins, then you would simply receive Him today as your Lord and Savior.  There is no work that you can do to gain salvation.  Jesus did the work, He paid the price, He took your curse upon Himself that you might be set free. If you will just call upon Him today you will be saved, and receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that you might have eternal life.  Today is the acceptable day of salvation.  Call on Him today.  [ohn 1:12  “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, [even] to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”