Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Guest (Male): Welcome to Hear the Word of God, the online and broadcast teaching ministry of the Reverend Eric Alexander.

Eric Alexander: Now, we open our Bibles this morning at that passage in Galatians, beginning at chapter three and verse 26. And with our Bibles open before us, let's bow for a moment in prayer.

Our gracious God, as we bow before Your written word, we acknowledge that You are its author and its only ultimate interpreter. We pray, therefore, that Your Holy Spirit may come and make the written word to be living and authoritative in our own souls and in our minds.

May Your Holy Spirit not only impart it to us that we may understand, but apply it to us that we may obey. Hear us, Lord, as we humble our minds and hearts and wills before You and before Your word, in Jesus' name. Amen.

I need to remind you regularly that when we come to the letter of Paul to the Galatians, we are not dealing with some mere local quarrel which Paul had with a group of people like these Galatian converts or the false teachers who had invaded them. We are dealing with the very heart and soul of the Christian faith.

We are dealing with the purity of the Christian gospel. The kind of question that Paul is taken up with is the survival in Galatia and in the churches of Galatia of pure apostolic, biblical, historic Christianity, or some substitute for it taking its place.

So Paul is concerned with absolutely central issues as he writes to these people who were converted, most probably, when he and Barnabas did their missionary tour around the churches in Galatia. Even more important, we are dealing in this letter and in these passages we've been studying in these Sundays, with the eternal well-being of people like ourselves. That's really what makes it ultimately important.

It is not just the defense of doctrinal orthodoxy that Paul is concerned with. It is not merely the maintenance of historic Christianity, although that is important, but the reason that is important is that we are dealing with the eternal well-being of people just like ourselves, whether in the first century or the 20th.

Because what Paul is saying to us is that there are two ways to live and two ways to die. There is the way that leads to life and hope and salvation, and there is the way that leads to death and judgment and despair.

And it is these two ways ultimately that he is setting before them. So this is no mere theory. This is the eternal welfare of people like ourselves that we're concerned with. And in reading what Paul is saying, in trying to grasp and understand it, we are really grappling with the issues of our own eternal welfare and of which of these two ways of living and dying we ourselves are on.

Now, already in chapter three, we have found Paul setting two contrasts before us. and this really was what we have been concerned with in the past two Sundays. He is setting before us first the contrast in verses one to 14 of chapter three, that salvation is by faith and not by works.

Secondly, in verses 15 to 23 or so, he is setting before us the truth that salvation is by promise, not by law. These are contrasts. Salvation is by faith, not by works. Salvation is through promise, not through law.

And now from verse 26 or so of chapter three, right through into chapter four, verse seven, he sets a further contrast before us. And that is this, that salvation in Christ makes us sons, not slaves.

Notice the key text in chapter four, verse seven. "So," he says, "that is those who are in Christ." He is addressing those who have been born anew. "So you are no longer a slave but a son. And since you are a son, God has made you also an heir."

It is exactly the same theme that you find Paul teaching the Romans in chapter eight, verse 15. "You did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the spirit of sonship."

Now, it's important again to see this as a personal idea and as something that touches upon our own lives. And I therefore have to apply this almost to you before I preach it to you. And the application is this: is your religious life this morning a life of slavery or a life of sonship?

Is it a life of dull, burdensome servitude, or is it a life of glorious, liberating sonship with God as your Father as the greatest reality of life? Is that your Christianity? Which is your own experience? Sonship or slavery?

Dr. Packer was so right when he singles this out as a major test of Christian genuineness in the book Knowing God. "If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity," he says, "find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child and having God as his Father." That's the issue.

Now, it's therefore a most wonderful thing to begin this passage that we read this morning with this resounding statement of the apostle in verse 26. "You are all sons of God," he says, "through faith in Christ Jesus."

Now, I need not tell you, I'm sure, that the word sons and sonship are not gender words. They are generic terms that go across the genders and speak of sons and daughters in Paul's terminology.

But here is this great truth, that being justified by faith, not by works, we are not slaves, we are not mere servants of God, we are sons and daughters and He is our Father. Now, in verses 26 to 29 of chapter three, there are three things Paul tells us about being sons and daughters of God, which lays the foundation for what he is going to say.

And the first of these three is this: sonship is never received apart from Jesus Christ. You will notice that all through this whole section, Paul is concerned to tell us that every aspect of salvation comes to us by faith in Jesus Christ, never by keeping the precepts of the law.

And here he says it of sonship, of that crowning blessing of the gospel, he says sonship is never received apart from Jesus Christ. "You are all sons of God," verse 26, "through faith in Christ Jesus."

That is, we become sons and daughters of God through our union with Jesus Christ. And that union is a faith union, so when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are united to Him. And it is through our union with Jesus Christ that we become sons and daughters of God.

