Dead to the Law, Alive to God

Galatians 2:15-21

Sometimes I take my boys to a local park where they play on the jungle gym. When they cross the monkey bars, they’re only strong enough to hold themselves for a few moments, let alone swing from one bar to the next. Sometime I help them grab hold, and then I let go and let them hang, and then sometimes they want me to hold them again. I’ll say let go and I’ll catch you. You have to let go of the bar so Daddy can catch you.

That’s the gospel. We have to let go of the bar to let Daddy catch us.

Paul does a lot of “letting go” in our passage as he gets into an explanation of the gospel.

Quick review: Paul had confronted Peter about not eating with Gentile Christians. “How can you ask Gentiles to live like Jews?” The Church is not a Jewish thing, and Gentiles are not second-class citizens. In the Church, the only thing that matters is faith in Christ.

Up through 2:14 was Paul’s auto-biographical defense: his gospel and apostleship were received directly from Christ, not second hand from the apostles.

This now begins the doctrinal section where by defends and explains the gospel itself.

1. Justification By Faith, Not Law: Throwing It Away (vv. 15-16)

Two categories: Jews who try to keep the law and Gentiles who neither keep the law nor even know the law. Obviously, from the Jewish perspective, these Gentiles are “sinners,” they are gross law-violators. But “we” Jewish Christians who used to keep the law realize that no one will get right with God by observing the law. That’s not what God looks for. Keeping the law is bankrupt, it is a fool’s gold, it’s is an empty promise.

So Jews and Gentiles are in the same boat. Law-keeping Jews are as much sinners as the law-breaking Gentiles. Jews have no advantage. They have to get in line with the Gentiles and put their faith in Christ.

For Paul and the other Jews, this was like robbing them of their identity, invalidating their credentials, ripping up their resume.

Perhaps it’s like, we who thought our education was worth something, we’ve spent our lives trying to get good grades and advance in school. We spent a lot of money to go to the right schools and get lots of degrees.

Let’s say we have we commit a crime (rape, murder). Our education & degrees aren’t going to do anything for us. Read as many books as you like, write as many papers as you please, that doesn’t mean anything in court. Let’s say you spent 14 years to become a surgeon, but it’s all meaningless. Whether we graduated from Harvard med school or we dropped out of high school, none of that matters. You spent your whole life studying, but now you realize, it isn’t going to help you one bit. We need a Savior. How foolish it would be to take more classes, try to get another degree! The sooner we understand that our education is useless and irrelevant to our crime problem, the sooner we abandon such efforts, the sooner we might turn to a Savior who can save us.

For Paul and us, it’s not education/degrees, it’s our “goodness.” Our good works are bankrupt. It’s like monopoly money—empty and useless. All our church going and Bible reading, all our charity donations and mission trips; all of our trying to be a good friend, son/daughter, brother/sister; all of our being honest or caring or sacrificial or genuine—it doesn’t matter.

But Paul throws away all his monopoly money, he throws away his being “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews.”

If Paul is saying he’s not good enough (e.g., Billy Graham), if he’s saying the Mosaic Law wasn’t good enough, then no one is, then nothing is.

Let me spell out some of the implications & problems with legalism

There is no Karma

What do you mean we have to throw away our good works? I believe my good works helps make up for all the bad works I’ve done.

Someone was telling me about a show called, “My Name is Earl,” [picture] where the main character Earl believes in Karma—you’re good deeds make up for your bad deeds. “Do good deeds, good things happen. Do bad things, bad things happen.” Now you’re saying, good deeds don’t have any value? That’s right.

Paul is saying it’s not by our good deeds that we get right with God.

We measure people with our (human) standards.

This is what we discussed last time. We have our ways of categorizing people, making distinctions. These Judaizers were making a big distinction between Jews and Gentiles. We may not worry about being a Jew/Gentile, circumcised or not, but we do it by school you graduated from, socio-economic status, ethnicity, physical attractiveness, etc. And then we treat people differently along those distinctions.

We see people who do good works: helping the poor, being generous, reading their Bibles, etc. And we see people who do bad works: lazy, greedy, manipulative, sarcastic, violent, racist, etc. We see them and treat them differently.

God doesn’t see a distinction between a Jew and a Greek, a mailman or a millionaire, secretary or a surgeon, a drunkard or a deacon, a prostitute or a preacher. To God, they are all the same. Remember the 3 ropes magic trick?

We draw lines where God does not draw lines. We make distinctions where God does not.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

We are not seeing people from God’s perspective. We are not living in light of the truth of the gospel.

