Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc: Welcome to Here the Word of God, the online and broadcast teaching ministry of the Reverend Eric Alexander.

Guest (Male): There is no doubt that you would find it helpful, and I would also find it helpful if you had your Bible open at Galatians chapter 3 and at the passage we read. With our Bibles open before us, perhaps we might bow for a moment in prayer to seek God's help as we understand it.

Our Heavenly Father, we acknowledge again as we come to your word our utter dependence upon you to let the light of your Holy Spirit shine on the written page of your word. As you have given this word, we pray that you would give us understanding in our minds and a willing obedience in our hearts that we may hear and receive everything that you would say to us. We ask it for Jesus' sake. Amen.

I was thinking when we were reading that passage this morning that I'd be really interested to know what was going through your mind if you were paying attention to it carefully. If I might hazard a guess, I would think that there were at least some who were reading it and saying to themselves, "What on earth has this got to do with me seeking to live the Christian life in this modern world?" More especially maybe, what has this to do with the cause of the gospel and with the whole state of the church in the end of the 20th century?

The answer to the questions is that in this letter to the Galatians, Paul is contending for the purity of the gospel in a day very like our own when the gospel was being corrupted beyond recognition. The great question was: what is the message of the Christian faith that we are called by God to proclaim and that a desperately needy world waits to believe?

What Paul is doing in the letter to the Galatians, and particularly in this particular chapter, is dealing with the central matters of the Christian faith. What is at stake is the survival of Christianity and the nature of Christian salvation. Paul's great theme is that salvation is found in Christ and in Christ alone, that it is obtained by faith and by faith alone, and it is grounded upon grace and upon grace alone.

If there is one issue over which the modern church is desperately confused and many people are dangerously vague, it is what exactly the Christian gospel is and what the message of the Christian faith is. This is what we are going to be turning to again this morning in Galatians 3.

In this third chapter, Paul is basically telling us three things about Christian salvation. You will notice if you have a New International Version that the paragraphs are headed in this kind of way. In verses 1 to 14, he is telling us that salvation in Christ is by faith, not by works. In verses 15 to 25, to which we turn this morning, he is telling us that salvation in Christ is by promise, not by law. In verse 26 into the first part of chapter 4, Paul is telling us that salvation in Christ makes us sons, not slaves.

It is by faith, not by works. That was last Sunday's theme. It is by promise, not by law. That's this Sunday's theme. I very eagerly want to know the grace of God that I may explain this clearly to you and that he may press upon us the importance of it for us each one. Salvation in Christ, then, is by promise, not by law.

There are obviously in the passage we read two main themes, which you could have deduced even just by counting the words that appear in these verses that we read. The two words which dominate the passage are the words "promise" and "law." The word "law" occurs about 10 times in these few verses. The word "promise" occurs something like seven or eight times. They dominate the vocabulary, and they dominate the theme that Paul is dealing with.

The promise was the promise made by God to Abraham. He has already spoken about it in verse 8 of chapter 3. The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: "All nations will be blessed through you." So the promise is the promise made by God to Abraham of which we read several times in the book of Genesis.

The law is the law given by God to Moses and through Moses to the people. Moses is, as one of the verses later says, the mediator of this law. God gave it centuries after Abraham. He gave the law to Moses so that the people of God might learn how to live to please him.

There are basically two things that Paul wants to explain to us, and they are these: first, he wants to explain to us the priority and the permanence of the promise that was first given to Abraham. Then secondly, he wants to explain to us the place and purpose of the law which was first given through Moses. So these are our two themes: the priority and the permanence of the promise, and the place and purpose of the law.

I want us to try to concentrate on thinking about these this morning: the priority and permanence of the promise. Now the promise that God gave to Abraham in the book of Genesis—"In you all nations of the earth will be blessed; I will bless you," he says, "and your seed after you"—that promise is given historically long before the law. This is Paul's point. It's important, as we'll see in a moment. Centuries before the law was given through Moses, the promise was given to Abraham.

The second thing is really the important one. It is that not only is the promise prior to the law, that is, it came long before it, but the promise God gave to Abraham is an unconditional covenant that he made, and it is permanent in its significance. It goes not only to Abraham and his immediate family or to the people around the generations of Abraham. The promise of God to Abraham is the key to the Christian gospel.

For the promise of God to Abraham was a promise that was fulfilled in Christ and through Christ to every believer. So if you are a Christian believer this morning, what Paul is saying is you are a child of Abraham. It is Abraham who is our father. This is how Jesus describes him too. The promise of God to Abraham is the promise that has been fulfilled to us in the gospel and in Jesus Christ.

Paul is so eager to tell us that when God makes a promise like that, he never goes back on it. He uses an illustration. Notice in verse 15, "Brothers," he says, "let me just take an example from everyday life." That is, he's going to use an illustration from everyday life, and the illustration he uses is of somebody making a will or a legal disposition.