"You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus." Now, baptism is an outward sign of that union with Christ, and Paul speaks of it immediately afterwards in verse 27. "For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ."

Now, I think that what Paul is referring to is not water baptism primarily. Undoubtedly water baptism is the outward sign of what he is speaking about, but I think what he is really referring to is that spiritual baptism by which we are united to Jesus, the baptism of which he speaks in 1 Corinthians 12:13, when he says, "By the one Spirit you were all baptized into the one body."

The spiritual baptism by which we are united to Jesus Christ is the baptism primarily of which Paul is speaking. The reason, of course, that I think that must be true is that not all who went through water baptism have put on Christ or clothed themselves in Christ.

It is possible to go through water baptism, the outward sign, and never to put on Jesus Christ as our righteousness. But the baptism of the Spirit, that is that initial work of grace by which God joins us to Jesus Christ through faith, is a baptism which universally unites us to Jesus Christ and makes us sons and daughters of God.

So when he says, "You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ," he is speaking of a spiritual work which is universal in its effect. It is by our union with Jesus Christ that we are made sons and daughters of God.

Now, what Paul is clearly concerned about is that they should recognize that sonship becomes a possibility and a reality, not by keeping the precepts of the law, not by any kind of outward act, and this is why I think he is not speaking about outward water baptism.

When Paul says, "Not circumcision, not any of these outward obediences to the law will make you a child of God," he is not going to confuse us about water baptism doing that. So he says, "It is this baptism into Christ, a spiritual work which universally makes us put on Christ and become in God's eyes His children." So sonship is never in the New Testament separated from Jesus Christ and our faith in Him.

Secondly, sonship in Christ transcends all barriers. Notice verse 28. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Now, you will see what Paul is speaking about.

Not only, he says, do we all become children of God through faith and union with Christ Jesus, but we all become brothers and sisters with each other when we are in Christ Jesus. One of the effects of becoming a child of God is that you become members of the same family.

Now, let me point out to you, that is not a natural phenomenon. It is not simply because we've all been born into the human family that we are therefore all Jock Tamson's bairns, as they say. What Paul is speaking about is a supernatural birth which creates a supernatural brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ.

And that means that racial and social and sexual barriers are dealt with in the gospel. Now, I am sure that it is of particular importance to Paul to emphasize and put first neither Jew nor Greek, because he is dealing with a problem in the churches in Galatia of people who wanted Christians to go back to Judaism and practice the ceremonial law.

He says in Christ, these distinctions no longer matter. Just as in the social and in the sexual realm, these distinctions have been in this deeper sense made insignificant. Notice they are not removed.

Being children of God does not mean that we suddenly lose the distinction between being male or female, Jew or Greek, or being slave or free. Those who were slaves would undoubtedly have remained slaves. Those who are males or females remained such.

What Paul is saying is these distinctions do not matter in Christ. Now, you will probably know that the distinction of being a female in the ancient world was almost all a negative one, certainly for the Jewish woman. Her male counterpart thanked God every day that he was not born a woman.

And what had happened in the gospel, you see, is that womanhood had been raised to a dignity and glory that the world had never seen. That's the difference that the gospel makes. It is so different from the secular feminist movement.

It raises women into the place of dignity and glory while allowing to remain the specific glory of womanhood. And Paul says there is neither male nor female because in the eyes of God, the barriers that previously were raised by men and women have been taken away. The distinctions have not been taken away, but the barrier has been.

Access to God, enjoyment of His benefits, the dignity of being, all of these things are gloriously made real for slaves as well as for free men, for men as well as for women, and for Greeks as well as for Jews. So Paul says sonship in Christ transcends all barriers.

Now, do you notice the third of these three things in this passage? Sonship in Christ is unknown outside of Jesus Christ. We need to affirm that in these days when the uniqueness and necessity of Jesus Christ for salvation is so vague in the thinking of so many. It is not vague in the New Testament.

Secondly, sonship in Christ transcends all barriers. Thirdly, sonship in Christ makes us heirs of God's promises first given to Abraham. Verse 29: "If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed."

Do you notice the connection? If you are sons of God or children of God, you are children of Abraham also, and heirs according to the promise God gave to Abraham. So the way in which God brings us to be heirs of His promises, do you see, is by making us His children.

And when we are children of God by faith in Jesus Christ, we are also the children of Abraham to whom God made all these promises of salvation so many thousands of years ago. It is the same note that Paul emphasizes in Romans eight, where he says, "Now, if we are sons or children of God, we are also heirs with Jesus Christ."

Let me just point out to you the enormous importance of this in the contemporary world. I want to say a little about it because I am so persuaded that this is so relevant to the modern society in which we live. This whole concept that being children of God is the thing that puts us in touch with our roots in Abraham and makes us inheritors of the promises of God of these thousands of years ago.