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Skip Heitzig: I think it's important to recognize that the only religion God ever gave to humanity was Judaism. I want to explain that. Prior to the time of Moses, God called a man who was a pagan worshiper by the name of Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees where he had been raised, worshiping the moon god, worshiping 3,600 other different deities. God spoke to him personally and made promises to him personally and entered into a covenant with him personally so that there was a personal relationship established.

God promised that he would have descendants as we discovered and discussed last week. Abram was getting older and older. Finally, God came to him and said, "Abram, I am your shield and your exceeding great reward." Abram said, "Well, that's nice, but what are you going to give me seeing that I don't have an heir? I don't have a child. You promised a child. I don't have one. I'm getting older now. That ship has sort of sailed for me and Sarah."

God said, "Look up at the sky, Abram. If you can number the stars, can you? So shall your descendants be. It's going to come from Sarah's own womb." It says, "Abram believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness." So right then and there, God established a right relationship with himself based solely upon belief, faith. Abram believed, and it was accounted to him as being righteous.

After Abraham was Isaac, Jacob, the 12 tribes. God through Moses, after bringing them out of Egypt into their own land, established a covenant with them called the Mosaic Covenant. The law, the Torah was given. In the law, God gave Ten Commandments, but after he gave the Ten Commandments, he gave a detailed set of blueprints to Moses to build a pretty elaborate house of worship in the desert, made out of cloth primarily and some skins of animals. But there were implements within that little portable temple structure called the Tabernacle.

God said, "This is how I must be approached. You must now take an animal and kill the animal. Its blood must be shed, and it has to be sprinkled. Everything has to be done just right. You can't just come in. Nobody can just barge in. You have to go through this elaborate set of parameters if you're going to have fellowship, if we're going to hang out together, if we're going to have fellowship together." So God established a covenant of the law after he had established righteousness by faith alone.

So when I say Judaism was the only religion that God gave to man, even though there had been many other religions before the time of Moses and after the time of Moses and still are many world religions today, the only religious system that God ever gave to humanity was Judaism. Christianity is not a religion, even though if you were to go take a class in college, they would call it a world religion. It has become known as that. But anyone who knows their Bible understands there's a huge difference between Judaism and the religious system required to be right before God in the law of Moses and Christianity.

So that covenant of the law, that religious set of parameters that God gave to his people served a purpose and served a term, and that term is over with. It's done. That religious system is ended as far as God was concerned when Jesus died on the cross. He took the veil of the temple and ripped it from top to bottom, basically saying all of that palaver is not required any longer. All of those ordinances are done. Now you can have fellowship one-on-one directly.

But it served a purpose. Back in chapter 3 of the book of Galatians, notice what purpose then does the law serve? He answers it. It was added because of transgressions until the Seed, capital S, singular, a reference to Christ, until the Seed should come to whom the promise was made, and it was appointed through angels by the hand of a mediator. The law served a purpose. It was added because of transgressions. In other words, the law came along and showed me how bad I am. I thought I was pretty good until I read the law. Then I read the law and I went, "Uh-oh, if that's true, I'm in trouble."

My father-in-law came to that end result in his reading of the Bible. He was an atheist, very educated, a doctor in Southern California who also went to law school to get a law degree on top of a medical degree. So he was quite advanced. He raised my wife to not believe in God, raised her to take care of herself. No God in heaven will do anything for you. There isn't such a thing. You do it on your own.

One day he was reading the New Testament, a red-letter edition, to see if Jesus was a positive person. He was reading it and he closed the book and he said to his wife, "If what I just read is true, I'm in deep trouble." He called Chuck Smith and said, "Will you baptize me?" Chuck said, "I'll meet you at the ocean." Met him at the ocean in a couple hours and baptized him.

So the law served a purpose. It showed me how bad I am. It was added because of transgression. Even Paul the Apostle, before he was Paul the Apostle, when he was Paul the Jewish rabbi, the Pharisee, he boasted in Philippians chapter 3 of his background. "I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, concerning the law a Pharisee. Concerning righteousness which comes by the law, I was blameless."

