The Righteous Will Live By Faith

Understanding Paul’s Argument

in Galatians

Joshua Nickel

Copyright © 2013 Joshua Nickel

All Rights Reserved

Scripture quotations from the Old Testament are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations from the New Testament are the author’s translation.

“No one loves the law by nature; and that is great sin. Grace, however, makes the law dear to us; then sin is no longer present, and the law is no longer against us but one with us.”

Martin Luther, 1522

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE

1. The Curse of the Law

2. Impossible Righteousness

3. The Ministry of Condemnation

4. The Gospel of Moses

PART TWO

5. Living by the Law

6. The Veil of Moses

7. Unbearable by Design

8. The Ministry of Righteousness

PART THREE

9. The Temporary Guardian

10. The Principle Elements

11. The Conflict at Antioch

12. Freedom in the Spirit

Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

APPENDICES

A: Galatians 1-2 compared with Acts 9, 11, and 15

B: Paul’s conflict with Peter at Antioch

C: Alternative interpretation of Galatians 2:17-18

D: Alternative translation of Galatians 3:11-12

E: Romans: Paul clarifies and defends his argument

A note from the author

INTRODUCTION

The history of Christianity would have turned out very differently had it not been for the stubbornness of one man.

That man, Paul the apostle, should not have been that influential. The church of the early first century was a dynamic movement, several thousand persons strong and growing. It had many leaders who had closely followed Jesus from the very beginning. The apostle Paul was not one of them. In fact, he wasn’t even an apostle, depending on who you asked. According to some within the movement, he was a late-comer, formerly one of the gospel’s most vehement opponents, now trying to impose his own peculiar vision on the entire movement by force of will.

And impose it he did. Paul turned out to be one of the most influential men in history, to a degree that he never could have imagined in his own lifetime. He was so sure of his convictions that he was willing to personally confront the apostle Peter, the most revered and influential leader of the church apart from Jesus Christ himself.

Paul was sure that he was right, but even more, that he had God on his side. A man who acts like that is usually considered not only a fool but a dangerous one. And if we were to be honest, most of us who owe so much to his ministry would have rejected him had we been around to do so.

But time has vindicated him. As it turns out, he did have God on his side (or rather, he was on God’s side), at least on the one issue about which he was so determined to take a stand.

And nowhere is Paul’s determination seen more clearly than in his letter to the Galatians, for in that letter he defends his rebuke of Peter. He also defends his vision and understanding of the gospel, especially as it stands in relation to the law of Moses.

It is important, therefore, for all Christians to understand the argument that Paul is making in Galatians. This book is dedicated to that purpose. It is not a book about everything that Paul says in Galatians, but about the main argument that he is making.

The churches that Paul had started in Galatia were being told to add to their faith in Christ a life of observance of the law of Moses. If they had done this, the law would actually have replaced their faith in Christ and rendered it meaningless. They didn’t understand this, and Paul had to make it clear to them.

Paul begins his letter with a defense of the gospel that he first proclaimed to them. He insists that he got it straight from God and not from men. This is in Galatians 1 and the beginning of Galatians 2.

He then defends himself in regard to the conflict that arose between him and Peter at the church in Antioch. This is in the rest of Galatians 2. Paul describes his disagreement with Peter and uses this description to move into his main argument.

Paul’s main argument is found in Galatians 3-4. The rest of the letter (Galatians 5-6) contains a number of further appeals and exhortations based on the argument that he has made.

We are going to begin our study by zooming in on a few verses, Galatians 3:10-12: For as many as are of works of law are under a curse, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law, to do them.” But that no one is justified before God by law is clear, because, “the righteous will live by faith,” and the law is not of faith, rather, “he who does these things will live by them.”

These verses are often misunderstood, which keeps the rest of the letter from being understood. More is at stake, however, than understanding this one letter. For these few verses, when misinterpreted, often contribute to a misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of the law of Moses. This in turn leads to a misunderstanding of the gospel and ultimately of God himself. Therefore I think it is worth spending the time to get these verses right, and much of this book will be spent dealing with the issues raised in these three verses.

We will spend part one of the book on Galatians 3:10, considering it in its immediate context as well as the context of what is taught elsewhere in the Bible. In part two we will do the same thing with Galatians 3:11-12.

Once these three verses have been studied in their context, we can zoom out and look at the rest of the letter. In part three we will do this, looking first at Paul’s argument in Galatians 3-4, then his account of his conflict with Peter in Galatians 2, and finally, in Galatians 5, the practical implications of Paul’s gospel.

Below is a paraphrase of Galatians, but it is somewhat out of balance. The parts of the letter that we will be focusing on are paraphrased with many words. There are other parts of the letter that are paraphrased with few words. This is because we will not be studying the whole letter, but specifically the main argument that Paul makes in the letter. The whole text of Galatians can be found in the back of this book.

Paraphrase of Galatians

Paul, to the churches of the Galatians:

You are making a big mistake. The people that you are being influenced by are leading you away from the truth; they are preaching a false gospel.

The gospel that you received from me is the true gospel and the whole gospel. It came to me independently of the Jerusalem church. I am not under the authority of the Jerusalem church, and neither are you. We have fellowship with them but are not under their authority. But even if you were under their authority, the true leaders of the Jerusalem church have already agreed with me that you do not need to be circumcised and adopt a Jewish lifestyle.

Peter doesn’t disagree with me about this. The conflict that we had in Antioch happened for a different reason, because he was not acting in accordance with his conviction. He was giving the Gentile believers in Antioch the impression that their own salvation was somehow defective (and so, therefore, was the gospel as I had been teaching it in Antioch).

As I rebuked Peter, I must now rebuke you. You had all the blessings of fellowship with God before these false preachers came to you. They told you that the gospel you received from me is incomplete. But has your experience been incomplete?

They say that you can now become members of Abraham’s family by circumcision, but you already are Abraham’s family because of your faith. You Gentiles were promised to Abraham as children by faith. I didn’t make that up, Moses taught it (see Genesis 15). These false preachers claim to be following Moses but they are contradicting Moses’ teaching on this very subject. They are exposing themselves to the curse from which Moses’ law offered protection, the same curse that you were once under as enemies of God.

By the way, that’s all that Moses’ law offered: temporary protection from the curse until Christ fulfilled God’s promise to Abraham. It was never a way of receiving righteousness before God, that was always by faith. And now Christ has come and redeemed us, Jews and Gentiles alike.

The law that they are trying to get you to adopt came 430 years after God promised you to Abraham as his children. Do you think that God would make a promise and then later add conditions to that promise? Not even men do that, so how could God do it?

The problem was that the promise was to be fulfilled by Christ and he had not yet come. The law of Moses served the promise until its fulfillment in Christ.

Do you see why it would be so wrong for you to come under the law of Moses? You might as well go back to idolatry!

Do you remember your salvation, what a blessing it was to you? That’s not what they are offering. Their message does not originate from God but from the religious leadership in Jerusalem, the leadership under which I once served. They opposed Christ and persecuted the church. This is just a new strategy.

Moses himself taught about this kind of opposition to the truth and to the grace of God’s promise. Remember Ishmael and his persecution of Isaac? That was an example of what the religious leaders of Jerusalem are doing today. This kind of religion has always been around in one form or another. It enslaves. Jesus Christ sets free. You have been set free; stay free.

Remember, if you come under the law of Moses you will be confessing that Christ has not dealt effectively with your sins. The law that they want you to keep will condemn you as sinners after you have already denied the only true source of forgiveness.

I’m sure that you will agree with me. But, you might ask, isn’t the law of Moses about not sinning? If we are not under the law of Moses are we now more likely to sin?

Do not think that freedom is a license to sin. Sin is always slavery; it’s the loss of freedom, not the abuse of it. If you do not walk in the Spirit, in true freedom, then you are going to be under the law whether you are circumcised or not. This is because you will be in the flesh, and the moral commands and prohibitions contained in the law of Moses apply to all who are in the flesh. Moses didn’t make them up just for Israel, they are part of the eternal law of God.

In the Spirit your sin has been condemned in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection is the true source of life. Let us walk consistently in our source of life.

OK. I think that you are going to be alright. Help one another. Restore sinners. Give and share and do good.

Signed, Paul.

PART ONE

“Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law, to do them.”

Galatians 3:10

CHAPTER ONE:

THE CURSE OF THE LAW

What Paul meant

Galatians 3:10 is the most misunderstood verse in Galatians. In this verse, Paul quotes Moses in order to make a point. The point that Paul was making will have to wait for another chapter. In this chapter we will focus on the point that he was not making, but that many people think that he was making.

Galatians 3:10 says, For as many as are of works of law are under a curse, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law to do them.” Paul, here, is quoting Deuteronomy 27:26 to support his statement that as many as are of works of law are under a curse. He does not mean, by that statement, that everyone who does what the law says to do is cursed.

Paul himself lived according to the law when it helped him to minister the gospel to Jews who lived that way (1 Corinthians 9:20). He certainly wasn’t putting himself under a curse just long enough to reach his fellow Jews. In addition, Acts 16:1-3 tells us that Paul had Timothy, his coworker, circumcised. (Timothy’s mother was Jewish but his father was Greek.) Circumcision is definitely a work of the law, but Paul did not imagine that he was putting himself or Timothy under a curse by doing it. Obviously, when Paul refers to as many as are of works of law, he has something more specific in mind.

From the opening of the letter he has been contrasting two different gospels: the true gospel and a certain false gospel that had been preached in Galatia. These two different gospels are preached by two different kinds of ministries and produce two different kinds of converts. He has just described the converts to the true gospel as those who are of faith. Continuing this contrast, he now identifies the false preachers and their converts as those who are of works of law. These specific people, he says, are under a curse.

Those who are of works of law are not those who do the works of the law while believing in Jesus Christ for salvation. This would describe Paul himself during the times that he lived like a Jew while ministering to Jews. What Paul means by this phrase is those who do the works of law instead of believing in Jesus Christ for salvation.

The false preachers who were influencing the Galatians would probably have denied that this was true of them. They would have said that their goal was that the Galatians would keep the law in addition to believing in Jesus. Paul’s burden was to show that this addition to faith in Christ was actually a perversion of the only true gospel, and that all who preached it and believed it were under a curse.

All unbelievers, whether Jews or Gentiles, are sinners who are alienated from God and in need of salvation. This is what Paul meant when he said, for example, in Romans 3:23, that all have sinned and are lacking the glory of God. But here in Galatians 3:10, when he speaks of as many as are of works of the law, he has a much smaller group of people in mind. He is talking about certain Jews who have rejected the true gospel and are aggressively trying to prevent it from being preached and believed. According to Paul, these are exactly the kind of people that Moses described when he said, cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law to do them.

It is very easy to understand this curse as something that comes as a result of imperfection and weakness. Nobody is perfect, nobody is sinless, everybody is guilty of not doing at least one thing that the law says they should do, no matter how hard they have tried. As true as that is, however, it's not the point that Paul is making here.

Please don’t assume that this is Paul’s point. He is about to explain why the law doesn't justify anyone. You will not understand him if you think that you already know why the law doesn't justify anyone. If you think that the law doesn't justify because nobody is good enough to do it perfectly, then the reason that Paul gives for the failure of the law to justify will not make sense.

The law, Paul says, was never intended to justify anyone. His argument is about the purpose of the law, not about our inability to keep it perfectly.

Suppose your doctor told you to take aspirin for your headaches and said, “The aspirin doesn't cure the cause of the headaches; it only blocks certain enzymes in your body in order to prevent the sensation of pain, that is, the symptom of the headaches. Besides, you’re not taking it right; you can’t expect the aspirin to cure your headaches if you don’t take it exactly how you are supposed to.”

This doctor is hopelessly confusing. In one sentence he said that aspirin doesn't cure the cause of the headaches because that's not its intended purpose. In the next sentence he said that aspirin doesn't cure the cause of the headaches because you are not using it right. These two statements can’t both be accurate.

Now imagine that this doctor invited you out on his boat and drove you around as you tried to water-ski for the first time. After hours of failing to stay above water, he comforts you with these words: “Don’t worry, water-skiing is very hard for some people to do for the first time. It took me several days of trying before I could stay above the water. Besides, those are snow skies.”

Again he is giving you two reasons when you only need one. Either you couldn’t keep above water on those skis because it's too hard, or because that's not the purpose for which those skis were made.

Now, when you read Galatians, don’t be frustrated with Paul like you would be with this crazy doctor friend of yours. He's not giving you two contradictory reasons why the law doesn't justify anyone.

In the passage immediately following Galatians 3:10 (verses 11-18) Paul explains why the law doesn't justify anyone. The reason he gives is that justification was never the intended purpose of the law. The reason is not that the law has too many rules and people are imperfect. All of that is irrelevant if indeed the law is not trying to justify anybody anyway. And according to Paul, it’s not.

Here is Paul’s argument, in Galatians 3:11-18, that the law was never intended to justify anyone: But that nobody is justified before God by law is clear, because “the righteous will live by faith” and the law is not of faith, instead, “he who does these things will live by them.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (because it is written, “cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”) so that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit by faith. Brothers, I speak according to man: though it is a man’s covenant, once it has been ratified, nobody sets it aside or adds conditions to it. Now the promise was spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He did not say, “and to your seeds,” as to many, but as to one, “and to your seed,” which is Christ. This is what I am saying: a law coming 430 years after a covenant has been ratified by God does not invalidate it, so as to nullify the promise. For if the inheritance is a matter of law, it is no longer a matter of promise. But God has granted it to Abraham through a promise.

In verses 11 and 12 Paul uses quotations from Habakkuk and Leviticus (“the righteous will live by faith” and “he who does these things will live by them”) to argue that the law is not for justification. We will consider both of these passages in part two of this book.

For now, note that Paul follows his quotation of Deuteronomy 27:26 (found in Galatians 3:10) with an argument in Galatians 3:11-18, explaining that the law doesn't justify anyone. As we have seen, his use of Deuteronomy 27:26 in Galatians 3:10 could itself be understood as an argument that the law doesn't justify anyone (because it's impossible to keep perfectly), but that's not the point Paul was making by quoting Deuteronomy 27:26.

Here again is his argument in Galatians 3:10: For as many as are of works of law are under a curse, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law to do them.” Once again, this verse, taken by itself, could be seen as giving the reason why the law does not justify anyone (because nobody does everything that the law says they should). It could be seen this way, but this interpretation makes an otherwise clear argument confusing.

If Paul thought that he had just given, in Galatians 3:10, the reason why the law doesn’t justify, then he wouldn’t have started Galatians 3:11 like this: But that nobody is justified before God by law is clear, because… Later we will take a closer look at what he goes on to say in verse 11. We are still considering what Paul is saying in verse 10. And in verse 10 he is not saying why the law doesn't justify, because he goes on to say—in the next sentence—why the law doesn't justify. (See Appendix D for a discussion of an alternate translation of Galatians 3:11-12.)

Paul is pretty clear, in Galatians 3:11-18, that the law was never intended to justify anyone. So whatever he's saying just before that, in Galatians 3:10, he can't be saying that the law doesn't justify anyone because it's too hard.

Galatians 3:15-18 contains the part of Paul’s argument that is most clear, the part about 430 years separating the promise and the law. Paul begins this passage by saying, I speak according to man. He means that he is about to make his point more clear with an illustration from common experience. He points out that once a man has made a covenant with another man, entering into a binding agreement, he can't come back the next day and say, “I will only keep my side of the agreement if these further conditions are also met.” If he could do that, then there could be no such thing as a binding agreement between two men.

God justified Abraham when Abraham believed God’s promise. How awful it would have been of God to come back, not the next day but 430 years later, and say to Abraham’s descendants, “that justification doesn’t count anymore unless, in addition to believing the promise, you also keep all these rules.” Paul is emphatic that God wasn't saying that when he gave the law. The law was not given to justify anybody. The promise of God had already been given to justify, simply by being believed.

After Paul makes his argument in Galatians 3:11-18, he immediately raises this question: why then the law? This is the question that Paul expects his readers to ask. He has just explained that the purpose of the law is not justification. He knows that if his readers have understood him, the natural question would be, “then what is its purpose?”

We will consider Paul’s answer concerning the law’s purpose later. Next let us take a look at Deuteronomy 27:26 in its original context to see if we have understood Paul so far. That is, we will see whether or not Deuteronomy 27:26 originally meant that people could be justified by keeping the law perfectly.

What Moses meant:

Deuteronomy 27:9-28:68 contains a speech that Moses gave to the Israelites near the end of his life, when they were about to enter into the promised land. He told them of the blessings that would come from obeying the law and the curses that would come as a result of disobedience. Before he described these blessings and curses, he instructed Israel to conduct a ceremony on Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. During this ceremony the Levites were to pronounce twelve curses over certain sins.

The first eleven curses are on specific sins, from dishonoring one’s parents to having sex with animals. The twelfth curse, found in Deuteronomy 27:26, says, cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them. This covers disobedience to the law that is not covered in the first eleven curses. So someone could abstain from all the misdeeds that are covered in the first eleven curses and still be liable to the twelfth curse.

But what kind of disobedience is Moses cursing here, shortcomings or willful rebellion? What manner of obedience is required of the people in order to avoid this curse? Is Moses saying that, in order not to be cursed, one must be perfect? Or is it enough to honestly strive to do what the law says despite occasionally failing? The rest of Moses’ speech indicates that he does not have sinless perfection in mind when he says, cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them.

After these twelve curses on individuals who break the law, Moses describes corporate blessings and curses that will come upon the nation as a whole, depending upon its obedience. In order for the blessings to come to pass, there must be enough people in the nation that keep the law well enough to avoid the curse of Deuteronomy 27:26. But if it were a general curse on all moral imperfection, no one would be able to avoid it; it would make the promise of blessings purely hypothetical. The Israelites would have to be morally perfect in order to avoid the curse and receive the blessings.

These promised blessings for obedience are found in Deuteronomy 28:1-14, and they do not appear to be hypothetical. Moses begins with these words: And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God (Deuteronomy 28:1-2).

Moses is not teasing the Israelites here, telling them what would be possible if only they were perfect people. The blessings that he goes on to describe are blessings that are attainable to the Israelites. The obedience that he describes as being careful to do all his commandments is not the achievement of a hypothetical perfect people. The blessings are real and attainable. (They are also, by the way, blessings of this earthly life. Justification is not one of the blessings. Eternal life is not being promised to the Israelites in exchange for their obedience.)

Moses does spend about four times as much time talking about the curses for disobedience and he describes them in more vivid detail. This is an indication that, although obedience and subsequent blessing is possible, he thinks that disobedience is more likely and will happen more often. In Deuteronomy 30:1 we see that Moses knows that Israel will sometimes obey and sometimes disobey. Looking to the distant future he says: And when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among the nations where the LORD your God has driven you… (Deuteronomy 30:1).