At the root of legalism, at the root of wanting to make such distinctions among people is the desire to measure ourselves, to find something that makes us significant relative to everybody else. We find some way of saying, “We’re better than those people.” We find things in us that we feel make us better than others (we’re more athletic, attractive, intelligent; we’re more open-minded, enlightened; we’re more generous, prayerful, etc.). At the root, legalism is about our pride and vanity. It’s about how we measure up.

We believe in ourselves.

We believe we can do something. Humanism: believe in yourself, you can do it, don’t give up, don’t give up on yourself. If you try hard enough, you can do it. The answer is within us: we just have to try harder, do more. We feel empowered, we have dignity.

The gospel message that we are hopelessly sinful, we’ll never make it, we’ve completely failed beyond any possibility of redeeming ourselves. Don’t believe in yourself—you’ve failed. It strikes at our pride. We realize the God is far too holy and the law is ridiculously impossible. The gospel says we are helplessly and hopelessly sinful. We are not spiritually middle-class, we are spiritually destitute, we are spiritual bums.

Paul says in v. 21, if we could save ourselves, if we could keep the law, then Christ died for nothing! The point is, we can’t, and Christ did not die for nothing.

That’s where we’re at.

We find ways to measure others and measure ourselves.

We put confidence in ourselves, that maybe if we just try harder and do more, that our fate is in our hands.

We have to throw it all away

Justification by faith means you have to throw away the law:

We have to throw away how we measure ourselves and others, the things that made us significant. We acknowledge that in the end, our education, our wealth, our popularity, our discipline, our personality—all of this is bankrupt, monopoly money. It’s meaningless.

Paul had spent his life as a Pharisee, a meticulously law-keeping Jew. And he throws that away and says, I’m just like a Gentile.

It is to have spent 14 years to be a surgeon, years of training and being on-call, and then quit your medical practice and say, This really doesn’t have any value.

We throw away hope in ourselves. We say, it’s true, I’ll never be good enough, I’ll never be able to score points with God, I’m helplessly and hopelessly sinful.

It’s a hard thing to throw all that away, to admit it was all a waste!

Paul and these Jewish Christians had to throw away their Jewish heritage, their law-keeping record, their circumcision.

What do you have to throw away? What do you hold on to as “this is what makes me a good person,” “this is what makes me better than others,” “this is what I have accomplished or who I have become that gives me something to stand on”? You have to “let go.”

2. Does Christ promote sin? Absolutely Not! (vv.17-19)

Licentiousness. Perhaps this was one of the accusations against Paul’s gospel.

Does this cause people to stop trying, to not want to do good? What will stop people from just doing whatever they want?

Doesn’t this make Christ the promoter of chaos and unrestrained sin?

The fear of legalists is that without the rules, without the merit system, how will we keep people under control, how will we get people/ourselves to do the right thing? There is another way, but we’ll get to that later.

The immediate answer in v. 17 is Absolutely not! Christ does not promote sin!

A. Christians are not more “sinful.” (v. 17)

“Sinner” in this context seems to be in quotes (as in v. 15). That is, sinners like Gentiles who do not keep the Mosaic Law.

These Jewish Christians who put our trust in Christ and stop following certain laws: they eat with Gentiles and don’t require circumcision, they stop living like a Jew. Yes, Paul/Christians are “sinners” as the Jews/Judaizers would call them (like Gentiles). But it’s not sinful to remain uncircumcised. It’s not sinful to be a Gentile.

What they call “sin” isn’t really sin.

B. We, not Christ, promote sin when we try to keep the law to gain favor with God (vv. 18-19)

v. 18, Paul has torn down the law a means for getting right with God, building our own righteousness to reach God. If Paul reinstates the law, if he goes back to saying it is through our law-keeping that we gain points with God, then he makes himself a sinner all over again.

For Paul, the real sin is not breaking the law, the real sin is using the law as a means of attaining favor with God. The problem is not failure to get circumcised; the problem is thinking that being circumcised makes anyone more acceptable to God.

Paul’s point is Christ does not make us sinners. We do that. We try to gain favor with God through the keeping the law, and so, we make ourselves sinners.

The problem in with these Galatian Christians is that they started with the gospel, but they turned away. They’ve rebuilt what they’ve destroyed. We’ll see this again in Gal 3. We start by grace, but then live by works. We think we’re saved by grace, but our Christian lives are by good works and effort.

This is where a lot of us are, including myself. We fail to realize that the gospel by which we’re saved is also the gospel by which we live.

v. 19, There is an implicit thought: there is an incompatability, a mutual exclusiveness to law vs. faith. Either you die to God and live by the law, or you die to the law and live to God. These are two very different roads and there is no middle ground.