That is, he went down every single one of the Ten Commandments. Check, check, check, check, check. He said until he got to the tenth commandment, "Thou shalt not covet." And then he said, "Uh-oh, I'm in trouble. Because now I realize the law wasn't given just to govern my outward actions, but my inward attitude. Because you can covet and nobody sees what you're doing. It's an inward thought. It's an attitude." So Paul said, "I read that last commandment and that sin revived," he said, "and I died in Romans 7."

So he says here, it was added because of transgression until the Seed should come to whom the promise was made, and it was appointed through angels by the hand of a mediator. That's the giving of the law. Think of the law as a mirror. When you get up in the morning and you look in the mirror, some of you are laughing because you realize it's not a pretty sight. Well, it might be a pretty sight. I'm not saying you're not pretty, but I'm guessing when you look in the mirror that even you, if you're awesome and pretty, will look at that first glimpse of yourself and go, "I need help. This needs work. I've got to paint it a little bit. I've got to fix the hair because it's kind of going crazy."

Let's say you look in the mirror and you notice smudges all over your face. Would you try to take the mirror off the wall and use it to clean yourself? No, it simply reveals your condition. You'll take something else with which to clean yourself. So when you look into the law, it's like looking into a mirror. You wouldn't use the mirror, the law, to try to clean yourself. It just reveals how dirty you are. Only Christ, the Seed, can make you clean.

So the law, Paul said, served a purpose. It was added because of transgression. It didn't start that way. God didn't establish that with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, but he did with Moses. He delivered his people out of bondage, then he established a new covenant of the law with them until Christ would come. It was a placeholder.

Look down at verse 23. "But before faith came," that's New Testament faith, "we were kept under guard by the law, kept for the faith which would afterward be revealed. Therefore, the law was our tutor." The old King James says schoolmaster. It was a schoolmaster or a tutor to bring us to Christ that we might be justified by faith.

Now what I didn't tell you last week because we were running out of time, the word for tutor is the Greek word paidagogos. Paidagogos, babysitter, a child trainer. It was referring to somebody who in Greek culture was hired by the master of the house to guard his children until they reached about 18 years of age, until they became adults. Then they were released. So that was the paidagogos, the child tender or trainer or the babysitter.

Guest (Male): This is Connect with Skip Heitzig. When you give to this ministry, you help reach thousands of people every day with God's life-changing truth, encouraging them to know him, trust him, and walk in his freedom. This month, we want to thank you with a special resource packet.

You'll receive Skip's book, Biography of God, which helps you explore God's nature, his power, the mystery of the Trinity, and the hope that comes from removing the false limitations we sometimes place on him. Plus, you'll get Skip's six-message CD series, Expound: Galatians, where Skip unpacks the book of Galatians and the freedom believers have through grace, not works.

Your gift today helps bring the life-changing message of Jesus to people around the world through Connect with Skip. Request your resources when you give $50 or more at connectwithskip.com/offer or by calling 800-922-1888. Now, here's more from Pastor Skip.

Skip Heitzig: Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. Why is he writing all this? Because the whole reason he wrote the book of Galatians is this church or these set of churches where Paul started them in the plateau of Southern Galatia are coming under fire. A group from Jerusalem, Judaizers we typically call them, say they believe in Christ, but they also say that if you are a Gentile, you must become a Jew once you come to Christ.

If you come to the Jewish Messiah, you must become a Jew, be circumcised, and keep the law of Moses. It was the Acts 15 principle. When they went up to Antioch in Syria and said, "Unless you are circumcised and keep the law of Moses, you can't be saved." So that's why the Council of Jerusalem was formed in order to deal with this issue. Well, some of these people had made their way to where Paul traveled and started churches.

Basically, the Judaizers were parasites. They didn't seek to win the lost. They didn't go out and try to evangelize people like Paul did and establish churches. They went to already established churches trying to talk those people into their doctrine. So they're not out to win the lost, they're out to wean the saved away from grace to keep the law of Moses.