So when Moses said, in Deuteronomy 27:26, cursed be anyone who does not confirm all the words of the law by doing them, he was not cursing all moral imperfection. Although he knew that the nation of Israel would eventually be so disobedient that all of the curses he was describing would come upon them, he also anticipated obedience sometimes and from some people. This obedience would result in earthly blessings (not justification or eternal life).

When we look at the history of Israel we see that things unfolded just as Moses predicted. There were times when Israel’s obedience resulted in blessings just as Moses described them. The reign of king David ushered in such a time of blessing that lasted into the reign of Solomon. David did not receive this blessing by keeping the law with sinless perfection. He stole Uriah’s wife and arranged for Uriah to be killed in battle. He repented and was forgiven. 1 Kings 15:5 says that David did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and did not turn aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite (emphasis added). That’s a pretty big exception.

The point is not that the law allowed some people to get away with sin, the point is that the law provided for forgiveness and restoration. A man like David could still be said to have continued in all things written in the book of the law to do them. In fact, David repented, and repentance is one of the things that the law says to do.

Josiah was another king who was obedient to the law. 2 Kings 23:25 says this about Josiah: Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him. Josiah did not live a life of sinless perfection. He did, however, obey the law in the way that Moses described as continuing in all things written in the book of the law to do them.

Josiah confirmed all the words of the law by doing them, so did David. So did many others, and they saw the blessings that Moses promised.

The law of Moses does not require sinless perfection in order to be kept. In fact it does not allow such perfection. It operates on the assumption that nobody is perfect. When Israelites like David repented of their sins they were not returning to the law that they had abandoned, they were obeying the law. What would have been really rebellious of David would be if he had refused to confess his sin; that would have placed him under the curse.

Leviticus 16 commands Israel to keep the Day of Atonement as one of its annual holy days. On this day the High Priest would offer sacrifices for himself, his household, and the whole nation of Israel. All Israel would observe this day as a Sabbath of rest and recognize that atonement was being made for all of their sins. This was in addition to any other sacrifices and offerings for sin that had been made during the rest of the year. This was the day to make atonement for sins that may have been overlooked or unrecognized, what can be called unintentional or unknown sins.

Hebrews 9:7 says this concerning the Day of Atonement: But into the second part of the Tabernacle only the high priest goes, and he only goes once a year, and not without taking blood that he offers for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people. This sacrifice covered all of those sins that the people were unaware of, committed not out of evil intentions but in ignorance.

Imagine that an Israelite were to say to the high priest on the Day of Atonement, “You don’t need to sacrifice for me today. I haven’t sinned all year.” The high priest would not say to him, “Keep up the good work, if only we had more like you.” Instead, he may say something like this: “Stop breaking the law by denying that you're a sinner. You haven’t perfectly carried out your obligation under the law without any failure. Nobody has. That’s why there's a Day of Atonement. In fact, that’s why there's a law; it was given because you are a sinner.”

CHAPTER TWO:

IMPOSSIBLE RIGHTEOUSNESS

The Law of Moses and the Law of God

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the law doesn’t require sinless perfection and doesn’t even allow for the possibility of it. At this point I must be clear that the law that does not allow you to be sinless is specifically the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. This is the sense in which I have been using the word law until now. This is the sense in which Paul uses the word in Galatians 3. However, he does not always use the word in the same way. The word law is used throughout the New Testament in a number of different ways. Often it means either the law of Moses or the law of God, and these two are not the same.

Paul’s description of his ministry in 1 Corinthians 9 illustrates the way the word law can be used in different ways. Here Paul explains that while he is ministering among Jews who keep the law of Moses, he also keeps the law of Moses so as not to needlessly offend them. As I noted earlier, Paul is not, by doing so, putting himself under a curse by becoming “of works of law.” He felt a certain degree of freedom to do the works of the law or not to do them, according to his circumstances.

Here is what he says in 1 Corinthians 9:19-21: For being free from all, I have enslaved myself to all, that I might win more. To the Jews I even became as a Jew, that I might win Jews. To those under the law I became as under the law (not being under the law myself) that I might win those under the law. To those without the law I became as without the law (not being without the law of God but in-lawed of Christ) that I might win those without the law.

By under the law he means observing all of the customs and regulations of the law of Moses, including rules about eating, observing holy days, etc. He says he is not obligated to live that way but will do so if it will help him reach his fellow Jews.

Those without the law are Gentiles who have never known the law of Moses with its regulations. When Paul is with them he lives like they do in terms of his diet and outward habits. But to make it clear that he does not live outside of Biblical moral standards, he says that even while he is living without the law, he is not without the law of God.

Here he is obviously using the word in two different ways. By law he means the law of Moses. By law of God he means something else, something that was around long before the law of Moses. He is referring to an unchanging standard of right and wrong, an eternal moral law that has its source in God’s own nature.

There are other meanings of the word law besides these two, but these are the most common. It is necessary, then, to make sure that we know what Paul means each time he uses this word. We can usually determine this by context. As I said, until now, when I have used the word law, I have meant the law of Moses. From this point on I will always specify whether I mean the law of Moses or the law of God. This is not bothersome to me and it will help to avoid confusion.

For example, when I say that the law does not require sinless perfection but rather denies it, I mean the law of Moses, the whole body of teaching contained in the first five books of the Old Testament, the covenant that God made with Israel. On the other hand, the eternal moral law of God does indeed demand perfection. And the whole world is indeed cut off from God and from real life because everyone has failed to live in this kind of perfection. As we saw in the previous chapter, it is very easy to read this fact into Paul’s statement, quoting Moses, that everyone who does not do all the things written in the book of the law is cursed. But to do this is to confuse the law of Moses with the law of God.

Here is another example from 1 Corinthians to demonstrate that Paul distinguished between the law of Moses and the law of God. In 1 Corinthians 7:19 he made this statement: It’s neither circumcision nor uncircumcision that matters, but keeping the commandments of God. But isn’t circumcision one of the commandments? It is if Paul is referring to all the commandments of the law of Moses. In that case this statement makes no sense. Again, context determines that Paul is referring to the commandments of the law of God, the law that has been around long before Moses was born.

Adam, Abel, Enoch, and Noah did not need the law of Moses to tell them that it was wrong to lie, cheat, and steal. They knew such behavior was wrong and contrary to the will of God. Abraham also knew God’s law. God said of Abraham, “I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice…” (Genesis 18:19). So Abraham knew how to do what was right because he knew the law of God. God made this clear in Genesis 26:5 when he said, “Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.” These commandments, statutes, and laws were later incorporated into the law of Moses. The law of Moses bore witness to the eternal law of God.

Consider this conversation Jesus had with a young man in Matthew 19:16-19: And behold, someone came up to him and said, “Teacher, what good thing shall I do to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is one who is good. If you want to enter into life keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which ones?” Jesus said, “You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, honor your father and mother, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

When asked, “Which ones?” Jesus didn’t say, “All of them.” He was not telling this man that keeping all of the law of Moses would cause him to enter into life. If he was, then he could have just said, “All of them.”

Neither was that the answer that this young man was looking for. If he had understood Deuteronomy 27:26 to be saying that eternal life is attained by keeping all of the law of Moses, then he wouldn’t have asked Jesus which commandments lead to life. He would have known that the answer is, “All of them.” By asking, “Which ones?” he is asking what part of the law of Moses represents the eternal law of God? Is it Sabbath-keeping? Is it not eating pork? Is it not touching lepers? Jesus answered by giving a list of the kinds of commandments that lead to life, commandments of the eternal law of God that are referred to in the law of Moses.

Jesus had a similar conversation in Luke 10:25-28: And behold a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And he said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” And he answered and said, “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.”

Both of these conversations hinge on the understanding that while the law of Moses was never meant to be the comprehensive list of things that must be done in order to live forever, it did bear witness to the existence of such a list, to an eternal, moral law of God that would lead to life. (As it turned out, the list could be pared down to one thing: love God.) In both conversations Jesus affirms that moral perfection according to the law of God would indeed result in eternal life. But he does not attribute that life-giving power to the law of Moses.

The Rule of Sin and Death

Like the young man and the lawyer who had those conversations with Jesus, Paul also believed that if anyone kept the law of God perfectly he or she would live forever. He also knew that this had never happened and never would, apart from Jesus Christ. To Paul, the fact that people die is proof that they have violated the law of God. This is the assumption underlying Paul’s argument, in Romans 5, that since nobody has lived forever yet, it must mean that nobody is without sin.

Paul says in Romans 5:12-14, Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, for all sinned—for sin was in the world before the law [here he means the law of Moses] but, there being no law, sin is not counted. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.

Everybody since Adam died because of their own sin. (Paul must consider that Enoch and Elijah, if they had been left on earth, would have died.) If there had been a man in history who didn’t sin, we would know it because he wouldn’t have died; he would still be around today. Everyone who lived before Moses violated the law of God. They sinned and died even though, as Paul says, there being no law, sin is not counted. The law of God is eternal, it has always existed. Paul means that they did not know the law of God, it was not told to them by Moses or by anyone else. (Paul insisted, however, in Romans 2:14-15, that even though the law of God was not formally declared to them, their conscience bore witness to it.)

Everybody was sinning against the law of God long before Moses came along. What Moses did was to make this explicit. The law of Moses makes it clear that everyone is a sinner deserving of death. It helps people understand what it is that they have done wrong, and more importantly, what is wrong with them.

Paul insists that everyone has sinned even though there may be some who have not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam. Adam knew what it was that he was forbidden to do. He had an explicit order from God. He knowingly violated that order. Many, like Adam, have done what they know is wrong. That is what it means to sin according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam. But Paul concedes that there may be some who have not knowingly sinned. Their deaths, however, prove that they did sin even if they didn't realize it. They committed the kinds of unintentional sins that were covered under the law Moses by the Day of Atonement.

The Old Testament gives us a record of at least one such man who perhaps did not sin according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam. His name was Job.

When we read the book of Job, it certainly seems as if that man never once did what he knew was wrong. Much of the book is about his friends insisting that he must be hiding some terrible secret sins that are the reason for his suffering. But he had lived such a good life that he couldn't find anything to confess. He couldn't find his sin. He says in Job 27:6: I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go; my heart does not reproach me for any of my days. At the end of his final discourse, in Job 3:11-40, he goes through the list of everything he knows to be wrong and insists that he never did any of it.

Job doesn’t know what he did wrong; he can’t find his sin. But he can’t find his righteousness either. He is frustrated, because no matter how good he is, he knows that he is still guilty before God. He acknowledges that as good as his life has been, it does not meet the standard of God’s law. He feels that God is determined to find him guilty of sin. He says in Job 10:5-7: Are your days as the days of man, or your years as a man’s years, that you seek out my iniquity and search for my sin, although you know that I am not guilty, and there is none to deliver out of your hand? Also in Job 9:20: Though I am in the right, my own mouth would condemn me; though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse. Job can’t win with God; his righteousness will never be enough. But he can’t lose either; God won’t destroy him and end his suffering.

Job is not trying to hide anything from God, he wants his sins revealed. He even asks God to tell him his sin, in Job 13:23-26: How many are my iniquities and my sins? Make me to know my transgression and my sin. Why do you hide your face and count me as your enemy? Will you frighten a driven leaf and pursue dry chaff? For you write bitter things against me and make me inherit the iniquities of my youth.

He also looks forward to the day when God will forever deal with his inescapable sense of guilt and uncleanness. Job 14:14-17 says: If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my service I would wait, till my renewal should come. You would call, and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands. For then you would number my steps; you would not keep watch over my sin; my transgression would be sealed up in a bag, and you would cover over my iniquity.

It is most likely that Job lived before the days of Moses. What we know for sure is that there is no direct reference to the law of Moses in the book of Job. The book of Job is a discussion of the law of God, a thorough and profound discussion. One of the questions at the heart of the discussion is raised in Job 9:2: How can a man be in the right before God?

There is a kind of outward righteousness that can be achieved before the eyes of men, and Job certainly had it. But it isn't enough. Job knew that there was something deeply and fundamentally wrong with him. He said in Job 14:4: Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean thing? There is not one. Job was fundamentally unclean before God. He knew it and he felt it. There was nothing in the law of God that could change that. He longed for a new and different kind of help. He was wise enough to know that this help would not come from a law, but from a person: a mediator, advocate, and redeemer (Job 9:33, 16:19, 19:25).

Another issue at the heart of Job is this question found in Job 14:14: If a man dies, shall he live again? This is connected to the question about how to be righteous. The righteousness that Job sought was one that would lead to life after death, even death that came as the result of one’s own sins.

When Job asked how a man could be in the right before God he was asking how a sinner could be righteous. Job was asking a truly radical question that had never occurred to his friends: is there another way to be righteous, a way that really works, even for sinners?

CHAPTER THREE:

THE MINISTRY OF CONDEMNATION

What Moses would say to Job

If the book of Job represents an incredibly good man and his mediocre friends wrestling with the deepest issues of the law of God, then the law of Moses is God’s answer to those questions. And through Moses God affirms Job’s conclusions, both the bad and the good, both the futility of trying to be righteous before God by doing what his law requires and the wisdom of hoping for a better way, and for a mediator and advocate before God.

The law of Moses bears witness to the law of God. It spells out what the demands of God’s holiness mean in daily life. By making God’s law clear Moses both simplifies it and makes it harder than anyone imagined.

The law of Moses contains several hundred rules to be followed. For this reason it may seem very complex, and indeed the Israelites made it complicated at times. But Moses actually summed up the law of God with one simple rule. When Jesus taught that the greatest commandment in the law of Moses was to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength (Mark 12:30) he was affirming what many of the teachers of the law of Moses had already discerned. If someone kept this one command, he would also love his neighbor as himself and avoid every sin, thus keeping the whole law of God.

This summarization of the entire law of God in one command is one of the great contributions of the law of Moses. It seems so obvious to us now, but that is because we have the benefit of the teachings of Moses and the prophets and the New Testament.

In the book of Job, however, love for God is barely mentioned. For that matter, neither is God’s love for Job discussed much. None of Job’s friends comforted him with the assurance of God’s love. They could only assure him of God’s justice: that right would eventually prevail over wrong. Job also, for all of his insistence that he had lived his life right and had done what was good, never said that he loved God. I am sure that Job did, in fact, love God. But he did so because of his confidence that there was more to God than his law. No one can love God if they only know him through his law.

The law of Moses, while simplifying the law of God to one command, also made the law of God impossible to follow perfectly. Of course it didn’t actually change the law of God to make it harder, it just made it clear how hard it really is, and that everyone has broken it. This is why Job was so frustrated.

The law of God seemed to offer eternal life as the reward for perfection. What Job learned the hard way and Moses affirmed in his law is that this is impossible. The law of Moses still provides this service to this day. It both spells out for us the law of God explicitly and, in doing so, condemns us as those who have already broken it.

When you are leaving work on a Friday afternoon you may say to your co-workers, “Have a nice weekend, see you on Monday.” But you would not say to someone, “Have a nice weekend and don’t beat your wife.” No doubt anyone would be offended if you said this to him. It won’t help if you insist that you are not implying that your co-worker beats his wife on the weekend, but simply reminding him not to. You have insulted him just by supposing that he needed to be reminded.

So it was when God gave us the ten commandments through Moses. He told us what not to do because we are those who need to be told. If we could have kept the law of God then we would have kept it instinctively and intuitively. If you were able to earn eternal life, you would already have it. If you think that eternal life is something that can be earned by keeping the law of God, that kind of thinking itself is a sign that you have already broken the law of God.

The law of Moses teaches us that we have already broken the law of God. And even if eternal life can be attained by keeping God’s law perfectly, it’s too late for someone who has already broken it.

Paul says, in Galatians 3:21, that the law of Moses does not have the power to give life where there is none: If a law had been given that was able to make alive, then righteousness would be based on law. But in Romans 7:10 he says something different: the commandment, which was unto life, was found to be unto death to me (emphasis added).

This statement is made in the middle of an argument in which Paul is discussing both the law of Moses and the law of God: What shall we say therefore, is the law sin? Certainly not! Instead I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, worked in me all kinds of covetousness. For without the law sin is dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the commandment, which was unto life, was found to be unto death to me. For sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. (Romans 7:7-12)

Paul is talking here about the law of Moses, but specifically as it bears witness to the law of God. The commandment he uses as an example is you shall not covet. He chose this example because it is a moral command of the law of God that is contained in the law of Moses. As Paul had said in Romans 5, sin was in the world from the days of Adam until Moses gave the law. It was always a sin to covet, and people were doing it before Moses came along. This command not to covet was part of the law of God. The law of Moses served to make it clear just how wrong this sin was and to show that everybody was guilty of it.

So when Paul says that the commandment was unto life he is saying the same thing that Jesus said when he told the lawyer, do this and you will live. The law of God should lead to life but it doesn’t because it can’t be kept, in fact it has already been broken.

In Romans 7:7-12 Paul is viewing the law of God through the lens of the law of Moses, but he does not always distinguish between the two. This may be the reason for the apparent redundancy of his statement that the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. He is defending both the law of Moses and the commandment of the law of God (you shall not covet) to which the law of Moses bears witness: the law (of Moses) is holy and the commandment (of the law of God) is holy and righteous and good.

There is nothing wrong with the law of God. It would lead to life if kept perfectly. But by the time we hear it clearly in the law of Moses we know that it's too late for us, we have already broken it. This is why Paul says, in Romans 3:20, For by the works of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

This knowledge of sin is a good service that the law of Moses provides, because it is knowledge of the truth. The nation of Israel was given the law of Moses so that it might be a light to the nations of the world, sharing with them, among other things, this knowledge of sin.

Israel had to be constantly reminded of its own guilt and its need for Christ because it was a priestly nation among the nations of the world. In Exodus 19:6 God called Israel a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Israel was chosen as a representative of the nations of the world. This is behind Paul’s reasoning in Romans 3:9, where he says that the Scriptures of Israel have made it clear that all people are guilty of breaking the law of God: We have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin. Paul then quotes passages from the Psalms and Isaiah that describe sin. Then, in verse 19, he says this: And we know that what the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be shut and the whole world become guilty before God. (He uses the term law in a bit of a different way here, meaning all of the Hebrew Scriptures, not just the writings of Moses. We do the same thing when we refer to the Hebrew Scriptures as the Old Testament. Strictly speaking, the Old Testament is the law of Moses, the books that he wrote, but we use it to mean all of the Hebrew Scriptures.)

The law of Moses was not meant to separate out Israel as the sinless ones. Rather, through it God took the people of Israel as a representative sample of all humanity. All of humanity is guilty under the law of God. The law of Moses convicts Israel of this guilt as an example, and what it says to Israel (to those who are under the law) it says in order to show that the whole world is guilty.

Many among Israel rebelled against Moses and did not trust God. They did this even though God had given them undeniable signs and wonders for all to see and the best moral instruction any nation could hope for. Since Israel was a representative sample, we can know that it is human nature to distrust God and rebel. Any nation would have done the same thing. Even those in Israel who trusted God sometimes sinned. We can therefore know that nobody on earth is without sin.

To point out Israel’s failure is not to imply that it is worse than other nations. Israel is the best of nations because of its history. Scripture teaches us about the sins of Israel to show us that, since even the best nation has rebelled against God, so has the entire world. Israel was called by God to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Priests represented the people. Israel represented the nations.

Hebrews 5:1-4 reminds us that the priest was not morally better or more spiritual than the rest of the people: For every priest taken from among men is appointed on behalf of men in the things pertaining to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sin. He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward because he himself is beset with weakness. For this reason he is obligated, as for the people so also for himself, to make offerings for sin. And no one takes this honor on himself, but only when called by God just as Aaron was. The priest was guilty just as the people were. Likewise, Israel’s calling as a kingdom of priests did not make it a nation free of sin.

In chapter two we considered two conversations that Jesus had, one with a young man and one with a lawyer. In both of these conversations Jesus affirmed that the law of God leads to eternal life when kept perfectly. These people that Jesus was talking to had not yet come to the realization that they had already sinned against the law of God. They were, like Job, fundamentally unclean. But, unlike Job, they did not realize it.

And Jesus did not tell them that they were already guilty, he let them continue in their foolishness and presumptuousness. In fact he seemed to encourage them. He even said to the lawyer, “Do this and you will live.” Was it unfair of Jesus to tease the man by telling him to keep God’s law while knowing that it is impossible and that he had already broken it?

On another occasion Jesus said to the Pharisees, I have not come to call the righteous but sinners (Mark 2:17). Their problem was that they thought they were righteous when they weren’t. But why didn’t Jesus correct them? Why let people continue to think that they're not sinners? Why did he not point out to them that they were just as guilty as everyone else of breaking God’s law?

Jesus addressed this aspect of his ministry in John 5:45-46: Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. The one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have hoped. If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me. It was Moses’ job to bear witness to the law of God and accuse us all of breaking it. These presumptuous people that Jesus was dealing with should have known better because they knew the law of Moses. Jesus gave Moses the highest endorsement that he could: he didn’t try to do his job for him. Moses had carried out his ministry of condemnation as well as anyone could have and it was written down for all to read.

CHAPTER FOUR:

THE GOSPEL OF MOSES

Accusation wasn’t Moses’ only job. The law of Moses also confirms Job’s hope that a mediator and redeemer would come. As we have seen, Jesus told the leaders in Jerusalem, If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me (John 5:46). The law of Moses bears witness to the promises that God made to Abraham that were fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Paul says in Romans 3:21: But now the righteousness of God apart from law is manifested, witnessed by the law and the prophets.

The law that Paul says bears witness to the gospel is the law of Moses. The law of God did not bear witness to the promise of the gospel, but only to the moral perfection of God and his eternal standard of right and wrong. The law of Moses, on the other hand, bore witness both to the law of God and also the promise of the gospel. Galatians 3:19 points to these two functions of the law of Moses: it was added because of transgression until the seed would come to whom the promise had been made. There were transgressions, but there was also a promise. Moses’ ministry was to testify to both of these.

This is why Moses wrote so much about what happened in the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His job was to testify to what God had promised to them. He also testified to the promises that God had made to Adam and to Noah. Genesis is full of promises from God, and Genesis is part of the law of Moses. Genesis also contains God’s law, and Moses bore witness to that as well.

People tend to think of the law of Moses only in terms of the rules and regulations that God gave to the Israelites when they left Egypt. But the history that happened before that is also part of the law of Moses. Even the Pharisees in Jesus’ day tended to neglect the history contained in Genesis as they sought to obey Moses. We see an example of this in the discussion that they had with Jesus recorded in Mark 10:2-9: And Pharisees came up to him and, testing him, asked him, “Is it permissible for a man to divorce his wife?” And he answered and said to them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of separation and to divorce her.” And Jesus said to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this command. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Jesus is quoting Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. The Pharisees knew these verses very well. But when asked about what Moses commanded, they immediately thought of Deuteronomy 24:1-4. Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy are the books of Moses that contain the rules and regulations given to Israel in the wilderness. The Pharisees revered Genesis as history, but they did not take their orders from that history, but from Moses’ rules.

This conversation about marriage also illustrates the difference between the law of God and the law of Moses. The law of God forbids divorce, and Moses bears witness to that law in Genesis. But the rules that Moses gave for the conduct of the Israelites regulated divorce, assuming that it would sometimes happen. The law of Moses was given to people who had already broken God’s law and would break it again.

Jesus reminded the Pharisees that Genesis was just as much a part of the law of Moses as Deuteronomy was, and it was just as much to be obeyed. In Galatians Paul makes the same kind of appeal to Genesis. He says this, for example, in Galatians 4:21-22: Tell me, you who want to be under law, do you not hear the law. For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. He then goes into an interpretation of Moses’ account of the birth of Abraham’s sons, Isaac and Ishmael. (We will examine this passage more closely in chapter 10.)

By this appeal to Genesis, Paul was reversing a charge that must have been brought against him by the false preachers. We have no record of what exactly these false preachers said to the Galatians churches, but some of the things they said can be safely inferred from Paul’s letter. He was clearly defending himself against certain charges. One such charge was that he knowingly withheld information from the Galatians. He preached the gospel to them but he left part of it out, the part that required them to be circumcised and adopt a Jewish lifestyle.

Paul makes clear that he did preach the whole gospel to them, and the only true gospel. But he also turns the tables on his accusers. They came preaching the law of Moses to the Galatians, no doubt claiming to be experts on it. But, Paul says, they left part of it out.

Not only did they leave out part of the law of Moses, they were acting contrary to a very important part. Paul says in Galatians 3:8, The Scriptures, foreseeing that God would justify the nations by faith, preached the gospel in advance to Abraham: “In you all the nations will be blessed.” Paul is quoting Genesis 12:3. He is pointing out that in order to obey the law of Moses one must not only listen to it as it bears witness to the law of God, but also as it bears witness to the promise of the gospel. As Jesus taught the Pharisees in their conversation about marriage, the historical parts of the law of Moses can be obeyed or disobeyed just as the rules and regulations can. And Paul is arguing that the false preachers are disobeying the law of Moses because they are disobeying Genesis.

This is the force of the word all in Galatians 3:10 (quoting Deuteronomy 27:26). Once again, Genesis 3:10 says, cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law to do them. As we have seen in chapter one, Paul’s argument is not based on the fact that nobody is perfect and so nobody can really do all that the law of Moses says to do. His point is that the promise to Abraham, which produced righteous faith in him, is itself part of all that the law of Moses bears witness to. And the false preachers, those who were “of works of law,” denied this integral part of the law of Moses. It is this denial that made them subject to the curse of Deuteronomy 27:26.

Paul’s quotation is taken from a Greek translation of Deuteronomy. In the original Hebrew text of Deuteronomy, Moses says that everyone must confirm the things written in the book by doing them. This means that everything they do must display their support for the law of Moses in its entirety. Their actions must conform to his teaching, and they must not willfully and consistently contradict it. “Those who are of works of law,” as Paul called them, were denying the part of the law of Moses that bears witness to the promise and were therefore not confirming the entire law of Moses, but undermining and contradicting part of it.

It is exactly this kind of curse-deserving opposition to the law of Moses that Paul, in Romans 3:31, denies that he and other true believers are guilty of: Do we undo the law through faith? [and therefore come under the curse of Deuteronomy 27:26] Certainly not! On the contrary, we establish it.

Faith in the gospel confirms and upholds the law of Moses. You can’t keep the law of Moses and oppose the gospel at the same time. Opposition to the gospel is against the law of Moses. Remember again what Jesus said to the Pharisees in John 5:46: If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me.

Here, then, is Paul’s argument in Galatians 3:8-10 with some extra words in brackets to clarify his intended meaning: Scriptures [Genesis, which is part of the law of Moses], foreseeing that God would justify the nations by faith, preached the gospel in advance to Abraham, saying, “In you all the nations will be blessed.” So those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham. For as many as are of works of law [instead of faith] are under a curse, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law [including Genesis] to do them” [by allowing the Gentiles to hear and believe and be justified by faith].

Imperfect or Enemies?

Paul’s description of his opponents in Galatians 3:8-10 corresponds very well with what he says in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. There he speaks of the unbelieving Jewish authorities who persecuted Jesus and the church. He uses the word wrath instead of curse, but he is describing the same kind of opposition to the gospel and the same punishment as a result: For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judea. Because you suffered the same things from your countrymen as they did from the Judeans who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us, and are displeasing to God and opposed to all men, trying to stop us from speaking to the Gentiles, that they might be saved, so as to always fill up the full measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them to the end.

It's ironic that Paul’s use of Deuteronomy 27:26 is often misunderstood in the way that it is. The law of Moses taught the people that there was no chance that they could obey the law of God well enough to be righteous before God. It told them to wait for the mediator that Job also longed for. Instead, people took that very law of Moses and turned it into a law that, if followed closely enough, could lead to righteousness before God.

After Paul quotes Deuteronomy 27:26 in Galatians 3:10, he goes on to say that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. He redeemed those of us, that is, who are “of faith.” Whoever they were who were “of works of law,” we were in danger of falling under the same curse as they were under because we are sinners as well.

How you interpret Galatians 3:10 (and Deuteronomy 27:26) will determine what you think it means to be a sinner. If you read it as a curse on all who are trying to obey God but are falling short due to imperfection, then, when you read that Christ redeemed us from the curse, you will understand that all of humanity is just falling short of God’s perfect standard and is therefore cursed. A sinner, by this understanding, is someone who is not good enough. So when Christ became a curse on the cross, it was the curse of not being good enough.

But this understanding of what it means to be a sinner is not consistent with what Paul says elsewhere about the sinful nature of all of humanity, which Christ redeemed us from. It’s not that we were not good enough for God; we were enemies of God. We were living our lives against him. Consider these statements of Paul: and you who were alienated from God and enemies in your mind because of evil works… (Colossians 1:21) …being enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son… (Romans 5:10).

Romans 3:23 tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It is easy to read this and get the idea that a sinner is someone who is trying but is not good enough. This is because some translations render a certain Greek word as fall short in English. But while that Greek word is sometimes used of someone who has failed to reach a goal, it is also used of someone who is lacking something. And this is what the word means in Romans 3:23.

A sinner is not someone who falls short of the glory of God like an athlete who trains hard but fails to qualify for the Olympic Games. A sinner is someone who lacks the glory of God like a liar lacks honesty and a cheater lacks integrity. As Paul had already said in Romans 3:11 (quoting Psalm 14), there is no one who seeks God. People aren’t trying and falling short; they’re not even trying.

God is not someone who created us to fulfill his impossible standard of perfection and then rejects us because we fall short of that standard. It is we who reject God; that is the essence of sin. In Romans 8:7-8 Paul says that all sinners are opposed to the law of God: Because the mind of the flesh is an enemy of God, for it is not subject to the law of God, nor can it be. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Sinners can’t please God, not because they fall short no matter how hard they try, but because they are enemies of God. They are not trying to please him at all and they can’t try. It’s against their nature.

God, as we know him only by his law, is impossible to love. This is not because there is something wrong his law, but because there is something wrong with us. Many people have tried to make God more lovable by making his law a little easier to obey, lessening its demands and changing it standards concerning sin and righteousness. This never works. As sinners we hate God’s law, not because it’s too hard, but because it’s God’s law, and we are his enemies. We hate his gospel for the same reason. We hate anything that is his, anything he says or does. This is what it means to be a sinner. This is the curse that Christ redeemed us from, the curse he suffered on the cross. He suffered as God’s enemy in our place.

Jesus fulfilled the law of God in his sinless life. He didn’t earn eternal life, he always had it. Eternal life is sinless life, life lived in perfect agreement with God. The only one who ever lived such a life died as an enemy of God.

It is important to understand what it means to be a sinner because it will affect what we hear God saying to us in the gospel. If we think of a sinner simply as someone who is imperfect, then we will think of the gospel as God’s way of saying this: “I want to accept you but you fall short of my perfect standard. So I punished Christ for your shortcomings.”

This is how the gospel is often heard, but God is saying more than that in the gospel. He is saying, “Stop fighting against me. I created you to be free and to be yourself, but every time you sin you are denying your Creator by acting contrary to my nature and trying to exist in my absence. This will never work. You can’t win a fight against God. You are bound to lose and when you do you will lose everything. Jesus Christ already lost that fight for you. On the cross he lost the fight against God. He became my enemy in your place so that he could lose for you. In his crucifixion I punished sin: I put down all rebellion against me and made powerless any so-called power raised up against me. Your fight against me is over; we are reconciled; you are free.”

PART TWO

“The righteous will live by faith, and the law is not of faith, instead, he who does these things will live by them.”

Galatians 3:11-12

CHAPTER FIVE:

LIVING BY THE LAW

What Paul meant

Now we will consider Paul’s use of Leviticus 18:5 in Galatians 3:12. This is another part of Paul’s argument in Galatians that is often misunderstood. Below is Galatians 3:10-13 with Paul’s reference to Leviticus 18:5 in italics for emphasis: For as many as are of works of law are under a curse, as it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law to do them.” But that no one is justified by law before God is clear because “the righteous will live by faith,” and the law is not of faith. On the contrary, “he who does these things will live by them.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, as it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.”

Paul uses this statement from Leviticus to back up his assertion that the law is not of faith. Doing the things of the law of Moses is contrasted with believing God's promise. The argument here is based on the simple observation that doing is not the same thing as believing. It is something different; it's not necessarily wrong, it’s just different. In fact, in this case, doing is a good thing. Doing and believing are both good things. One results in justification and the other does not. But these two things are not mutually exclusive; both can exist together at the same time. You can do the works of the law of Moses and believe in the promise of God at the same time. You just have to know which one justifies you before God and which one doesn't.

The point that Paul is making is that simple. And it's not even the main point of the passage, it's a remark that he adds to clarify his meaning. In Galatians 3:10-13 Paul uses the word curse twice at the beginning of the passage and then three more times at the end. The subject of his focus is the curse of the law of Moses. In the middle of this passage he interjects an important clarification.

Moses issued a curse on all who oppose his law. Paul doesn’t want anyone to assume, on this basis, that if they simply did the law of Moses they would be justified. The law of Moses cursed, but it did not, on the other hand, justify. It protected from the curse until Christ came. The protection offered by the law of Moses was not justification. The redemption accomplished by Christ is what results in true justification before God.

Read these verses again with parentheses added around Paul’s clarification to show that it is, in fact, a parenthetical comment. Consider the following passage as a teaching on the curse of the law of Moses with the important added reminder that, although the law of Moses curses, it does not justify : For as many as are of works of law are under a curse, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law to do them.” (But that no one is justified by law before God is clear, because, “The righteous will live by faith,” and the law is not of faith, on the contrary, “He who does these things will live by them.”) Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, as it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” (Galatians 3:10-13, emphasis added)

Paul often makes such parenthetical statements. Putting parentheses around a statement does not make it unimportant. Indeed, Paul considered it important enough to interrupt his own argument.

Paul’s use of Leviticus 18:5, like his use of Deuteronomy 27:26, is sometimes understood to mean that eternal life is offered to anyone who does the law of Moses without failure. At the risk of belaboring the point: this is not so. Doing the law of Moses was never about earning eternal life. Paul makes clear that the law of Moses does not have the power to grant eternal life: if a law had been given which was able to make alive, then righteousness would indeed be a matter of law (Galatians 3:21). The law of Moses did not grant eternal life, it regulated mortal life, the life that is lived by sinners.

Here we have to be careful not to confuse works with sin. Doing the works of the law of Moses does not necessarily cancel out faith in God. It can, if you put your faith in those works, but it doesn't have to. However, when we consider the life that the law of Moses was given to control, the life of a sinner, then we are dealing with something that is always in opposition to faith in God.

Paul has already implied, earlier in his argument, that there are two ways of being alive. This was in Galatians 2:19, where he said, For through the law I died to the law that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. Paul said he died so that he might live. This statement only makes sense if Paul is thinking of two different ways to be alive. In order to be alive to God, he had to stop being alive to the law of Moses. One way of being alive was preventing the other way of being alive. Although believing Moses and doing what he said to do are not mutually exclusive, these two ways of being alive are. They are in conflict with one another. Being alive to God is being justified by faith and being assured of eternal life. Far from attaining this life by doing the things written in the law of Moses, the life Paul lived by the law of Moses prevented him from living unto God.

It was not the law of Moses itself that prevented Paul from living unto God. It was the life that he already had and was living, which the law of Moses regulated, that was keeping him dead to God.

The law of Moses could not be blamed for his condition. Paul raised that question himself just to knock it down: Is the law opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! (Galatians 3:21) Don’t blame the law of Moses, it works with what it has to work with. The life Paul had was the life of a sinner—a sinner who was bound to die. This is what the law of Moses was given to deal with. It was added because of transgressions. (Galatians 3:19)

The law of Moses was given to regulate the life of sinful human beings. If such sinners are going to be made alive to God forever it will be by faith in the promise of God. What the law of Moses can offer you is that you can keep the life that you already have as a sinner. You can keep it, that is, until you die. You cannot keep it forever. That is the life that the law of Moses is given to work with: the earthly, temporal life of a sinner.

Paul contrasts this life of a sinner with the new life that comes through faith in Jesus Christ. One life is determined by what you do, the other by who you trust. Not only are these two lives different, they are incompatible. Paul had to end one so he could begin the other. He could not live both at the same time.

So it is not the works of the law of Moses in and of themselves that are antithetical to faith, it is the life of the sinner who does the works. It is the death of the sinner that ultimately fulfills the law of Moses, not the works that he does while he lives.

The works of the law of Moses were intended to be done by sinners who were waiting in faith for their own death in Christ, a mystery to which Moses pointed them. When, instead, these works were done in order to be justified before God, they were done to prolong the life of the sinner beyond the reach of death. This goal is antithetical to the power and purpose of the law of Moses. Eternal life is righteous life. The law of Moses was not given to grant this kind of life, but to deal with mortal life, the life of a sinner.

When the law of Moses says “the man who does these things will live by them,” God is saying through Moses, “Do this and I won’t kill you. You will die eventually of course, but I won’t kill you now.” Moses was teaching Israel how not to get killed by God. At most he was teaching them how to live good and decent lives with the kind of life that they already had. That is, how to be good and decent sinners.

It’s not that Moses didn’t want to stop them from being sinners, it’s just that his law was powerless to do so. The most that the law of Moses could do was teach them to be sinners who didn’t sin as much. This is better than the other kind of sinner, but it is far from being alive to God forever. Whether or not they received eternal life depended on whether or not they believed God’s promise. The law of Moses could bear witness to that promise and tell them to wait for its fulfillment, but it couldn’t make them believe it. You cannot force people to trust God because the law is not of faith. Faith is not something that can be forced or threatened out of people.

Paul contrasts doing the law of Moses with believing God’s promise: “The righteous will live by faith.” But the law is not of faith, on the contrary, “he who does these things will live by them.” The two things are clearly different, but they are not mutually exclusive. Doing the law of Moses did not necessarily cancel out faith in Christ. Those believers who obeyed Moses before Christ came, people like King David and King Josiah, learned about God’s promises and believed them. It was on the basis of this faith that they kept the law of Moses.

The Galatians, however, were in a special predicament. They needed to be seriously warned because they were about to be persuaded by preachers of a false gospel. For them to do the works of the law of Moses would cost them their faith. This is because of the way that the law of Moses had been presented to them. But, as we have noted, Paul himself observed parts of the law of Moses sometimes and he had Timothy circumcised when he considered it to be convenient. When Paul said, cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law to do them, he did not mean that any believer who does any work of the law of Moses was putting himself under a curse. Likewise, when he contrasts the works of the law of Moses with the faith that justifies, he is not saying that any such work would cancel out someone’s faith.

The law of Moses wants people to believe but cannot make them believe. It wants people to be in the Spirit but it cannot put them there. The law of Moses is powerless to produce life. Hearing what you have to do does not produce faith. Hearing what God has done produces faith. Paul says in Galatians 3:18, For if the inheritance were a matter of law then it is no longer a matter of promise, but God has granted it to Abraham by promise.

He explains this idea more fully in Romans 4:13-16: For the promise that he would be heir of the world was not to Abraham and to his seed through the law but through the righteousness of faith. For if those who are of law are heirs then faith is made empty and the promise is of no effect. For the law produces wrath, for where there is no law there is no transgression. Therefore it is by faith, so that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be certain to all the seed.

Jesus said something in Matthew 23:23 that we have to consider in this context. In his lengthy rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem, he said this: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. These things you should have done, without neglecting the others.

Why does Paul say that the law of Moses is not of faith when Jesus said that faith is one of that law’s more important matters? First of all, Jesus may have been saying faithfulness, since the same Greek work is translated as either faith or faithfulness throughout the New Testament. Nevertheless, Paul does not deny that Moses wrote a lot about faith. Faith was very important to Moses and he wanted more than anything for the Israelites to have faith. That's why Moses described in detail the promises that God had made to Abraham and the other patriarchs. He knew that the promises of God produce faith.

But the covenant that Moses mediated at Mount Sinai was not such a promise. It bore witness to the promises of God but was itself a conditional agreement between God and Israel, dependent upon what the Israelites did and didn’t do. Such a covenant cannot produce faith. As Paul explains in Romans 4:15 (quoted above), it produces transgressions.

The same principle is true to this day. When people are told to have faith, they are told what they lack. They are actually told their sin, because lack of faith is sin. Christians certainly need to be urged to have faith because they need their lack of faith exposed. But this is actually the ministry of Moses, which is still necessary today and will be until Jesus returns. But, in addition to this, people need to be told what God has done for them. This produces in them the faith that they lack. This is the ministry of the gospel. “Jesus has done it all for you” is the message of the gospel that produces faith.

What Moses meant

Leviticus 18:1-5 says, And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the LORD your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the LORD your God. You shall therefore keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the LORD your God. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the LORD.

Leviticus 18:6-23 goes on to describe the kinds of rules and statutes by which the people of Israel will live. This list of rules can be characterized as follows: don’t have sex with relatives or animals; don’t kill your children. If these are the rules that, when followed, lead to eternal life, then it’s really easy to be justified by works!

But Moses is not, by these rules, telling the Israelites how to live forever. He is telling them how not to be killed by God today. After the list, God says to them through Moses, Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you (for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these abominations, so that the land became unclean), lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For everyone who does any of these, the persons who do them shall be cut off from among their people. So keep my charge never to practice any of these abominable customs that were practiced before you, and never make yourselves unclean by them: I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 18:24-30)

Thus ends Leviticus 18, which is one unified passage of teaching. Here is verse 5 compared with verse 29: You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them… For everyone who does any of these [the sins of the Egyptians and the Canaanites], the persons who do them shall be cut off from among their people. The punishment for these sins was immediate; it was not a cutting off that only happened in the future, after one died. The life promised in this passage was also immediate, not future. The statutes and rules of Leviticus 18:5, which would keep people alive, are contrasted with the deeds of the Egyptians and Canaanites, which would get them killed. Leviticus 18:5 is directed toward the temporal, earthly lives of the people of Israel.

If Jesus thought that Leviticus 18:5 was an offer of eternal life, he would have had opportunity to say so. He was challenged by the Sadducees, who did not think that eternal life was taught anywhere in the books of Moses. To them the blessings and the curses of the law of Moses were an entirely earthly matter. As for the more explicit teachings on this subject in the rest of the Old Testament, the Sadducees considered only the books that Moses wrote to be authoritative.

When the Sadducees questioned Jesus concerning the resurrection of the dead, he answered them with a reference to the book of Exodus. Instead of pointing to the Psalms and Prophets, which the Sadducees did not consider authoritative Scripture, Jesus directed their attention to the story of Moses at the burning bush. Jesus said to them, “Is this not why you are deceived, knowing neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. But concerning the dead, that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses, how God spoke to him at the bush, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living. You are very deceived.” (Mark 12:24-27)

When Jesus wanted to demonstrate that the law of Moses taught about the resurrection of the dead, and therefore the hope of eternal life, he didn't go to Leviticus 18:5 but to Exodus 3:6. At the burning bush, before Moses had given any law, God promised that he would deliver Israel out of slavery in Egypt. Exodus 2:24 gives God’s reason for doing this: And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. This was the covenant of promise that God had made with Abraham and confirmed with his sons. It was the gospel preached beforehand, the unconditional promise.

Because God identified himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob long after they had died, we know for sure that these three people will be raised from the dead. These men have received eternal life. They received it not by keeping the law of Moses but by believing the promise of God. Since this hope of eternal life, which Paul calls the inheritance, is based on a promise believed, it cannot later be made dependent upon the keeping of some rules, neither by Leviticus 18:5 nor by any passage out of the law of Moses.

Moses received his commission from God at the burning bush. It was the confirmation of his calling that he had perceived forty years earlier (Acts 7:23-25). God told Moses to go to Egypt and announce to the Israelites that the Lord was going to deliver them. At that time God said nothing to Moses about giving the people of Israel a comprehensive set of rules to live by.

Moses’ original calling was to announce good news to Israel; he was a gospel preacher at heart. He is best known for the law which he received at Mount Sinai and which bears his name. He is Israel’s great law-giver. But his passion was first and foremost to proclaim the promise of blessing that God had made to Abraham and was confirming by delivering Israel out of Egypt, the promise that Paul, in Galatians 3:8, called the gospel preached in advance. His role as law-giver became his primary work only because of Israel’s lack of faith in the promise. The less faith they had, the more rules they needed.

Although the law of Moses occupied most of his time, he never forget his original calling as a preacher of good news, and neither did God. According to Deuteronomy 18:18-19, God told Moses, I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. The New Testament apostles understood this to be a prophecy about Jesus Christ.

When God promised Moses that he would raise up a prophet like him, he did not mean another law-giver. He meant a prophet who would proclaim the good news that God has remembered his covenant of promise that he made with Abraham and that he was about to fulfill it.

CHAPTER SIX:

THE VEIL OF MOSES

Besides being a gospel preacher, there is another way that Jesus was a prophet like Moses. The law of Moses, Paul said, was given to the people by the hand of a mediator (Galatians 3:19). Jesus, like Moses, was also a mediator. But Jesus’ work as a mediator was significantly different than what Moses did. In order to understand this, we have to understand how Moses himself functioned as a mediator, and why the people of Israel needed such a mediator.

The law of God is not just a set of rules that has been around forever, rules that even God has to keep. Ultimately, the law of God is God himself. That is to say that God is a law unto himself. He is free from the need to follow any rules whatsoever. Whatever he does is right. He is the source of righteousness and the ultimate standard of what is right and what is wrong. Those commandments that we know to be part of the law of God (“do not lie,” for example) are not the law of God because even God has to do them. They are the law of God because they reflect God’s unchanging character. God is above and before the law of God.

This was Job’s problem with the law of God. His complaint was not that the rules were so hard and unfair and impossible to keep perfectly. His complaint was that God himself was hard and unfair and impossible to please. Your attitude toward God’s law reflects your attitude toward God. It makes no sense to say that you love God if you don’t love his law. That's like the man who once said to his former colleague, “I don’t hate you, it’s your guts that I hate.” Likewise, any complaints that we have about the law of God are complaints about God himself.

Job’s problem was also Israel’s problem. Israel’s problem with the law of Moses was that it revealed the law of God. Israel’s problem was not Moses, it was God. When the law of Moses was given at Mount Sinai, God himself spoke to the people with an awesome display of power. The Israelites had just witnessed the ten plagues on Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea, but they were still not prepared for such a direct encounter with God. Exodus 20:18-21 describes their reaction: Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin.” The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.

The Israelites had just fasted for three days in preparation for this encounter with God, yet they found it unbearably terrifying. They asked Moses to come between them and God, to mediate. Moses related later, in Deuteronomy 18:15-17, that the Lord had agreed with the people, that indeed too much exposure to God would have killed them: The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—just as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb [another name for Sinai] on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the LORD said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken.’

Moses made it possible for the Israelites to survive the presence of God. God had warned Moses that, just as the Israelites had understood at Mount Sinai, the presence of God would destroy them: For the LORD had said to Moses, “Say to the people of Israel, ‘You are a stiff-necked people; if for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you…’” (Exodus 33:5). But Moses interceded and convinced God to go with Israel as they journeyed to the land of Canaan. And it wasn’t only at Mount Sinai that Moses became a mediator between God and Israel. For the rest of his life he would go into the presence of God on behalf of the people.

Moses successfully interceded for the Israelites for the same reason that he himself was able to survive a direct encounter with God. He had faith in God that was rooted in God’s promise to Abraham—the promise of the gospel. Moses’ primary calling was as a preacher of the gospel. This calling affected how he experienced God. He had a faith in God’s goodness and mercy that had been tried and tested for forty years. His faith enabled him to go directly to God and to act as a mediator between God and Israel.

But the Israelites needed even more than the mediation of Moses. They needed the mediation of a veiled Moses. They not only needed Moses to come between them and God, they needed a veil to come between them and Moses!

Exodus 34:29-33 says, When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with them. Afterward all the people of Israel came near, and he commanded them all that the LORD had spoken with him in Mount Sinai. And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face.

This was not a one-time occurrence, but it continued for the duration of Moses’ ministry, as Exodus 34:34-35 goes on to describe: Whenever Moses went in before the LORD to speak with him, he would remove the veil, until he came out. And when he came out and told the people of Israel what he was commanded, the people of Israel would see the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face was shining. And Moses would put the veil over his face again, until he went in to speak with him.

I have quoted this passage from Exodus at length because Paul uses this story to teach an important lesson about the law of Moses. In 2 Corinthians he uses the veil over Moses’ face as a metaphor for Moses himself acting as a mediator and protecting the people from God.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:7-11: If the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came in glory, so that the Israelites were not able to stare into the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, which was being cut off, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be in much more glory? For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness must abound in much more glory. For that which was glorious has become inglorious because of the glory that surpasses it. For if that which was being cut off was with glory, much more will that which remains be in glory.

The glory of Moses’ face is contrasted with the glory of the gospel, which is glory that remains. Because of this contrast, the glory of Moses’ face is described in many translations as fading away. But this is not the exact meaning of the Greek word that Paul uses, and neither is it what is described in Exodus. Exodus 34:35 says that Moses kept the veil over his face until the next time that he went into the presence of the Lord, not until the glory faded away. In the translation above I have described the glory of Moses’ face as being cut off, because that is how the word is often translated in the New Testament and that is what the veil did, it kept the glory from shining on the people.

Paul goes on to explain why Moses concealed his face: Therefore, having such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who used to put a veil over his face so that the Israelites could not stare unto the end result of what was being cut off (2 Corinthians 3:12-13). Many translations indicate that Moses covered his face with a veil in order to hide the transitory nature of the shining glory, so that the Israelites could not see the end of what was fading away. But the Old Testament nowhere indicates that the glory of Moses’ face was fading away, and if it was, there is no reason why Moses would want to hide that fact from the people.

What the Old Testament does say is that the glory of his face was being cut off, hidden behind a veil, for the protection of the people. As we have seen in Exodus 34, when the Israelites saw Moses’ face shining, they were afraid to come near him. Moses’ face was shining with the holiness of God. Having experienced what they did at Mount Sinai, they understood that God’s holiness and glory were deadly. They were afraid for their lives. Since Moses could not tell the people what God had said if they ran away from him, he veiled his face. Paul says that the veil protected them from the end of the glory, that is, the purpose of the glory of the law of Moses: the death of sinners. Paul calls the law of Moses the ministry of death because that is its purpose.

The law of Moses not only bears witness to the law of God, but it protects from the law of God. The law of God is simply God himself in his perfection and majesty. His presence is terrifying to sinners, who cannot survive an encounter with him as he truly is. The Israelites couldn’t deal directly with God, but they could deal with Moses. He was not terrifying. And his law, written down and explained by him, was much less threatening and it even seemed possible to do.

So the veil over Moses’ face was a metaphor for Moses himself, protecting the people from the devastating glory of the law of God and providing an experience with God that was less direct and more bearable. But there was an unintended consequence of this ministry of mediation. Because Moses was just a man like them, the people could have contempt for him. Because his law was a written code instead of the naked majesty of the almighty God, they didn’t tremble in fear.

This was an unfortunate development. The fear that they showed at Mount Sinai was healthy. God told Moses that he wanted them to retain that fear even as they kept the law of Moses, although he knew that they wouldn’t: Oh that they had such a mind as this always, to fear me and to keep all my commandments, that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever (Deuteronomy 5:29).

Paul goes on, in 2 Corinthians 3:14-16, to point out this unintended consequence of the veil: But their minds were hardened. For till this day, when they read the Old Testament, that same veil remains, unlifted. Because only in Christ is it removed. Till this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart. But when he turns to the Lord the veil is lifted.

Paul understood this hardening of the mind very well because it described his former life as a Pharisee. Paul had found that the law of Moses, unlike the law of God, could be done superficially, without faith. The law of Moses should have kept him humble, since, as Hebrews 10:3 says, there was a reminder of sin in those same sacrifices offered every year. Instead, Paul found that he could live under the protective veil of the law of Moses and never come to terms with his own rebellion against God. Instead of humbling himself under the law of Moses and finding protection from the curse, he used the law of Moses as a veil to protect him from true repentance.

And so, because the law of Moses protected from the raw holiness of God, it became a set of rules that could be kept without faith. This is how Paul and many of his fellow Pharisees kept the law. Consider once again what Jesus said to Paul’s contemporaries, in John 5:46-47: If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

It would have come as a surprise to them that they did not believe Moses. They were convinced that they did indeed have faith. This was because of the hardening of their minds under the protection of the veil. The law of Moses protected them from the full condemnation for their unbelief, a condemnation that would have killed them. This protection was supposed to give them time to repent, but instead they found that they could do what Moses said to do, so they thought that they had faith. This is the error that Paul wants to correct when he says that the law is not of faith, on the contrary, “he who does these things will live by them.” Doing what Moses said to do does not prove that you have the faith that Moses had.

Before he met Christ, Paul had become an expert in this kind of faithless observance of the law of Moses. In Philippians 3:5-6 he described himself like this: according to the law a Pharisee, according to zeal persecuting the church, according to the righteousness that is by the law blameless. What Paul calls the righteousness that is by the law is the righteousness that comes by keeping the rules that Moses gave, while not even believing Moses. Paul’s opposition to the gospel (persecuting the church) exposed him as an opponent of the law of Moses, rather than a faithful adherent.

Through the protective veil of Moses’ intercession, the law of Moses was able to achieve what was necessary until Christ came, but it remained unfulfilled. One of the purposes of the law of Moses was the total condemnation of sinful flesh by the law of God, that is, by the perfect holiness and glory of God. This is condemnation unto destruction. Moses provided protection from this condemnation and destruction until Christ provided redemption from it.

So not only was Moses diverted from his original calling as a gospel preacher, he couldn’t even let his law do its complete work. He had to weaken the effect of his own law to keep it from killing everybody with the holiness of God. He had to wait, along with everyone else, for the one person in whom his law could be fulfilled. For the law of Moses was sent by God not simply to condemn sin, but to condemn sin in Christ.

Paul says in Romans 8:3 that the law of Moses could not accomplish its purposes until Christ came: What the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and on account of sin: he condemned sin in the flesh. Notice that Paul does not say that this failure was because we were weak in the flesh, as if the law of Moses failed because we came short of its perfect standard despite our best efforts. Remember that we were not even trying, we were enemies of God. The law of Moses itself was weak through the flesh. It dealt with the people on their level, the level of their flesh.

Romans 7:14 says, For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. If the law of Moses had not been weakened through the flesh, then its raw spiritual power would have killed every sinner who was exposed to it. Instead, it dealt with sinners as it found them. It could not kill them (which was its purpose) and it could not cure them (which was never its purpose); it could only point to God’s promise and offer temporary protection until that promise was fulfilled.

But killing sinners was not the ultimate purpose of the law of Moses. For after saying that the law of Moses was weak through the flesh, Paul explains, in Romans 8:4, why the condemnation of all sin was so important: So that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled among us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. The righteous requirement of the law of Moses is that the law of God may be fulfilled; that perfect holiness and righteousness may not only be realized but delighted in; that God could be himself among his people without destroying them.

The law of Moses was sent to serve the law of God by condemning all sin so as to bring it to an end. If it had done this in the days of Moses, it would have destroyed all sinners along with their sin, leaving no one left to delight in the righteousness of God. So the law of Moses veiled its own power, waiting until its greater purpose could be fulfilled. Christ was sent so that God could condemn sin unto destruction while saving the sinners. Only Christ could do this, and only Christ could fulfill the law of Moses.

CHAPTER SEVEN:

UNBEARABLE BY DESIGN

In Galatians 3:13 Paul says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. Now, when he says that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, he does not mean that the law of Moses was a curse, but that it issued a curse. For example, as we have seen, in Deuteronomy 27:26 Moses issued a curse on all who oppose and contradict what is written in his book. He knew that people, as sinners, are opposed to both the law of God and the gospel of God. Since his book bore witness to both of these, there would be many who opposed Moses and his law.

Those who heard the words of promise in his book and believed them would submit to the rules. They would try as hard as they could to obey and seek forgiveness for their moral failures, even the ones that they didn’t know about. In doing so they would be protected from the curse as they waited for the promised redemption that Christ would accomplish.

The curse of Deuteronomy 27:26 applied to all unrepentant sinners because they were enemies of God, not because they fell short no matter how hard they tried to be perfect. The ones who fell short no matter how hard they tried were those Israelites who believed Moses, repented, and were protected under his law as they waited for the promised Christ.

Some of those Israelites who did not believe Moses or the promises of God that he bore witness to would rebel, perhaps committing perverse sins. These would draw a lot of attention, but they weren’t the only disobedient ones. Some would keep the ceremonial works of the law of Moses while remaining without faith, embracing some of the law of Moses but opposing some of it, thinking that they were doing all of it. These kinds of unbelievers would also be under the curse that comes on all who oppose the law of Moses. Paul was one of these kinds of Israelites before he met Christ.

Paul points out that while he was a Pharisee who appeared to keep the law of Moses while opposing the gospel, he was actually opposing the law of Moses. He was just as much a sinner as the rebellious Gentiles were: And you, being dead in your transgression and sins in which you once walked, according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the authority of the air, the spirit who is now at work among the sons of disobedience—among whom we all also once conducted ourselves, in the lusts of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath just like the rest. (Ephesians 2:1-3)

This will be important to remember when you read the end of Galatians and Paul says something that may sound like the Israelites are falling short despite their best efforts. Galatians 6:13 says, Not even the circumcised keep the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they might boast in your flesh. Paul is referring here to the unbelieving Israelites in Jerusalem who have been persecuting the church. He recognizes that although the false preachers claim to be part of the church, they are really unbelievers who want to use circumcision to bring the Gentile churches under their control. Paul was once like them, and although he was “blameless according to the righteousness of the law,” he was not really keeping the law of Moses and neither are they.

Paul makes another statement, in Galatians 5:3-4, that can be understood to imply that the law of Moses was a much harder (even impossible) alternate way to justification: I testify again to every man who is circumcised that he is obligated to do the whole law. You have been cut off from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen from grace. Perhaps more than anywhere else in Galatians, it is here that Paul sounds like he is arguing that the law of Moses was a hypothetical means of justification that proved to be too difficult. But that is not exactly what he is saying.

First of all, what Paul said in these verses could have been said to any Israelite living in the time of the Old Testament (except for you have been cut off from Christ). Even in the days of Moses, anyone who sought to be justified by the law of Moses had fallen from grace. They would be seeking to use the law of Moses in a way that it was never intended to be used. Seeking to be justified by the law of Moses was a violation of the law of Moses.

Furthermore, if Paul was implying here that the law of Moses was an alternate but harder way to be justified, then he was also implying that the moral demands of Jesus were not as strict as those of Moses. But that is not the argument that Paul is making here. He is not saying, “If you want to be justified under the law of Moses you have to be perfect, but with Jesus you can still sin a little.” Paul would never imply such a thing. Besides, we know that Jesus was stricter than Moses concerning the kind of behavior that he expected from his followers.

And even if the Galatians had been able to be perfect under the law of Moses, they had certainly sinned in the past. Their past sins needed to be dealt with, and the law of Moses could not help them with this. The sacrifices of the law of Moses were a temporary provision until Christ made complete atonement for sin. Paul is warning them that to be obligated to keep the whole law is to wait for a redemption that is never going to come, because they would be denying that it had already come.

To be obligated to do the whole law is to be obligated to make atonement for your past sins. It doesn’t matter how good you are in the future if these sins are not dealt with. Only Christ can do this, and to be cut off from him is to be left to your own resources to make up for his absence.

In these verses, Paul presents three ideas that are synonymous to him: to be obligated to do the whole law is the same thing as to be cut off from Christ and to fall from grace. No amount of good works and moral perfection could ever be able to make up for the absence of Christ and his grace. Nor could perfect people do the whole law of Moses without Christ, because the law of Moses was always about more than good works and moral perfection.

Remember that before Paul met Christ, he didn’t think that it was such an impossible thing to keep the whole law of Moses. He described himself as blameless according to the righteousness that comes by keeping the law outwardly, but in the light of Christ he saw this so-called righteousness to be worthless (Philippians 3:4-11).

Peter’s background, however, was very different from Paul’s, and he had a different evaluation of the difficulty of keeping the law of Moses. Acts 15 records the discussion that the apostles and elders in Jerusalem had concerning whether or not the Gentile believers needed to keep the law of Moses in order to be saved. Peter made a remarkable statement, saying that the law of Moses had been unbearable: And after there had been much debate Peter stood up and said to them, “Men, brothers, you know that in the early days God chose from among you that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the heart, testified on their behalf, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith. Now, therefore, why do you test God by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.” (Acts 15:7-11)

When Peter says neither we nor our fathers he is referring to Israelites who, for the most part, trusted God and did not try to be justified by the law of Moses. As for Peter, he was a follower of John the Baptist before he met Jesus. He was never a Pharisee. He was a fisherman who was always quick to recognize his own sinfulness and repent. In this respect he was like many Old Testament believers, whom he refers to as our fathers.

There is a revealing contrast between Peter’s statement about the unbearable law of Moses and Paul’s own assessment of his success with the same law. Those Israelites like Paul, who were rebelling against the law of Moses by trying to be justified by doing its outward works, did not complain about how hard it was. But Israelites like Peter, who submitted to the law of Moses and confessed their sins and repented, found it to be unbearable. In other words, it was an unbearable law to those who were doing it right, not to those who were doing it wrong. This is because the law of Moses was always meant to be unbearable.

And what was unbearable about it? For one thing, there was the constant reminder of sin. It was hard on the conscience, especially compared to what God did to the Gentiles, cleansing their hearts by faith.

But the law of Moses didn’t just point to what was there (sin), it also pointed to who was missing (Christ). The law of Moses was never meant to be bearable because it was meant to create and intensify a longing for Christ. It was meant to make Christ’s absence unbearable.

When Paul encountered Jesus Christ he discovered the true purpose of the law of Moses. He said in Romans 10:4, For Christ is the goal of the law unto righteousness for all who believe. Christ himself is the ultimate goal of the law of Moses, not moral perfection, not atonement for sin. These things are found in Christ, and are thus subordinate goals of the law. But even if these things could hypothetically be achieved another way than by Christ, the law of Moses wants Christ. He is the ultimate goal. All lesser goals are fulfilled in him.

Even the death of sinners, which, as we have seen in the last chapter, is called the goal of the law of Moses in 2 Corinthians 3:13, is subordinate to its ultimate goal. The law of Moses was not about punishment for punishment’s sake or death for death’s sake. Romans 8:3-4 says that in Christ God condemned sin in the flesh so that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Christ living in us is the ultimate goal of the law of Moses. It was unto this end that Christ died for us, and it was unto this end that he was raised from the dead.

In his letter to Titus Paul refers to two purposes of Christ in fulfilling the law of Moses. What Christ did, he did for us. His death for us was one of the goals of the law of Moses because, in it, sin was condemned. But since Christ himself is the ultimate goal of the law of Moses, his sacrifice was also for himself. He gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all lawlessness and purify for himself a people all his own, zealous for good works (Titus 2:14 emphasis added).

The worst thing about being cut off from Christ is not that you have to be perfect in order to be justified. The worst thing about being cut off from Christ is the absence of Christ. It is not that you would be without his help, it is just that you would be without him.

Christ was always the ultimate goal of creation, even before there was any sin to make atonement for. Paul tells us in Romans 5:14 that Adam was a type of Christ. Even before he sinned, Adam was created to point to the one who was to come. Christ himself was always the ultimate purpose, not only of the law of Moses but of the entire universe.

CHAPTER EIGHT:

THE MINISTRY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

When Paul encountered the resurrected Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus, he encountered the law of Moses fulfilled. Describing his conversion, he said, through the law I died to the law (Galatians 2:19). This does not mean that Paul tried so hard to keep the law of Moses until he realized that it was impossible and finally gave up. On the contrary, at the time of his encounter with Christ he thought that he was doing a good job of keeping the law of Moses. He was very much alive to it. His problem—although he did not realize it at the time—was that he was dead to God. When he saw Jesus Christ raised from the dead, he saw the one in whom the law of Moses had finally dealt the decisive blow to sin. He saw the one upon whom the condemnation of the law of Moses had fallen with its full force, releasing the terror of the law of God—God himself in his perfect holiness—as it confronts and kills all of sinful humanity, including Paul himself. He saw the truth about all that he had done in which he thought he was following the law of Moses and serving God; he saw that he had not done any of it for God, but against him. He died.

But he also saw the one by whom he himself could live again even though he had died. In Christ Paul saw himself killed and given new life. Moses shielded the people from the glory of God, otherwise it would have destroyed them. Christ revealed the glory of God in all its sin-destroying power—power now directed at him and satisfied in him. Christ did not prevent the sinners from being destroyed. He allowed for them to be destroyed in his own death.

So when Paul says, through the law I died to the law, he is not just saying that he gave up on something. He is saying that the law of Moses killed him in Christ. Remember that in Romans 8:3-4 he said that, through Christ, God fulfilled this important function of the law of Moses, the condemnation of sin, so that the righteous requirement of the law of Moses, agreement with the law of God, might be fulfilled. So also he says in Galatians that the law killed him so that he might be alive to God, no longer an enemy but a son. In this new life before God, the law of God is no longer terror and wrath, but life and peace. It is something that can be delighted in.

Paul goes on to say, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. The life he lives in the flesh refers to the remainder of his earthly life after his encounter with Christ. He says that he is living out the rest of his earthly life by faith in Jesus. Note that this is what Paul means here by the phrase live by faith. He does not mean that after his earthly life is over he will be rewarded with eternal life because of his faith. That is true, but that is not what Paul is saying here when he says he lives by faith. This is important to note because he will use the same phrase in Galatians 3:11 (making an allusion to Habakkuk 2:4) and when he does so, he means the same thing.

Here then is Galatians 3:11-12: But that no one is justified by law is clear because “the righteous will live by faith,” and the law is not of faith, on the contrary, “he who does these things will live by them.” Paul is not contrasting two different ways of acquiring eternal life after you die. He is contrasting two ways of living out your earthly life. This statement, the righteous will live by faith, does not describe how the righteous become righteous, it describes how they live. They in fact are righteous because of their faith. What Paul is saying (and what Habakkuk before him was saying) is more than that. They are saying that they will continue to live their lives by the same faith by which they have been counted righteous in the first place.

Since those who are righteous before God are righteous on account of their faith, what the righteous will live by faith means is this: those with faith will live by their faith. And since their faith is counted as righteousness, it could also be said this way: the righteous will live by their righteousness.

Paul had just asked the Galatians this question: Having begun in the Spirit are you now being made complete in the flesh? (Galatians 3:3) This is another way the question could be asked: Having been counted righteous on the basis of your faith are you now going on to maturity on the basis of your works? The answer to the question is: no, that is not how the righteous mature, they mature by continuing in their righteousness, that is, by continuing in their faith. Paul says something very similar to this in Galatians 5:25, when he says, since we live in the Spirit let us also walk in the Spirit.

Moses also speaks of faith not only as that which results in righteousness but as that which itself is righteousness. Genesis 15:6 says, Abraham believed God, and for him that was counted as righteousness. Abraham’s faith in God was counted as Abraham’s righteousness. His righteousness was not something else that faith merely acquired for him. Abraham’s righteousness was his faith and his faith was his righteousness.

Faith is not the ticket to the event, it is the event. If I have a ticket to a concert, I treasure that ticket until it gets me into the concert itself. From that point on it is good only as a souvenir. The Galatian churches were in danger of making their faith into a souvenir, in which case it would be useless. They were being told by the false preachers that their faith in Christ served them well as their ticket to righteousness, and now circumcision and keeping the law of Moses is how they will live out that righteousness.

The Galatians were being tempted to adopt an understanding of faith that could be called transactional. This understanding of faith would be natural for former Pharisees who converted to Christianity but did not have the revelation of Christ that Paul had. In chapter six we saw that Paul had learned to do what Moses said to do even though he lacked faith. In Philippians 3:6 Paul says that he had been blameless as to the righteousness that is by the law. But his mind was hardened to the real message of the law of Moses and he was dead to God.

But in Philippians 3:9 he describes his new condition as not having a righteousness of [his] own that comes through the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. Paul’s understanding of faith, which he wanted the Galatians to adopt, was organic rather than transactional.

True righteousness comes through faith in Christ, and it is organically linked to faith, the moment faith is gone, so is the righteousness. For those like Paul, who were used to the righteousness that comes by doing what Moses said, but doing it without faith, this is easy to forget. They considered themselves righteous because of works done in the past. The works were past, but the righteousness was theirs to keep. When people with that perspective came to faith in Christ, some of them thought of their faith also as something that was in the past, a transaction by which they received righteousness which was now theirs to keep.

But Paul did not consider faith in Christ to be a past event which brought about something else, something called righteousness. To his way of thinking, faith is a kind of righteousness (the right kind) and righteousness is a kind of life (the right kind). That is why Paul could say, if a law were given that had power to make alive, then righteousness would be a matter of law (Galatians 3:21). To be righteous is to be alive to God. To continue in that condition is to live by faith.

Habakkuk 2:4 is also expounded on in the book of Hebrews. Hebrews 10:38 quotes the text from Habakkuk and then Hebrews chapter 11 goes on to illustrate this principle by describing how believers (the righteous) lived. They offered sacrifices, disappeared from the face of the earth, built an ark, lived in tents, wandered around in the wilderness, suffered persecution, defeated armies, prophesied to their children, protected spies. In other words, they did many different things. And they did these things not because they were following a written code, but because they were believing in the living God.

It is this kind of living that Paul, in Galatians, contrasts with works. Remember that for Paul “those who are of works of law” means something very specific. It means those who are opposed to the gospel that produces faith in Christ. The works that he is against are the works that he himself did before he encountered Jesus Christ: dead works done by enemies of God.

When this is not understood, Paul is thought to be saying something contrary to what James, the brother of Jesus, said in his letter. In fact they are saying the same thing. James 2:17-18 says: So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.

Meanwhile, Paul says, the righteous will live by faith. Paul is describing how the righteous live, how they do what they do. Everything they do, they do by faith. By live he means something very close to what James means by works. In fact it is so close that Paul could easily adopt James’ language and still say what he wanted to say. Instead of saying the righteous will live by faith, he would say this: the righteous will do all their works by faith. Likewise, if James were to say what he said using Paul’s language, he would say this: show me your faith apart from your life and I will show you my faith by the life I live.

James goes on to give two examples from Scripture to illustrate his point: Do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was working together with his works, and faith was completed by his works; and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” And he was called a friend of God. You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. Likewise was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead. (James 2:20-26)

Both of the examples used above are also used in Hebrews 11, which is an entire chapter describing how the righteous live by faith. In Hebrews 11 both Abraham and Rahab are described as doing what they did by faith: By faith Abraham, when tested, offered up Isaac…by faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient because she received the spies with peace (Hebrews 11:17,31). They did not do what they did because the law of Moses told them to, they did these works because they were inspired by faith.

When James speaks of works, he means works of faith. These works of faith are not necessarily works commanded by the law of Moses. In fact, in Abraham’s case, what he was willing to do in the obedience of faith was something that would have been forbidden by the law of Moses. He was willing to sacrifice his own son, something forbidden even by the law of God. This was a special case, a unique prophetic event. God led Abraham to such extremes to show him that the promised blessing that would come to the world through him would be utterly new and different. God was promising to make himself known in a way in which he can't be known by the law of God.

PART THREE

“For freedom Christ has set you free. Therefore stand firm and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

Galatians 5:1

CHAPTER NINE:

THE TEMPORARY GUARDIAN

We have been considering Paul’s argument especially in Galatians 3:10-12. Now let us take a step back and consider the flow of the argument in all of Galatians 3. We will begin with the last few verses of Galatians 2: For through the law I died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me. And the life I live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness is through the law, Christ died for nothing. (Galatians 2:19-2:22)

Thus Paul concludes his summary of his argument against Peter and Barnabas, which occurred at Antioch (Galatians 2:11-21). We will return to that argument later. I quote it now because Paul moves from that summary straight into his main appeal to the Galatians, which constitutes the middle of the letter. Paul begins by reminding them about Christ crucified and asking them to remember the beginning of their life in Christ:

O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as having been crucified? This alone I want to learn from you: did you receive the Spirit by works of law or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit are you now being perfected by the flesh? Have you suffered so much in vain (if indeed it was in vain)?

Next he mentions their reception of the Spirit again and compares it to what happened to Abraham. The way they received the Spirit is taught and endorsed by Scripture. It’s the same way that Abraham himself was justified. The false preachers are denying the testimony of Scripture and seeking to undermine it. This puts them at odds with Moses and therefore exposes them to a curse:

He then who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does he do it by works of law or by the hearing of faith, just as Abraham “believed God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness”? Know therefore that those who are of faith, these are sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the nations by faith, proclaimed the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you all the nations shall be blessed.” So those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham.

For as many as are of works of law are under a curse, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law, to do them.”

Paul knows that what he has just said could lead to the wrong conclusion. Since the false preachers are cursed for acting contrary to the law of Moses, Paul’s readers may conclude that if they cooperated with the law of Moses they would be justified instead of cursed. To prevent this assumption, Paul adds an important parenthetical statement reminding them that, although you can be cursed for opposing the law of Moses, you cannot be justified by doing it. You can be protected by it, but you are only justified by believing in the promise to which Moses points, the promise which was around long before his law. The law of Moses protected from the curse until the promise was fulfilled. Paul doesn’t want anyone to mistake this temporary protection for true, life-giving righteousness, so he adds this:

(But that no one is justified before God by law is clear, because, “the righteous will live by faith,” and the law is not of faith, rather, “he who does these things will live by them.”)

It was not Moses but Christ who fulfilled the promise, offering eternal redemption from the curse that comes on all who rebel against God:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (for it is written, “cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”) so that the blessing of Abraham might come to the nations in Christ Jesus; so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit by faith.

Paul began this part of his argument by reminding them of the crucifixion of Christ and asking them how they received the Spirit. He has just come full circle by reminding them again of Christ crucified (hanged on a tree) and answering the question that he began with: they received the Spirit by faith.

Next he illustrates his point by means of a simple history lesson. God’s promise to Abraham, Paul points out, preceded the law of Moses by centuries.

Brothers, I will use a human analogy. Even though it’s a man’s covenant, once it has been ratified, nobody sets it aside or adds conditions to it. Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and his seed. He does not say, “and to seeds,” as if to many, but as if to one, “and to your seed,” which is Christ. This is what I am saying: a law which came 430 years later does not invalidate a covenant ratified by God so as to undo the promise. For if the inheritance is a matter of law, it is no longer a matter of promise. But God has granted it to Abraham by promise.

The law of Moses defined the nation of Israel and set it apart from the nations of the world. But the promise to Abraham was always for Christ and, as Paul will point out a few verses later, those who are in Christ. In this illustration he has been as clear as possible that the law of Moses does not affect the promise or offer an alternate means of justification before God. He knows that if his readers have understood this they will wonder what its purpose really is:

Why then the law? It was added because of transgression. It was enacted by angels through the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator implies more than one, but God is one.

Hebrews 2:2-3 contrasts the angels who ministered the law of Moses with Jesus himself as the messenger of the gospel. This contrast shows the gospel to be a greater revelation than the law of Moses. This is probably Paul’s point as well. But more important than the involvement of the angels is what they did. When Paul says that the angels enacted the law of Moses he is using a word that is closely related to the word he used above, where he said that conditions could not be added to a covenant once it had been ratified. So whatever the law of Moses did, it did not change the promise.

The significance of a mediator is that it means that the law of Moses was a bilateral agreement. It depended both upon the people and upon God to do their part. The promise, on the other hand, was unilateral. God promised it and he would do it.

But the law of Moses, however different it was, served the promise. And Paul wants to make clear that it did not hinder the promise of God in any way:

So then, is the law against the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given which was able to make alive, then righteousness would indeed be a matter of law. But Scripture has confined all things under sin so that the promise, by faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe.

Paul goes on, in the rest of Galatians 3, to describe the positive contribution of the law of Moses in its temporary role:

But before faith came we were kept under guard by the law, confined for the faith which was going to be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come we are no longer under a guardian. For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise.

The law of Moses was Israel’s guardian. It kept Israel from adopting the sinful customs of the rest of the nations. This was not just for the sake of the Israelites themselves. Of course God didn’t want them to sin, and everything that could keep them from the impurity of the idolatrous nations was to their benefit. But it was also for the benefit of God’s promise to Abraham.

The law of Moses served the covenant of promise that God made with Abraham. For this reason it was, in a sense, subordinate to the covenant of promise. This is illustrated in Jesus’ teaching in Jerusalem recorded in John’s Gospel.

Jesus said in John 7:22-24, Moses gave you circumcision (not that it is from Moses but from the fathers), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because I made a man’s whole body well on the Sabbath? Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.

Jesus points out that the law of Moses forced a choice upon the people. Moses commanded that no work be done on the seventh day of the week. He also commanded that a male child be circumcised on the eighth day of his life. Whenever the eighth day of a child’s life fell on the seventh day of the week, these two commandments were in conflict with one another; only one could be kept. The command to circumcise was kept.

By circumcising their children on the Sabbath, the Israelites were making the right choice. But they did not know why they made that choice; they were doing it by tradition but had forgotten the rationale for the decision. Before the law of Moses, circumcision was part of the covenant that God made with Abraham, the covenant of promise that was the preaching of the gospel beforehand. For this reason it was kept, even on the Sabbath.

The Sabbath was not part of the covenant that God made with Abraham. It may have been observed in Abraham’s day, but it was not the seal of the covenant of promise, circumcision was. The law of Moses incorporated the command to circumcise and also added the command to observe the Sabbath (or face the penalty of death). Since the law of Moses was given to serve the promise, and circumcision was part of the covenant of promise, circumcision took priority over Sabbath-keeping.

Circumcision had an important place in the law of Moses because of its function pertaining to God’s covenant with Abraham. The law of Moses came after the covenant of circumcision and served it. Likewise, circumcision itself came after God’s promise of blessing and served that promise. Paul explains in Romans 4:11-12 that circumcision was given to Abraham after he had already believed the promise: He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had while still uncircumcised, so that he might be the father of all who believe though uncircumcised, that faith might be counted to them as righteousness, and the father of the circumcision who are not only of the circumcision but who also walk in the steps of faith that our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.

Abraham was not the first person to be justified by faith. For example, Hebrews 11:7 says that Noah became an heir of the righteousness that is according to faith when he escaped the flood in the ark. But although many people since Adam had the experience of justification by faith, it is Abraham, not Adam, Enoch, or Noah, who is called the father of those who believe.

If you are a believer, whether Jew or Gentile, God promised you to Abraham many years before you were born. Circumcision played a vital part in the fulfillment of that promise; it preserved for you the truth about Abraham’s experience of justification by faith.

Abraham is our father not just because we have had the same experience as him, but because our experience was based on faith in the same promise that God had made to Abraham. (Actually, in our case it is the fulfillment of that promise in Christ.) Paul calls circumcision a seal because it preserved that promise throughout all the generations from Abraham to Christ.

If you receive a letter that is still sealed, that will tell you that the contents of the letter have not been altered. Likewise, in order for the promise of God to be accurately transmitted through hundreds of years until its fulfillment, it needed to be kept from corruption. Therefore a family was designated, and later a nation, that would be distinct from other peoples, with its own customs and traditions. The law of Moses continued the tradition of circumcision and added many other regulations to be followed as well. These additional rules were for the same purpose, to give the Israelites a distinct identity and to keep them from adopting the customs of the nations around them. If they had done so, they would have corrupted the memory of what God had promised to Abraham; God’s words would have been altered or lost.

There are many ancient accounts of a global flood throughout the cultures of the world. But they vary in details and differ from one another and from Moses’ account. Moses’ accurate account was preserved over many generations by a distinct nation with a culture that gave the preservation of Moses’ written word the highest priority. When we see how much the account of the flood was corrupted in other cultures, we know that the same thing would have happened in Israel had Moses not written it down and entrusted it to the nation to keep. The same corruption would have happened to Moses’ account of God’s dealings with Abraham were it not for a nation and culture dedicated to preserving it.

So the law of Moses was designed to preserve Israel’s distinct identity, in order to preserve the promise of God until it was fulfilled by Jesus Christ. The law of Moses, and the culture that it created, were like a vessel designed to carry a package, the word of God, safely across the ages to be delivered to us uncontaminated. This precious package included both the law of God and the promise of God, for the law of Moses bore witness to both. Israel was entrusted with the words of God for the sake of the whole world, serving among the nations as a prophet. And for the sake of this prophetic ministry Israel’s culture had to be kept from being defiled by the nations around it. This separation resulted in a culture that was morally purer than any other nation. This moral purity was a great blessing, but it was not, and was never intended to be, justification before God.

CHAPTER TEN:

THE PRINCIPLE ELEMENTS

Israel served the nations not only as a prophet, but also as a priest. In chapter three we compared Israel’s role among the nations to that of a priest serving the people. The priest himself was not sinless; he was just as much in need of forgiveness as the people he represented. So it was with Israel. Though itself a nation of sinners, it served the nations of the world by being set apart unto God. God did not choose the people of Israel so that they might look down on the rest of the nations but that they might represent them.

This function of Israel, to represent the nations as a priest, is necessary to bear in mind as we turn to Galatians 4 because there Paul moves from discussing Israel under the law of Moses until Christ came to discussing the condition of all of humanity, Israel included. In doing so, he uses stronger language than he used in Galatians 3. There he had described Israel as confined and held in custody under a guardian. Here he speaks of slavery:

But I say that as long as the heir is a child he is no different from a slave, though he is master of everything. But he is under guardians and managers until the time set by the father. Likewise also we, when we were children, were enslaved under the principle elements of the world.

In what Paul says next he sounds like he is saying that Christ became a Jew to redeem the Jews (only). But he immediately refers to the Galatian believers—Gentiles and former idolaters—as included in this redemption:

But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave but a son. And if you are a son, you are also an heir through God.

He then tells the Galatians that for them to be circumcised and convert to Judaism would be like going back to idolatry:

But then, when you did not know God, you were indeed slaves to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have known God, or rather, are known by God, how can you return again to the weak and useless principle elements, to which you want to be enslaved all over again. You observe days, months, seasons, and years. I fear for you lest somehow I have labored over you in vain.

The law of Moses, as a guardian, contained Israel until Christ came. This was Israel’s unique situation. But all of humanity was enslaved to the principle elements of the world. Israel shared this condition with the rest of the nations.

The law of Moses did not enslave the Israelites, it found them already enslaved and dealt with them as they were. The nations of the world manifested this slavery by worshiping idols. Israel had been trained by the law of Moses to worship the true God. But even when the Israelites did not worship idols, they were still in danger of acting like slaves to the principle elements of the world. They just did it in a different way.

We have seen that the law of Moses was like a vessel carrying the word of God across the ages. To a practicing Jew the vessel itself would come to be closely associated with its contents over time. The law of Moses contained many rules designed to keep the Israelites separate from the nations for the sake of the word that had been entrusted to them. It would be a small step from keeping these rules to assuming that the rules themselves, and the Israelites’ diet and outward habits, made them holy.

A similar thing happened with idolatrous Gentiles who came to faith in Christ. The Corinthian believers were an example of this. When they were idol worshipers they used to eat meat offered to idols in the temples at Corinth. Now that they were believers they had reservations about eating meat from animals that had been offered in idols’ temples, even if they simply bought it at the market and cooked it at home.

Paul answered that if a believer wasn’t bothered by it, he or she should go ahead and eat it. But if they continued to have a troubled conscience they should not eat it. In 1 Corinthians 8:7 he describes those who suffered from a troubled conscience: Some, because of previous association with idolatry, still eat it as a thing offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. Because of their former slavery to the principle elements of the world, they still associated certain foods with idol worship. They were now free from the principle elements, but, in some matters, they still thought like slaves.

The Jews also associated food with certain kind of behavior. Their association was rooted in the same kind of slavery although it had a very different result. The Gentiles’ diet and eating habits were associated with their former immorality and idolatry; the Jews, on the other hand, associated their strict diet with their equally strict moral code.

This was a mistake. They were instructed to keep themselves separate from the Gentile not because they were holier, but because they were just as sinful. If they had adopted the customs of the Gentiles, they would soon be worshiping their idols and engaging in the same kinds of sins.

The same law of Moses that kept Israel distinct from the sinful Gentiles also kept them from supposing that they themselves were not also sinners. At least, that’s what it was intended to do. It was meant to make Israel a priestly nation, identifying with and interceding for the nations of the world just as a priest identified with and interceded for the people he served.

Next, in Galatians 4:12-20, Paul interrupts his argument to make a personal appeal to the Galatians, reminding them of their history together and warning them about the motives of the false preachers:

Brothers, I beg you, become like me because I became like you. You did me no wrong. And you know that because of a weakness in the flesh I proclaimed the gospel to you at first. And you did not despise or reject your trial in my flesh, but you received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. So then, where is your blessedness? For I testify for you that, if possible, you would have ripped out your eyes and given them to me. So have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?

They are zealous for you, but not in a good way. They want to shut you out so that you might be zealous for them. It’s always good to be treated zealously in a good way, and not only when I am present with you. My children, for whom I am in labor pains again until Christ is formed in you, I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you.

Paul follows this with an illustration from the book of Genesis, an allegorical interpretation of the story of Ishmael and Isaac. He compares Ishmael to Jerusalem and Isaac to the Galatian churches. This is a fitting climax to the argument that Paul has been making. He has been comparing the law of Moses and the promise to Abraham. The promise to Abraham was the gospel preached beforehand, fulfilled by Christ. When Jesus made a new covenant in his blood he was fulfilling the covenant of promise that God had made with Abraham. So although the new covenant came after the law of Moses, it was guaranteed to Abraham before the law of Moses was given.

The dispute between Paul and the false preachers was over who were the true heirs of the promise to Abraham. Paul points out that this dispute had already begun during Abraham’s own lifetime:

Tell me, you who want to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the one by a slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the one by the free woman, through a promise. Now this can be understood as an allegory, in which these women are two covenants. One, from Mount Sinai and birthing into slavery, is Hagar. Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, symbolizing present day Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.

But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written, “Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear, break forth and shout, you who are not in labor. For the children of the desolate woman are more than those of the one who has a husband.” And you brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise.

But as it was then, he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now. But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman will not inherit with [the son of the free woman].” So then brothers, we are not children of a slave woman but of the free woman.

These are harsh words for Jerusalem, but we have to understand that Paul was referring to the religious leadership in Jerusalem, the same people who plotted to kill Jesus. Remember that when Paul speaks of those who are “of works of law” he means something specific and limited. So also, below, when he speaks of “present day Jerusalem” he does not mean all of Jerusalem or all of the Jews, but the current leadership in Jerusalem and all who followed it. They were against the gospel and were persecuting the church. Also, he calls this present day Jerusalem. Jerusalem was enslaved in unbelief, but it did not have to remain that way.

The early church labored for the conversion of the entire nation of Israel. Most of the nation, however, remained unconverted. The church must have wondered why most of Israel did not believe in Jesus. Paul also grieved over this. He addressed this issue at length in Romans 11.

Looking back on the history of Israel he saw that it had always been that way. Paul used the days of Elijah as an example in Romans 11. At that time all of Israel worshiped Baal except for a remnant of 7,000. This was a striking example, but there were other times as well during which the true believers were in the minority. Often a small remnant remained faithful to God among a great majority of unbelievers. Jesus Christ did not bring this about, he just made it manifest who were the believers and who weren’t.

The faithful remnant among Israel was often hidden in the days of the Old Testament. God knew who those 7,000 were who had not worshiped Baal, but Elijah did not know about them. After Jesus came, however, there would be no doubt about who or where the remnant was. The gospel revealed the remnant.

John the Baptist predicted that Jesus’ ministry would have this effect: The winnowing fork is in his hand, he will clear out his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire (Matthew 3:12). Although this prophecy still has a future fulfillment, it already started to be fulfilled by Israel’s reaction to the ministry of Jesus and the early church. Those who rejected Jesus were revealed to be chaff. It was not enough just to belong to the nation of Israel; it had never been enough.

Remember that in Deuteronomy 27 God issued curses on individual sinners, culminating in verse 28: cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the law, to do them. Immediately following that, Moses described the corporate blessings and curses that Israel could expect as a result of its conduct as a nation.

The curse that Christ redeemed us from is a curse on individuals. And just as Christ redeemed from the curse, he brought about the blessing of eternal life, also on individuals. Eternal life is a blessing that is granted to people one at a time.

But the temporal blessings of the law of Moses were corporate, as were the temporal curses. That is, when Israel obeyed the law of Moses, the nation would be blessed with prosperity and safety. Whenever this happened in the history of Israel, there were, no doubt, some wicked individuals who nevertheless benefitted from this national prosperity. Just belonging to Israel was enough. Likewise, when Israel was disobedient and suffered the punishments described by Moses, there were some righteous people within the nation who also suffered. These kinds of temporal curses, like war and famine, affected the nation as a whole.

Moses often spoke of God’s deliverance of the Israelites out of Egypt as a kind of redemption. God redeemed the nation out of slavery. It is a mistake to understand this to mean that they were all spiritually redeemed, as if crossing over the Red Sea gave them eternal life. It was a physical redemption. It was corporate and historical; it did not result in eternal life.

But within the corporately redeemed nation of Israel were many individuals who were also waiting in faith for the spiritual redemption that God had promised to Abraham’s seed. This faithful remnant became the New Testament church, to which many believing Gentiles were added.

CHAPTER ELEVEN:

THE CONFLICT AT ANTIOCH

Now we will consider Paul’s argument in Galatians 2:11-21. In this passage he recounts a conflict that he had with Peter (also called Cephas) in Antioch:

Now when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James he would eat with the Gentiles. But when they came he withdrew and kept himself apart, fearing those of the circumcision. The rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy.

It is difficult to determine the exact details of this encounter, and it is not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament. In Appendix B we will look closer at some of the historical questions, considering when this happened and who exactly Peter was afraid of and why. In this chapter we will focus on Paul’s argument. He recounts this event in order to tell the Galatians what he said to Peter; he wants them to understand his reasoning.

Paul’s language is very strong: I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. He is speaking here about the law of Moses when he uses the word condemned. It is not the gospel, but the law of Moses, that condemns people. Peter stood condemned because of his hypocritical behavior. Paul is about to make the argument, in Galatians 3:8-10, that the false preachers were cursed by the law of Moses because they opposed the preaching of the gospel. Here he points out another example of the ministry of Moses at work: when Peter was not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, his behavior was condemned by the law of Moses.

The law of Moses is called the ministry of condemnation (2 Corinthians 3:9). This ministry did not come to an end when Jesus was crucified. It continues to work in the world because not everything that is done in the world is consistent with the truth of the gospel. And as Peter’s example teaches us, not even everything that is done by mature believers is in keeping with the gospel of grace; not all of their works are done in Christ. So the law of Moses remains to condemn all that is not in Christ, while Christ gives his righteousness to everything that is done in him.

Paul may be responding to an accusation that the false preachers made against him to the Galatian churches. They may have told the Galatians the story of this conflict in Antioch in order to put Paul in an unfavorable light. This passage is more than a personal defense, however, for Paul uses the incident to demonstrate and defend his understanding of the law of Moses and to launch into the main argument of the letter.

Here is how Paul began his rebuke of Peter:

But when I saw that they were not walking in a way that lined up with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to become Jews? For we are Jews by nature, not sinners of the Gentiles.”

By saying sinners of the Gentiles, Paul is using language that Peter would be familiar with as a proud Israelite. He is also beginning his argument by pointing out what they have in common. They were Jews by nature. They were born and raised to avoid the kind of immorality that was rampant in the Gentile world, and they continued to maintain the highest moral standards as followers of Jesus. Examples from their own writings will show what both Paul and Peter thought about typical Gentile behavior.

Paul said in Ephesians 4:17-20: Therefore this I say and charge in the Lord that you should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their minds, being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their hearts, who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness to work all kinds of uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ.

Peter said in 1 Peter 4:3-5: For the time that has past is enough for doing the will of the Gentiles, living in lewdness, lusts, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and wanton idolatry. Concerning these things they are surprised when you do not run with them in the same flood of dissipation, and they blashpheme you; but they will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.

Like most who had grown up in a Jewish home at that time, Paul and Peter were shocked and disgusted at the kinds of sins that typical Gentiles considered normal. This is a repulsion that they would have shared even with those Jews who did not believe in Jesus Christ. It was a result of their moral upbringing. It was a good part of their shared cultural heritage that they valued and retained as they believed in Christ. Both apostles taught that the moral character of a follower of Christ must be stricter than even anything that they had learned growing up as Jews. On this there was no disagreement.

Paul begins his argument this way because, although the immediate issue at hand was about regulations concerning eating and drinking, there was an underlying moral issue. Peter and Paul understood that the regulations about eating and drinking contained in the law of Moses were designed to keep them from fellowshipping with the Gentiles. This was so that they would not be influenced by them to share in their sinful lifestyles. Separation from the Gentiles helped them maintain their moral standards.

Peter and Paul also agreed that their culture’s strict standards and refined sense of morality did not give them better standing before God. That was by faith. Paul emphasizes this point of agreement between them:

“But, knowing that a man is not justified by works of law but by faith in Jesus Christ, we also have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of law. For by works of law no flesh will be justified.”

It is here that Paul’s argument becomes harder to follow:

“But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, even we ourselves were found to be sinners, then is Christ a minister of sin? Certainly not!”

Paul asks Peter if he agrees in his heart with the implications of his actions, and then he answers for him, certainly not! Peter, Paul, and Barnabas had all stopped keeping the law of Moses in every detail, especially regarding eating and drinking. They did this because they viewed these laws as unessential. Their faith in Christ was essential, because it was their righteousness. Paul is saying to Peter, “If we must now keep the food laws like we did before, then it was wrong for us to stop keeping them. But it was our faith in Christ that led us to stop keeping these laws so that we could fellowship with Gentiles who share our faith. And if it was Christ who led us into this error, then he is a facilitator of sin.”

Having spelled out the implications of Peter’s actions, he then insists that those implications are wrong. It was not, in fact, a sin to destroy the wall of separation between the Jews and Gentiles. To rebuild that wall, however, would be a sin. It would be a transgression against the law of Moses itself. Paul tore down that wall when he met Christ. He also tore down his life of righteousness that he had built for himself by doing the works of the law of Moses. He can’t build these things again:

For if I build again the things I destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor.

Paul has gone from speaking in terms of us and we to speaking about himself. This makes it a little bit harder to follow, for he is explaining why Peter and Barnabas were wrong by saying why it would be wrong for him to do the same thing. It is a polite way of saying, “If you, Peter, build again the things you destroyed, you prove yourself to be a transgressor.”

The real transgression of the law of Moses, Paul says, would be to go back to keeping separate from the Gentile believers. (For an alternative interpretation of Galatians 2:17-18 see Appendix C.) But if the law of Moses itself put these food laws in place, how could it be transgression of that law to return to observing them? Because these kinds of regulations did not fulfill the law of Moses, even when they were scrupulously kept. They were a temporary provision until the law of Moses could be fulfilled. It was fulfilled by the crucifixion of Jesus, which was also the death of Paul the sinner.

Paul speaks of this death as occurring through the law of Moses because it was the law of Moses, the ministry of condemnation, that pointed to the perfect holiness of God and demanded the utter punishment of sins. Although Moses had veiled the sin-destroying wrath of God for the sake of the people, Jesus experienced it directly and in its fullness on the cross. And he experienced it on behalf of Paul the sinner:

For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Paul’s death with Christ was not just a symbolic way to say that he had been pardoned and cleared of guilt. It was a true death, it ended Paul’s existence as a sinner. In Christ he is a new creation, even if, in the flesh, he still looks like the same Paul:

And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God. For if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

Paul never gets tired of saying that righteousness is not through the law of Moses. The Law of Moses wasn’t trying to make sinners righteous, it was trying to make them dead. This goal was fulfilled by Christ, and as long as believers remain in Christ, the law of Moses is totally uninterested in them. The law of Moses remains to deal with believers to the extent that they behave in any way that is not consistent with their death and resurrection in Christ.

Paul would go on to explain, in his main argument to the Galatians, that the law of Moses regulated the life of the Israelites as a temporary measure until Christ came (Galatians 3:19-26). It seems that this would have been an easier argument to make to Peter as well. Paul could have said, “Those food laws served a good purpose in keeping us Israelites separate from the Gentiles. But those regulations were temporary. They are no longer necessary now that Christ has come.”

But Paul didn’t make that argument to the Galatians until he had shown, in Galatians 3:1-18, that righteousness before God does not come through the law of Moses. When people think of righteousness as something that can be measured and observed by the law of Moses, they will always fall into other errors as well. That is the fundamental mistake that needed to be dealt with, both in Paul’s conflict with Peter and in his struggle to keep the Galatians from being influenced by the false preachers.

Paul understood this better than Peter or Barnabas because of his former life as a zealous and legalistic Pharisee. Paul himself had made this error concerning the purpose of the law of Moses, and he had made it as thoroughly as one could make it. That is why he could recognize this error even when it was being made in a very small way. You could say that the Lord removed the log out of Paul’s eye so that he could see clearly to remove the speck out of his brother’s eye.

And what was in Peter’s eye was indeed just a speck. For even Paul himself kept the law of Moses sometimes when ministering among Jews. Paul even had Timothy circumcised so that he could minister to the Jews more easily. Peter and Paul both agreed that there were circumstances under which it made sense to continue to observe some of the regulations of the law of Moses. Peter felt that the visit of the men from Jerusalem was such a circumstance.

Peter would never have suggested that the Gentile believers in Antioch were not saved, but Paul apparently felt that this was an inescapable inference from what Peter was doing. Although Peter led the first evangelistic outreach to the Gentiles (Acts 10), he ministered primarily among the Jews. Paul’s ministry, on the other hand, was focused on the Gentiles. He knew better than anyone what could weaken or jeopardize their faith.

Paul’s disagreement with Peter was very different from his disagreement with the false preachers who were trying to persuade the Galatians. However, after addressing his altercation with Peter he goes right back to refuting the message of the false preachers. Paul transitions from one argument to the other, different argument, using his rebuke of Peter to launch into the main argument of the letter. He could do this because he saw the similarities between the two situations. Just as Peter didn’t realize the seriousness of what he was implying by his actions, the Galatians churches did not realize what they were doing by receiving the message of the false preachers. They thought that they were augmenting their faith while they were really undoing it.

Paul had one standard to evaluate his behavior: did it strengthen or weaken other people’s faith in Christ? He could appear to be inconsistent to those who did not understand this standard, and he could be offensive when he sought to impose this standard on other believers. But, despite all the misunderstandings and offenses, he kept to this standard to the day he died. For him nothing else mattered.

CHAPTER TWELVE:

FREEDOM IN THE SPIRIT

As Galatians 5 begins, Paul has finished the main part of his argument but continues to make his appeal in the most urgent and direct way, warning the Galatians not to be circumcised in obedience to the false preachers. He then gives the churches a number of exhortations to live holy and righteous lives. Paul ends most of his letters with such exhortations, but here in Galatians they also serve as part of Paul’s defense of himself and of his gospel.

It is likely that the false preachers had been extolling the moral excellence of the law of Moses. Their purpose was to instill in the Galatians the fear that they would fall into sin if they did not submit to circumcision. According to them, Paul had left them vulnerable to sin because he did not put them under the law of Moses. They offered their message of circumcision as a way of correcting this shortcoming in Paul’s preaching. Paul needed to show how his gospel would keep them from sinning even better than the law of Moses could.

In chapter two we noted that in 1 Corinthians 9 Paul had said that although he was not under the law of Moses, that did not mean that he was without the law of God, but that he was “in-lawed of Christ.” But this was a parenthetical comment and Paul did not take time to elaborate on what he meant. Here, however, is his chance to defend his gospel in terms of its power to keep people from sin. And, while he doesn't use that term again, Galatians 5 does elaborate on the believer's relationship to the law of God.

But before he does that he strongly emphasizes the importance of freedom. He has just taught about the two sons of Abraham and compared the Galatians with the son of the free woman, rather than the slave woman. He then says this: For freedom Christ has set us free, therefore stand fast and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery (Galatians 5:1). The Galatians needed to understand this freedom before they could trust the gospel’s power to keep them from sinning.

For freedom Christ has set us free, Paul says. Christ needed no other reason to set us free than for freedom. He did not set us free as a means to an end. Freedom is the end itself. He set us free, not in order to get something from us, but simply that we might be free. True spiritual freedom needs no justification; it is freedom for freedom’s sake, and it will lead to holiness and righteousness in all areas of life.

In chapter three we saw that if you could keep the law of God perfectly you would not need to be told what to do. You would do it instinctively and intuitively. But if that were the case, then the way you experienced the law of God would be different, for you would not encounter it as one who had already broken it. You would not experience it as God’s law but as God’s freedom.

After all, that’s what the law of God is to God; it is simply his freedom. He doesn’t do what he does because he is bound by some law to do it, but because he is free to do it. But because of our sin, our hostility against God, we see his freedom as law and we hate it. (And remember, we hate it not because it’s hard but because it’s his.)

When sin has been utterly eradicated from our nature we will do God’s law perfectly simply by exercising our freedom. This is true freedom: freedom from sin. Christ has set us free from sin but sin remains possible in this present evil age. In the age to come we will live free even from the possibility of sin. This is what we are waiting for, what Paul calls, in Galatians 5:5, the hope of righteousness. Then we will not have to be told what we should do. In this life, however, we still have to be told sometimes; we still need the ministry of Moses.

Galatians 5:5 is another definition of living by faith: For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness. This is how we live, in the expectation of perfection. Paul here admits that perfection in the flesh cannot come in this life. The false preachers offered it, but Paul cannot offer it as part of his gospel. He can only warn the Galatians that the false preachers are lying.

That is why Paul said, the life I live in the flesh I live by faith (Galatians 2:20). There is the righteousness that we have now and there is the righteousness that we are waiting for, the redemption of our bodies. Then we will be unable to sin. Until that day we are able to sin and must constantly be aware of the danger of sin and temptation.

Paul has been stressing to the Galatians that they are already righteous by faith in Jesus and that they don’t need to observe the law of Moses to become righteous. So when he says that they are waiting for the hope of righteousness he risks being misunderstood. But he has to make this point. In Galatians 3:2 he asked them rhetorically if they were going to arrive at maturity by the flesh, that is, by doing the works of the law of Moses. The answer was that, while there is such a thing as Christian maturity, it is arrived at by the Spirit. But now he must insist that this maturity does not make one unable to sin.

The false teachers were abusing the law of Moses. It was given to show that everyone is a sinner, but they were trying to use it as a way of not being a sinner. Paul remembered, from his former life, what it was like to think that he wasn’t a sinner. To seek to be justified by the law of Moses to is refuse to acknowledge that you are a sinner. If you thus resist Moses’ ministry of condemnation, you will be deluded and go on sinning, not even realizing it.

But, on the other hand, if you simply think of yourself as a sinner, you are setting yourself up for defeat and minimizing what Christ has done. Paul wanted them to avoid this mistake as well; he wanted them to think of themselves not just as sinners, but as crucified sinners. The key to living free of sin is to be a sinner, identified and condemned by the law of Moses at the cross. This is the only kind of sinner that doesn’t sin anymore.

Wherever the law of Moses has punished all sin in the death of Christ, the law of God can then be fulfilled in the freedom of the Spirit. In Christ the Galatians are free to delight in the law of God. And Paul reminds them what Moses taught about the law of God, that it can be summarized by love:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not think of freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, in this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out lest you be consumed by one another.

Notice that Paul defends freedom by warning them not to think of it as something that can be used as an excuse to sin: only do not think of freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. A strictly literal translation of what Paul said would look more like this: only… not… freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. In the second half of this sentence he tells them what to do: serve. But there is no verb in the first half of the sentence telling them what not to do. The verb is implied and has to be added by the translation into English.

Most translations supply the word use: do not use freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. However, I don’t think that Paul would teach that freedom can be used to sin. Sin is an act of slavery, never an expression of freedom. To be in the flesh is to be enslaved under sin.

The Galatians were afraid that the freedom of the gospel would lead them into sin. Paul is telling them that real freedom is freedom from sin, and their fear of sinning stems from the fact that they have not understood this. That is why I have translated this sentence with the word think: do not think that freedom is an opportunity for the flesh (for then you would be confusing freedom with slavery).

Serving one another in love is the way that they can exercise their freedom and thus resist the yoke of slavery. Paul goes on to speak of this exercise of freedom as walking in the Spirit:

But I say, walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. For these are opposed to one another, so that you do not do the things that you want to. But if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law.

Notice that being in the flesh is equated with being under the law (of Moses). The law of Moses was given to deal with sinners. To the extent that believers walk in sin and unbelief (that is, in the flesh) the law of Moses remains to deal with them. To the extent that they walk in the Spirit, their sins have been dealt with at the cross and they are already dead and punished as far as the law of Moses is concerned.

The struggle between the flesh and the Spirit is so intense that there is no middle ground between them. This is what I think Paul means when he says, these are opposed to one another, so that you do not do the things that you want to. Paul doesn’t specify here whether the things that you want are good things or bad things, but it makes a difference in the interpretation.

If the things that you want to do but don’t do are sinful things, then it is the Spirit that is keeping you from what you want. If the things that you want to do but don’t are good things, then it is the flesh that is winning over the Spirit. But I don’t think that either of these scenarios describes the life of a believer as Paul understood it.

The Spirit doesn’t have to choose between losing to the flesh and forcing you against your will. The Spirit gives you true freedom, and true freedom always does what is good and right.

But this freedom is not the same thing as just doing whatever you want. This is how the Galatians thought of freedom, and it is why they feared that freedom would lead them into sin. Freedom is more than just doing whatever you want, it is wanting what God wants. For this reason I have translated Paul’s sentence like this: For these are opposed to one another, so that you do not just do whatever you want (rather, you do what God wants, because you are no longer his enemy and there is no difference anymore between what you want and what he wants).

And lest there be any doubt left in their minds, Paul spells out for them exactly what his gospel will keep them from and what it will produce in their lives:

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, rivalries, dissentions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and things like that. About these things I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who practice these things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and lusts. And since we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.

This is the kind of life Paul promises his converts that they can expect his gospel to produce. He has great confidence that the gospel of grace, revealed as something utterly different from the law of Moses, will create true freedom. And true freedom, in turn, will produce these wonderful fruits.

Paul would go on, in Galatians 6, to give the church further practical exhortations and advice. But it is here at the end of Galatians 5 that he has made his last great appeal to his beloved converts. His gospel is the true gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ, and by it alone the Spirit will produce these wonderful fruits in them. There is no other voice, no other message, that results in the crucified life.

PAUL’S LETTER TO THE GALATIANS

Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of the Galatians. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever, Amen.

I am astonished that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you by the grace of Christ to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven were to proclaim to you a gospel contrary to the one we proclaimed to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: if anyone is proclaiming to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

For now am I persuading men or God? Or am I seeking to please men? If I were still pleasing men I would not be a servant of Christ. For I make known to you brothers, that the gospel that was proclaimed to you by me is not according to man, neither did I receive it from any man, neither was I taught it. Rather, it was through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

For you have heard of my former conduct in Judaism: how I persecuted the church of God excessively and tried to destroy her. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my peers among my people, being so much more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.

But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called my by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not consult right away with flesh and blood. But I went up to Arabia and returned again to Damascus.

Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the brother of the Lord. (These things that I write to you, behold, before God, I am not lying.)

Then I went into the territories of Syria and Cilicia. I was not personally known to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They were only hearing it said, “He who once persecuted us is now proclaiming the faith that he once tried to destroy.” And they glorified God because of me.

Then after fourteen years I went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, also taking Titus along. I went up according to a revelation, and I set before them (though privately, before those who seemed to be something) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, lest somehow I was running or had run in vain.

But not even Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. And this issue only came up because of false brothers who were smuggled in, who came in by stealth to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, in order to enslave us. We did not yield in submission to them for a moment, that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.

But from those who seemed to be something—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show partiality—those who seemed to be something added nothing to me. On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcision just as Peter had been to the circumcision—for he who worked through Peter as an apostle to the circumcision worked through me to the Gentiles—and when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to me and Barnabas, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcision. They only asked that we remember the poor, the very thing that I was eager to do.

Now when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James he would eat with the Gentiles. But when they came he withdrew and kept himself apart, fearing those of the circumcision. The rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy.

But when I saw that they were not walking in a way that lined up with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to become Jews? For we are Jews by nature, not sinners of the Gentiles. But, knowing that a man is not justified by works of law but by faith in Jesus Christ, we also have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of law. For by works of law no flesh will be justified.

“But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, even we ourselves were found to be sinners, then is Christ a minister of sin? Certainly not! For if I build again the things I destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God. For if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”

O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as having been crucified? This alone I want to learn from you: did you receive the Spirit by works of law or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit are you now being perfected by the flesh? Have you suffered so much in vain (if indeed it was in vain)?

He then who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does he do it by works of law or by the hearing of faith, just as Abraham “believed God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness”? Know therefore that those who are of faith, these are sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the nations by faith, proclaimed the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you all the nations shall be blessed.” So those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham.

For as many as are of works of law are under a curse, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law, to do them.” (But that no one is justified before God by law is clear, because, “the righteous will live by faith,” and the law is not of faith, rather, “he who does these things will live by them.”)

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (for it is written, “cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”) so that the blessing of Abraham might come to the nations in Christ Jesus; so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit by faith.

Brothers, I will use a human analogy. Even though it’s a man’s covenant, once it has been ratified, nobody sets it aside or adds conditions to it. Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and his seed. He does not say, “and to seeds,” as if to many, but as if to one, “and to your seed,” which is Christ. This is what I am saying: a law which came 430 years later does not invalidate a covenant ratified by God so as to undo the promise. For if the inheritance is a matter of law, it is no longer a matter of promise. But God has granted it to Abraham by promise.

Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the seed should come to whom the promise had been made. It was put into effect through angels by the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not one but God is one.

So then, is the law against the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given which was able to make alive, then righteousness would indeed be a matter of law. But Scripture has confined all things under sin so that the promise, by faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe.

But before faith came we were kept under guard by the law, confined for the faith which was going to be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come we are no longer under a guardian. For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise.

But I say that as long as the heir is a child he is no different from a slave, though he is master of everything. He is under guardians and managers until the time set by the father. Likewise also we, when we were children, were enslaved under the principle elements of the world.

But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave but a son. And if you are a son, you are also an heir through God.

But then, when you did not know God, you were indeed slaves to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have known God, or rather, are known by God, how can you return again to the weak and useless principle elements, to which you want to be enslaved all over again. You observe days, months, seasons, and years. I fear for you lest somehow I have labored over you in vain.

Brothers, I beg you, become like me because I became like you. You did me no wrong. And you know that because of a weakness in the flesh I proclaimed the gospel to you at first. And you did not despise or reject your trial in my flesh, but you received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. So then, where is your blessedness? For I testify for you that, if possible, you would have ripped out your eyes and given them to me. So have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?

They are zealous for you, but not in a good way. They want to shut you out so that you might be zealous for them. It’s always good to be treated zealously in a good way, and not only when I am present with you. My children, for whom I am in labor pains again until Christ is formed in you, I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you.

Tell me, you who want to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the one by a slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the one by the free woman, through a promise. Now this can be understood as an allegory, in which these women are two covenants. One, from Mount Sinai and birthing into slavery, is Hagar. Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, symbolizing present day Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.

But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written, “Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear, break forth and shout, you who are not in labor. For the children of the desolate woman are more than those of the one who has a husband.” And you brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise.

But as it was then, he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now. But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman will not inherit with [the son of the free woman].” So then brothers, we are not children of a slave woman but of the free woman.

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand fast therefore and do not be entangled again in a yoke of slavery. Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised Christ will be of no advantage to you. Again I testify to every man who becomes circumcised that he is obligated to do the whole law. You have been cut off from Christ, you who would be justified by law. You have fallen from grace. For we, in the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters, but faith working through love.

You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. I am persuaded in the Lord about you, that you will not be of a different mind. But the one who is troubling you will bear the judgment, whoever he is. But I, brothers, if I am still proclaiming circumcision, why am I still being persecuted, for if that were the case the offense of the cross would be removed? If only those who were disturbing you would emasculate themselves!

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not think of freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, in this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out lest you be consumed by one another.

But I say, walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. For these are opposed to one another, so that you do not just do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law.

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, rivalries, dissentions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and things like that. About these things I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who practice these things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and lusts. And since we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.

Brothers, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a person in a spirit of meekness, looking out for yourselves, lest you also be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. Let each one prove his own work, then his cause for boasting will be in himself alone and not in another. For each will bear his own load.

Let him who is taught the word share all good things with him who teaches. Do not be deceived, God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows, that also will he reap. For he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, and he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary in doing good, for we will reap in due season if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work what is good to everyone, especially to those who are of the household of faith.

See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. As many as want to present a good appearance in the flesh, these will compel you to be circumcised, only that they might not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For not even those who are circumcised themselves keep the law, but they want to have you circumcised so that they might boast in your flesh. But may it never be that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters, but a new creation. And as many as walk by this standard, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.

From now on let nobody trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of Jesus.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit brothers, Amen.

Appendix A:

Galatians 1-2 compared with Acts 9, 11, and 15

In Galatians 1:18-2:10 Paul recounts two visits that he made to Jerusalem following his conversion. What Paul says about the first of these two visits comports well with what Luke says in Acts 9:26-30. Below are two descriptions of this first post-conversion visit to Jerusalem, first Paul’s version, then Luke’s.

Galatians 1:18-24: Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the brother of the Lord. (These things that I write to you, behold, before God, I am not lying.)

Then I went into the territories of Syria and Cilicia. I was not personally known to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They were only hearing it said, “He who once persecuted us is now proclaiming the faith that he once tried to destroy.” And they glorified God because of me.

Acts 9:26-30: And when he had come to Jerusalem he tried to join the disciples. And they all feared him and did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and described to them how he had seen the Lord on the road and that he had spoken to him, and how at Damascus he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus. So he was with them at Jerusalem, going in and coming out, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord. And he spoke and disputed against the Greek-speaking Jews. And they were trying to kill him, but when the brothers found out, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.

Luke’s account helps us to understand why Paul only stayed with Peter for fifteen days. People were trying to kill him!

You may notice that Luke refers to “the apostles” when in fact it was only Peter and James who were present at the time. He is referring to them by their position, not by their number. This is not unusual. For example, in 1 Corinthians 15:5 Paul, recounting Christ’s post-resurrection appearances, says that Jesus appeared to “the twelve” when, at the time, there were only eleven (Judas had not yet been replaced).

The next visit that Luke tells us about is in Acts 11:27-30. A prophet named Agabus foretold a famine. The church at Antioch decided to send relief to Jerusalem. Paul and Barnabas delivered this relief. This is sometimes called the famine relief visit.

Then, in Acts 15, Luke describes a controversy that arose in Antioch over whether or not the Gentile believers needed to be circumcised. Paul, Barnabas, and others went to Jerusalem to settle this matter with the apostles and elders there. This is sometimes called the Jerusalem Council.

The question is this: when Paul recounts his second visit to Jerusalem (in Galatians 2:1-10) is he describing the famine relief visit or the Jerusalem Council? Opinions differ.

Below is Paul’s account of his two visits to Jerusalem along with reasons why the second visit could be the famine relief visit or the Jerusalem Council.

Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the brother of the Lord. (These things that I write to you, behold, before God, I am not lying.)

Then I went into the territories of Syria and Cilicia. I was not personally known to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They were only hearing it said, “He who once persecuted us is now proclaiming the faith that he once tried to destroy.” And they glorified God because of me.

Then after fourteen years I went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, also taking Titus along.

Famine relief visit: Paul is recounting his visits to Jerusalem after his conversion and he swears that he is not lying. But if he skipped to the Jerusalem Council visit and neglected to mention the famine relief visit, it would have been dishonest.

Jerusalem Council: Paul swears that he is not lying concerning his contact with those who were apostles before him, not about his physical visits to Jerusalem. During the famine relief visit he did not see any of the apostles because of the persecution described in Acts 12. Acts 11:30 states that the famine relief was delivered by Barnabas and Paul to the elders in Jerusalem.

I went up according to a revelation,

Famine relief visit: The revelation was the prophecy of Agabus that there would be a famine. This is what prompted the church at Antioch to send relief to Jerusalem by Barnabas and Paul.

Jerusalem Council: We don’t know what the revelation was. It may be that God told Paul that it was time to go to Jerusalem; or the revelation may be Paul’s gospel, which he was going to defend. Although Acts says Paul and Barnabas were appointed to go to Jerusalem because of a controversy that had arisen over circumcision, Paul describes it differently.

and I set before them (though privately, before those who seemed to be something) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, lest somehow I was running or had run in vain.

Famine relief visit: This was a private meeting with the Christian leaders at Jerusalem. But the Jerusalem Council is described in Acts 15:12 as a larger meeting of the church: And all the multitude became silent and listened to Barnabas and Paul…

Jerusalem Council: Acts 15:12 would be better translated like this: And all the assembly became silent and listened to Barnabas and Paul… It was not a large crowd as if the whole church had come together, but since it was all the elders of the church along with the apostles, it would have been a sizable number of people. Paul doesn’t say how many people were there, just that they were the supposed leaders of the church.

But not even Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. And this issue only came up because of false brothers who were smuggled in, who came in by stealth to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, in order to enslave us.

Famine relief visit: Although Acts doesn’t mention any controversy about circumcision during the famine relief visit, it did happen not long after Peter had gone to the home of a Gentile, Cornelius, and had baptized him and his family. Acts 11:2-3 records that some members of the Jerusalem church (the circumcision party) disapproved of this. These same men, whom Paul may have considered false brothers, would have also wanted Titus to be circumcised.

Jerusalem Council: The purpose of this visit to Jerusalem was to settle the question of whether Gentile believers needed to be circumcised. Paul took Titus with him as an example of a Gentile believer who was doing just fine without circumcision.

We did not yield in submission to them for a moment, that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.

Famine relief visit: At this time Paul had not met the Galatians. He meant that he took a stand so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for all the Gentiles that he would go on to preach to in the future, which, as it turns out, included the Galatians.

Jerusalem council: Paul had returned from his trip to Galatia before the controversy over circumcision arose. He had them in mind because he knew that the outcome of this controversy would profoundly affect them.

But from those who seemed to be something—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show partiality—those who seemed to be something added nothing to me. On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcision just as Peter had been to the circumcision—for he who worked through Peter as an apostle to the circumcised worked through me to the Gentiles

Famine relief visit: Paul is referring to his ministry in Damascus, Arabia, Tarsus, and Antioch. Luke doesn’t say much about this ministry in the book of Acts, but it was clearly considered apostolic by Paul and the leaders at Jerusalem. Luke only tells us that Paul preached powerfully, starting right after his conversion, and that he was a teacher in the Antioch church.

Jerusalem Council: Paul is referring to the work done on the trip that he took with Barnabas as recorded in Acts 13-14. Although Paul was a preacher and teacher before this, it was on this trip that Paul’s apostolic ministry emerged.

and when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to me and Barnabas, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcision. They only asked that we remember the poor, the very thing that I was eager to do.

Famine relief visit: Paul doesn’t just mean that he was eager to remember the poor, but that he was already diligently engaged in such activity. That is what the visit to Jerusalem was about. Paul just took the opportunity, while he was there, to discuss the question of circumcision with the apostles.

Jerusalem Council: The remembering of the poor that they are referring to is the collection that Paul was planning to gather from the Gentile churches and deliver to Jerusalem. According to 1 Corinthians 16:1, the Galatian churches were told about this collection (either before or after Paul’s letter to the Galatians was written).

Famine relief visit: The letter to the Galatians was written before the Jerusalem Council. At that council, all the apostles and elders of Jerusalem drafted a letter to be sent to the Gentile churches. The letter informed them in no uncertain terms that they did not need to be circumcised. If Galatians were written after the Jerusalem Council, then Paul would have mentioned the decision that was reached by that Council. It would have cut the legs out from under the false preachers who were troubling the Galatians.

Jerusalem Council: One of the points that Paul is making in Galatians was that he was not under the authority of the Jerusalem church. He doesn’t mention the letter because, although it might help him win an argument, it would ultimately undermine his point that his apostolic ministry is independent of Jerusalem. Instead, Paul refers to the right hand of fellowship that he received at the Jerusalem Council. Furthermore, the Jerusalem Council happened because visitors from Judea came to Antioch and said to the Gentiles, “unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” (Acts 15:1) This sounds a lot like what the false preachers must have been saying to the Galatian churches. It doesn’t seem likely that this message would have come to the Galatians before it came to Antioch, so the letter to the Galatians was written sometime after the Jerusalem Council.

Appendix B:

Paul’s conflict with Peter at Antioch: historical background

When did it happen?

In the context of the letter to the Galatians, it seems most likely that Paul’s opposition to Peter, described in Galatians 2:11-14, happened after his meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem, described in Galatians 2:1-10. For that is the order that Paul puts them in when he is carefully listing the contacts he has had with the apostles since his conversion.

So, whether it happened before or after the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) depends on whether Galatians 2:1-10 describes the Jerusalem Council or a meeting that happened before the Jerusalem Council. See Appendix A for an examination of this issue.

Who was Peter afraid of?

Galatians 2:12 says that Peter stopped eating with the Gentiles, fearing those of the circumcision. Paul is more interested in why Peter’s actions were wrong than in his motivation for doing what he did, so he does not elaborate any further on Peter’s fear.

Those of the circumcision could be any of three different groups:

1. Believers within the churches of Jerusalem and Judea who did not agree with Paul on the issue of fellowship with Gentiles. This is a common understanding based simply on the way Paul describes the situation in Galatian 2:12: For before certain men came from James he would eat with the Gentiles. But when they came he withdrew and kept himself apart, fearing those of the circumcision (emphasis added). A visit from men identified with James triggered the change in Peter’s behavior. It is natural to read this and to assume that Paul goes on to refer to these men as those of the circumcision. And Luke, when writing Acts, indeed identifies a faction within the church in Jerusalem by that very designation. In Acts 11:2-3 he describes how Peter was criticized in Jerusalem for going into Cornelius’ house and eating: When Peter went up to Jerusalem those of the circumcision criticized him, saying, “You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them.” However, this incident happened long before Peter’s conflict with Paul in Antioch, and Peter ably defended himself against those who criticized him. It is hard to see why Peter would now fear the same group, years later, over the same issue.

2. False brothers. Paul has already mentioned false brothers who tried to pressure Titus to be circumcised when he visited Jerusalem (Galatians 2:4). And indeed the entire letter of Galatians was occasioned by the visit of false brothers to the Galatian churches. These preachers of a false gospel are never far from Paul’s mind as he writes the letter. However, if it is hard to see why Peter would fear James and his other fellow believers in Jerusalem, it is even harder to understand what he would have to fear from false brothers.

3. The unbelieving Jews in charge of the Temple and the synagogues. Paul often uses the phrase of the circumcision to refer to Jews in general. In this case he would be referring to the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, the high priest and council-members who plotted to have Jesus killed and subsequently persecuted the church. They were not, however, persecuting the church at time of Peter’s visit to Antioch, and Peter may have been trying to prevent further persecution. Perhaps he was informed by his friends who arrived from Jerusalem that the rulers of Jerusalem were ready to seize upon any opportunity to renew persecution. The report that Peter was eating with Gentiles would have provided such an opportunity. So he did what he did in order to protect the believers in Jerusalem from another wave of persecution. If this is the case, then those of the circumcision are the same persecutors that Paul refers to again in Galatians 6:13: For not even those who are circumcised themselves keep the law, but they want to have you circumcised so that they might boast in your flesh.

Appendix C:

Alternative interpretation of Galatians 2:17-18

In Galatians 2:17-18 Paul’s argument is hard to follow and can be understood at least two different ways, both of which make sense of these two difficult verses: But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, even we ourselves were found to be sinners, then is Christ a minister of sin? Certainly not! For if I build again the things I destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor.

Let us start with this sentence: For if I build again the things I destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor. I have followed what I think is the more common understanding of this verse: that Paul has just denied that abandoning the food regulations was a sin (Certainly not!) and now he is saying that the real sin would be for him (or Peter) to go back to keeping these regulations. Such a return to the food laws would constitute a rebuilding of something already destroyed: the wall of separation between Jew and Gentile, or perhaps Paul’s entire life and identity as a law-observant Jew. In any case, the rebuilding would be the sin, not the destroying.

But Paul might be doing something else in this sentence. He might be clarifying the somewhat cryptic logic of the previous verse: But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, even we ourselves were found to be sinners, then is Christ a minister of sin?

Why would Christ appear to be a minister of sin? Because Peter’s actions were tantamount to a confession that he had been wrong to stop keeping the food laws. Paul is saying that Peter’s return to the food laws is a kind of rebuilding of his observance of these laws, a rebuilding by which he is making a public declaration that he was wrong to have stopped keeping them, i.e. “proving himself to be a transgressor.”

This interpretation makes good sense of verses 17 and 18, but does not do as well when it comes to verse 19: For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. Paul, here, is explaining why it would be a transgression for him to go back to keeping the law of Moses: because he destroyed it/died to it. This follows more naturally from the first interpretation than from the second.

But both of these interpretations agree that the sin that Christ supposedly becomes a minister of is the sin of breaking food laws. Not everyone agrees on this. Some think that Paul is addressing the fear that he or Peter might commit some kind of moral sin that could then be blamed on the grace of Christ.

It is true that Paul begins this argument by referring to sinners of the Gentiles. By this designation he is referring to more than eating unclean food. The Gentiles were immoral, breaking every one of the Ten Commandments. But Peter wasn’t about to fall in to immorality, and neither was Paul. The question was what was really keeping them from falling into immorality. Paul’s argument was that it was the grace of Christ, not the law of Moses.

Appendix D:

Alternative translation of Galatians 3:11-12

In chapter one I argued that Paul is not saying, in Galatians 3:10, that the law of Moses curses everyone who doesn’t do it perfectly. In other words, Paul is not saying that the law of Moses had to be done 100% or not at all when he quotes Moses as saying, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law, to do them.”

I went on to argue that the curse that Paul quotes in Galatians 3:10 is a curse against opponents of the law of Moses. And, since Paul considered that he had Moses on his side and that his gospel was taught by Moses, opponents of Paul were opponents of Moses.

But saying that the law curses is not the same thing as explaining why the law does not justify. And on pages 18-19 I argued that Galatians 3:10 is not Paul explaining why the law does not justify, because Galatians 3:11-18 contains that explanation. Now, if Paul had thought that he had just given, in verse 10, the reason that the law does not justify, then verses 11-12 would have been different.

Here is Galatians 3:10-12: For as many as are of works of law are under a curse, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law, to do them.” But that nobody is justified before God by law is clear, because “the righteous will live by faith” and the law is not of faith, instead, “he who does these things will live by them.”

And here is the flow of the argument in Galatians 3:10-12:

1. The law curses those who contradict it (in word or in deed).

2. But that does not mean that the law justifies those who do it.

3. Because justification is by faith, not by doing the law.

But there is another way that Galatians 3:11-12 can be translated: And since nobody is justified before God by law, it is clear that “the righteous will live by faith.” And the law is not of faith, but, “he who does these things will live by them.”

With this translation, the flow of the argument is different:

1. The law doesn’t justify because it would have to be kept perfectly and nobody can do that.

2. Therefore, justification must come by some other way.

3. And obviously that way is by faith, not by doing the law, because that is impossible.

But it is not obvious that justification is by faith since it is not achievable by the law of Moses. The fact that it is impossible to keep the law of Moses perfectly would not lead anyone to the conclusion that justification must be by faith.

And even if it were obvious, this translation doesn’t account for the clear priority that Paul gives to faith on the basis of chronological order. For that is where his argument goes in Galatians 3:15-18.

When Moses gave the law to the people of Israel, he taught them that justification was by faith. He never intended that the people would try to be justified by his law first, learn that it is impossible, and then resort to faith.

Appendix E:

Romans: Paul clarifies and defends his argument

Paul’s argument to the Galatians was tailored to their specific situation. And their situation, by Paul’s assessment, was dire. It is no surprise, then, that his language is as forceful as it is. The urgency of the situation left no room for nuance.

Paul wanted to be clearly understood by the Galatian churches, and I assume he was. But his argument was subject to abuse and misunderstanding by other churches and preachers, not to mention Paul’s enemies. And on no subject was this more manifest then on the subject of circumcision.

Circumcision, of course, was more than just a one-time procedure. For an individual, it represented incorporation into the nation of Israel, marking one as an Israelite for life. For Israel, it was integral to its continuing national identity, for there could be no Israel if there were no Israelites. And it is here that Paul’s argument in Galatians could be misunderstood as a threat to his own countrymen, because he speaks so forcefully against circumcision that he could be taken to mean that no one should ever be circumcised anymore.

But Paul was not advocating an end to all circumcision or an end to the nation of Israel. And when he wrote his letter to the Romans he had an opportunity to set the record straight, and perhaps add the nuance that Galatians lacked.

Paul raises the issue fairly early on in Romans, when, after establishing that being a Jew is not a guarantee of righteousness before God, he says, “What advantage, therefore, does the Jew have, and what is the benefit of circumcision?” Someone who only knows Paul from his letter to the Galatians would expect him to answer, “No benefit at all, of course.” But Paul asks this rhetorical question so that he can give a different answer, and put that misunderstanding to rest. “Much, in every way,” he says.

Paul would go on to highlight Israel’s role as a prophetic and priestly nation. I have used some of his arguments from Romans in this book because they are illuminating for understanding Galatians.

But it is in Romans 9-11 that Paul gives this issue his undivided attention. In Romans 8 he appears to many readers to finish his treatise on justification by faith with a glorious finale. But, beginning in Romans 9, he goes on for another three chapters dealing with the role of the nation of Israel in light of its rejection of the gospel.

Paul makes it clear that the gospel does not lead to the conclusion that the Jews who believe in Christ should stop being circumcised and identifying as Jews. If that were the case then there would be no believing remnant of Israelites. But God wants such a remnant, and Paul saw himself as part of it. And the reason that God wants a believing remnant in Israel is that God wants all of Israel to be a believing nation.

So Romans 9-11 is not an afterthought, nor is it misplaced. Rather, it was very important to Paul that he lay to rest any misunderstanding that may have resulted from his teaching on circumcision. Israel, according to Paul’s gospel, was to continue as a nation by the will and purpose of God.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

PART ONE

1. The Curse of the Law

2. Impossible Righteousness

3. The Ministry of Condemnation

4. The Gospel of Moses

PART TWO

5. Living by the Law

6. The Veil of Moses

7. Unbearable by Design

8. The Ministry of Righteousness

PART THREE

9. The Temporary Guardian

10. The Principle Elements

11. The Conflict at Antioch

12. Freedom in the Spirit

Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

A: Galatians 1-2 compared with Acts 9, 11, and 15

B: Paul’s conflict with Peter at Antioch

C: Alternative interpretation of Galatians 2:17-18

D: Alternative translation of Galatians 3:11-12

E: Romans: Paul clarifies and defends his argument