What he says is this: just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case. The promise that was made to Abraham is like the kind of promise that people would make when they make a will, for example. Now you may well know that in our law, it is entirely possible if somebody has made a will that they can change it.

So the argument seems to fall down from our own contemporary experience, and that would have been true also in the Roman world. But in the Greek world, if you had made a will and disposed of your property to somebody else, you could not change it. It was irrevocable. Nor could you alter it, nor could you add to it. It was fixed. It seems that this law especially applied to disposing of property to somebody else.

So if you had done that and signed it and it was properly constituted as a covenant, you could not change or go back on it, even if the person to whom you had left the property suddenly displeased you and you began to hate them. You still could not deprive them of their inheritance. Now this is how Paul sees an illustration of what God has done in the promise that he makes to Abraham.

That promise, once sealed by God as a covenant he has made, is a promise and a covenant that is eternal in its significance. Now the promise was a promise of blessing, a promise of salvation, and it was a promise that was made to Abraham as a free gift of God. It was not something Abraham merited. It was not something that he deserved. It was not something that he had earned. It was God's free gift to him.

Let me show you how he points that out in verse 18. "If the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on a promise, but God in his grace gave it to Abraham through a promise." So the promise of salvation, the promise of blessing, the promise that Jesus said God made to Abraham, and Abraham saw his day and was glad, that was a promise of grace.

Not only so, but it was a promise that even when God was making it focused on Christ. Notice in verse 16, Paul links that promise to Christ. "The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed." Now who are Abraham's seed? Well, later on, he is going to tell us that we all are Abraham's seed.

But here he says the Scripture does not say "and to seeds," meaning many people, but "and to your seed," meaning one person who is Christ. So what is Paul saying? He is saying this: when God promised salvation to Abraham on the ground of free grace, he told him that it was to his seed, and that seed would be Christ. The promise would be fulfilled therefore especially in Christ, and then through Christ to all who believed in Christ.

Now that is the New Testament gospel. That's why the New Testament begins not in Bethlehem but in the book of Genesis. You say, "Did I hear you right? The New Testament begins in the book of Genesis?" Yes, you heard me right. You open the New Testament at the beginning of Matthew, and you read the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

So how do we understand why Jesus Christ has come into the world and how we are to receive salvation through him? The answer is go and read about Abraham. That's what Matthew is saying. The promise that was made by God to Abraham is fulfilled in Jesus Christ and then comes through Jesus Christ to all who believe in him.

But the nature of that salvation and the nature of that promise you will begin to understand, says Paul, when you understand the promise God made to Abraham. It was a promise of free grace. It was not based on anything that we can do. It was promised on the ground of God's mercy. Now what was God promising? He was promising the blessings of salvation.

You can see what these false teachers or Judaizers were saying. They were saying, "Ah, yes, we understand. This is exactly what we ourselves believe. But when the law was given in the time of Moses, everything was changed. Salvation is now by keeping the law."

And Paul says, "What are you trying to tell us? Are you trying to tell us that God has done what even a man would not and could not do, that he has gone back on his covenant, that he has broken his promise, that he has canceled his decree or testament?"

In verses 17 and 18, he says, "What I mean is this: the law introduced 430 years later"—and that figure does not, of course, mean the span between Abraham and Moses, but it is rather the time the people of Israel were in the wilderness and in the period after the Exodus—"the law introduced 430 years later does not set aside the covenant previously established by God and thus do away with the promise. For if the inheritance depends on the law, it no longer depends on a promise. But God in his grace gave it to Abraham through a promise."

So you see what he is saying: the giving of the law does not set aside the promise, and salvation is by promise, not by law. Now what does that have to do with us? Well, simply this: that the way Abraham found salvation was by believing God's promise, by hearing God's word and resting his confidence in the promise of God. He looked forward to the day when Christ would come and be the sacrifice for the sins of people.

And he believed God and "saw my day," says Jesus, "and was glad." How are we saved? How do we receive salvation? Precisely the same way. We hear the promise of God, we listen to God's overtones of mercy to us, and we look back to Christ who has appeared for our salvation and we are glad. But it is exactly the same process, and we are the children of Abraham when we believe on the ground of God's grace as Abraham believed.

Now there are so many people who find it so much easier—just you think about yourself for a moment—there are so many people who find it so much easier to be told, "You need to do this or do that. You need to fulfill this requirement of God in order to achieve salvation."

I sat some years ago in the vestry with a man who had a distinguished life in business and who had been coming to some of our lunch hour services. He said to me, "Do you know," he said, "it's this business of admitting and acknowledging that I am a helpless sinner who cannot do anything to achieve my salvation that really kills me off. If you told me that I had to do this or make that sacrifice or give away all my money, I believe I could accept it. But it is the humiliation of acknowledging that I have nothing." He didn't want to be saved Abraham's way. That's the simple truth.

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc: Rev. Eric Alexander's teaching was a production of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc.