We continue today our study of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. To review, the gospel message Paul had proclaimed to the churches of Galatia was under attack by groups of people who believed in the law of God rather than the grace of God; that preaching to the Gentiles was a waste of time. Paul’s response is that we are saved by the grace of God alone. We can’t earn it or buy it. We only have to trust in Him and accept it.
Here at last in these verses from chapter two we come to the heart of the matter. A decision was reached by the leaders of the church in Jerusalem, a compromise between Jewish born Christians and Gentile born Christians. But this compromise holds within it seeds of trouble. In effect the decision was that the Jews would go on living like Jews, observing circumcision and the law, but that the Gentiles were free from these observances. Things could not go on like this because the inevitable result was to produce two grades of Christians, the rule-filled and the rule-less, and two quite distinct classes within the church.
Paul argues with Peter, “You shared table with the Gentiles; you ate as they ate; therefore you approved in principle that there is one way for Jew and Gentile alike. How can you reverse things and want Gentiles to be circumcised and learn the law? It doesn’t make sense.
You may have noticed in verse 15 that Paul refers to Gentiles as sinners. When a Jew used the word sinners of the Gentiles he was not thinking of moral qualities; he thinking of the observance of the law. Look at Leviticus chapter eleven. God describes what animals you may or may not use for food. If you ate pork, for example, you were a sinner in this sense of the world. Peter would always answer Paul that if he ate with Gentiles and eat the things they eat, then I become a sinner, plain and simple. That’s his excuse and he’s sticking to it for now.
Paul’s response to Peter: ‘Look, we agreed long ago that no amount of observance of the law can make a man right with God. A man cannot earn the generous offer of the love of God in Jesus. He can only accept it. Therefore, the busyness of the law is no longer needed. You believe that to forget all this business about rules and regulations will make you a sinner. But that is precisely, Peter, what Jesus Christ instructs us to do. He did not tell you to try to earn salvation by eating this animal and not eating that one. He told you to fling yourself without reservation on the grace of God. Are you going to argue, then, that Jesus taught you to become a sinner?’ The old laws were wiped out.
We are not justified by the Works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. Paul says that I have died to the law, so I might live to God. In Paul’s eyes it is as if I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me, as the Bible says.
It could not be right for Gentiles to come to God by grace and Jews by the law. There is only one reality, grace, and it was by way of surrender to that grace that all of us must come.
If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. There is no amount of observance of the law that can make a person right with God. It’s a matter of grace. It cannot be earned, only accepted.
For Paul, the law never put him right with God. It only showed him his own helplessness.
He had been crucified with Christ so that the man he used to be was dead and the living power within him now was Christ himself. The question is not whether one achieves justification by following
the law or by believing. Instead, the question is “works of the law” versus “faith in Jesus Christ”. Does justification come by means of the law of Moses or by means of Jesus Christ? Justification comes by
means of Jesus Christ, the one who “gave himself for our sins” (1:4) and who “loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20). In this fundamental sense, then, it matters little whether the Greek expression pistis christou (literally, faith of Christ) refers to faith “in” Christ (that is, human belief) or faith “of” Christ (that is, Christ’s own faithful obedience), since even faith “in” Christ comes about solely on the basis of God’s intervention.
What Paul “tore down” was not a bad or wicked life, but one that the gospel has rendered passé. What Paul again labors to express is the sense that the gospel overwhelms, eclipses, renders nil all previous values and commitments.
For the one who asserts that Christ “lives in me,” the previous standards of the law—of ethnic pride, of personal accomplishment, whatever those standards might be—have been swept away. If
Christ “lives in me,” then, Christ may also live in all other human beings, regardless of their origin or viewpoints or behavior. To withdraw from fellowship with any of those human beings on the basis
of my own individual judgment is fundamentally to misunderstand the gospel of Jesus Christ.
There are two great temptations in the Christian life. First is the temptation to earn God’s favor and second to use some minor, small achievement to compare oneself with someone else to our advantage and their disadvantage. This reminds me of a story about a rather pompous, arrogant, self-righteous Sunday School teacher who was trying to make the point that good Christians don’t keep their faith a secret. With her head held high and her chest thrust out, the teacher strutted impressively back and forth across the room. She asked, “Now, class, why do you think people call me a Christian?” The room was silent for a moment. Then one of the boys slowly raised his hand and said, “Probably because they don’t know you.”
The Christianity which has enough of itself left in it to think that by its own efforts it can satisfy God and by its own achievements it can demonstrate itself superior to others is not Christianity at all.
Paul sees us as humans in need of salvation, and in this text he talks about transcending our humanness through Christ Jesus. Jesus Christ had done for Paul what he, Paul, could never have done for himself. Life is not merely a journey simply traveled by obeying the obvious rules of the road. Life is meant to display and present the grace of Christ to a world filled with people who are terrified of life, people left abandoned on the side of the road, people who have been dented and crushed by repeated hits, people sputtering along with very little fuel left to keep them moving forward.
As professing Christians, maybe our business is something more than getting ahead. Maybe our business involves something higher. Maybe we are called to help others along their journey too, in the great hope that we will all end up in the presence of the living God.
Paul's point is that from the standpoint of the law, we try to see what we can get away with. But from the standpoint of grace, we try to see what we can give away. In the first case, we function out of an ethic of duty and obligation; in the second, we work out of an ethic of love. Where does the power for this rule-less living come from? It comes from our total identification with Christ in his suffering. "I have been crucified with Christ," Paul writes, "and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me."
This life is a life of faith. It’s no longer about sin but sacrifice; no longer about folly, but faith. This is the Good News. Amen.
[i]
Texts for Preaching – CD Rom edition: A Lectionary Commentary based on the New
Revised Standard Version, Year A, B, and C. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2007).
[ii]
Barclay, William. The Daily Study Bible
Series: The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians. (Philadelphia: The
Westminster Press, 1976).
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