	Law	Faith
Value	Good works, law-keeping	Faith
Main problem:	breaking the law	using the law to gain God’s favor
Law	Keepable	Unkeepable, shows us our sin
Solution	Self effort, trusting in self	Reliance on Christ
Main character	Me	Christ
Main story	What I do	What Christ has done
Result	Bondage, slavery	Freedom

There are mutually exclusive. That is why Paul says I died to the law so that I might live to God. You cannot live to God without first dying to the law.

And if you die to the law to live to God, then clearly you must not rebuild the law again!! If you rebuild, that proves we are lawbreakers (v. 18).

And if we do, if we start by grace but then go back to the law, then I am the sinner, not Christ. No, Christ does not promote sin (works righteousness).

We must die to the self-reliance approach. We must die to the law so that we can live for God. We cannot have a relationship with God as long as we’re trying to score points, earn our way, depending on our good works. [keep chart on display until here]

What does that mean, to die to the law?

3. Dead to the Law

A. The law has no rule on us. It does not obligate us, it does not condemn us.

There is no more law over us. It does not apply to us.

It’s like saying, “The law in Brazil is this.” We say, “We’re not in Brazil, we’re not Brazilian citizens.” It has nothing on us.

Paul is saying, that’s how we as Christians relate to the law. We’re dead to it. We have no relation to it. It would be stupid to put yourself under Brazilian law! And it would be ridiculous to put Gentiles under Brazilian law.

Why does Paul say that we are dead to the law?

Christ has fulfilled the law. In Christ, we’ve kept the law perfectly.

Christ has satisfied it’s demand. Christ took our punishment, there’s nothing left to be paid.

Double transaction:

Christ	Us
Perfectly righteous, fulfilled the law	Unrighteous, violators, criminals
Glorified	Condemned to death

B. The law gives us no credit.

As we mentioned at the beginning, this meant for Paul and the Jews, giving up their “points.” To those who spend their lives “keeping the law,” to those who amassed huge amounts of “monopoly money,” it is a personal loss to throw it all away.

Paul had spent his life as a Pharisee, a meticulously law-keeping Jew. And he throws that away and says, I’m just like a Gentile.

It is to have spent 14 years to be a surgeon, years of training and being on-call, and then quit your medical practice and say, This really doesn’t have any value.

But we must die to the law so that we can live for God.

4. Alive to God: A New Creation

At one time, it seemed lots of Christians I knew had memorized Gal 2:20. And then took it to mean, I must die to myself. I must deny myself. Jesus is in the driver’s seat, and I submit to His Lordship. And that’s all good, but that’s not what Paul is talking about here.

V. 20 speaks of our union with Christ. It is in Christ that we are dead to the law. It is in Christ that we have fulfilled the law, and it is in Christ that I have been crucified and paid the full penalty of the law.

And now, in Christ, we are alive to God

Alive to God (v. 19)

Christ lives in me (v. 20)

Live by faith in Christ (v. 20)

Live by grace (v. 21)

Live by the Holy Spirit (5:16-26)

These all refer to the same thing.

We’ll take a lot more time to develop this as we move forward, but let me remind us of something mentioned at the beginning of our series.

Notice vs. 21. Paul does not set aside the grace of God. How do we set aside the grace of God? How do we act like God’s grace isn’t there?

We set it aside by continuing to live under the law, to act as if Christ had not died for our sins, to try to earn our own righteousness. Legalism.

We set it aside by continuing to live in sin, to remain in rebellion against God, to disregard God’s commands. Sin, Licentiousness.

These are the two things Paul condemns. But what’s the alterative. We live by the HS. We live by faith. Christ lives in us. It is not our striving, it is not our disobeying. It is a new creation, a new life, Christ in us.

Caterpillar Illustration (from Mike Shea)

Let’s command this caterpillar [picture] to fly. He tries, but fails. He then goes into a cocoon and is no more. The caterpillar police come and demand, “Where is that sinful caterpillar? We told him to fly and he hasn’t obeyed and we’re here to punish him. He must die.” His friends say, “You can’t put him to death, he’s already dead. He went inside that thing and we haven’t seen him for over a week.” Police, “Hmmph. Alright. Case closed.”

A few days later, out comes a butterfly [picture], a new creation. By flying, he fulfills the law.

Do this! The law commands

But gives me neither feet nor hands

A better word the gospel brings

It bids me fly and gives me wings!

This is the gospel. We are no longer caterpillars being commanded to fly. We can’t fly. And the whole point of the command was to show us that we can’t, it was not to try to have us try harder.

Rather, God wants to make us new. He wants us to live not by our effort but by faith, by His Spirit. It is about Christ in us, and we becoming a new creation.

We let go of the monkey bars so that Daddy can carry us. We are dead to the law, and alive to God.

NonChristians and Christians—there is a different way to live. Christianity isn’t about good people trying to be better people. Christianity is about abandoning ourselves and finding a new life in Christ.