Sometimes we talk about Christians backsliding. You've heard that term. You're sliding back. You're going back. You were growing in your faith and then after a while you just sort of let it go. You lapse and then you find yourself going backwards. Well, that's wrong to do that. But let me tell you what else is wrong. Not just to backslide, but to frontslide.

And that is what the Judaizers were doing. They were saying, "We're going further than what the Bible says we should go." And because we're going further, we're more spiritual than you are. So backsliding is bad, but frontsliding is also bad. They're adding to the gospel, the gospel of grace, salvation through faith by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. That's what the Reformation got back to, by the way. Paul is outlining that here.

So grace is not a stopping point, Paul is saying. The Judaizers were saying it's a stopping point. "I'm glad you came to Christ. We're happy for you that you have found our Messiah, the Jewish Messiah, and we believe that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. But grace, this unmerited favor to you Gentiles, you heathens, is just the starting point."

So Paul writes the book of Galatians saying grace isn't the starting point, it's the only point. It's the only point. And his whole thing is I'm going to keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is Jesus only, Jesus alone, believing in him alone, justified by faith alone. So after faith has come, you are no longer under a tutor.

"But you are all sons of God," verse 26, chapter 3, that we breezed through last week. "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. One isn't better than another. There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise."

Now I say, chapter 4, verse 1, that the heir as long as he is a child does not differ at all from a slave, though he is the master of all. Now Paul expands this analogy that he began in chapter 3, the analogy of a tutor or a schoolmaster taking that young child and carrying that child along. Coming of age until the child becomes an adult.

So he now takes this analogy of a child coming of age and he expands it a little bit. If you were to look back in any ancient culture, but in particular, let's just take the culture of the Bible, the Greek culture, the Roman culture, the Jewish culture, every one of those three cultures had a specific coming of age ceremony for a son or daughter. When the son or daughter is now responsible and you are being treated as an adult member of our community, one of the things I am saddened for that is lacking in our culture is this.

In our culture, there is no real, "Okay, this is the ceremony you go through. You're going to work up toward this, and now you're a son or daughter of the commandment. Now we're going to treat you differently. Now your responsibility is different." We just don't have that. It's very nebulous. It's very ambiguous.

So I applaud my son and daughter-in-law who when Seth, my grandson, got to be a certain age, we went out and he had to go pass several tests out in the wild with some of his friends from his connect group speaking into his life, including myself, speaking into his life and giving him challenges. And then around the campfire where we conferred this coming of age upon him. That was just standard fare in an ancient culture.

So back to verse 1 of chapter 4. "Now I say that the heir, as long as he is a child," and the word here means a very young child, "does not differ at all from a slave, though he is the master of all, but is under guardians and stewards," money managers, babysitters, tutors, "until the time appointed by his father."

Even so—and by the way, when is that time? Well, it varies from culture to culture. I often get asked, "Well, what's the age of accountability?" And of course, I think it depends on the person and the circumstances and the situation. But I'm going to throw you a curveball.

If you went to Jerusalem today and went to Mea Shearim, the very ultra-orthodox section of Jerusalem, and you would say, "When do you consider someone an adult?" It wouldn't be 13 like the bar mitzvah. That just means you're a child, a son or daughter of the commandment, the covenant. But you are regarded as an adult in an Orthodox Jewish community at age 40. So that's not in view here, I just wanted to throw you a curveball.

Even so we, verse 3, even so we—and I think he's speaking here, we of we Jewish people. He's writing to Gentiles in Galatia, but since they have been influenced by Judaizers, he is now speaking as a Jewish person. "Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world. But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law."

Let's say a child is born into a wealthy home. That's what's in view here. He's an heir, it says in verse 1. The heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is the master of all. So you have a son born into a wealthy household. Essentially, he's the master of everything in that household. One day he will be the inheritor of it all.

But that doesn't mean that as a child he can go cut a check or spend any of it or enjoy any of it. He has to wait until he is of full age, and that age is determined by his dad, by his father. But he is the one who will inherit all that wealth, but when he's a very young child, there's really not much of a difference between that child and a household slave, both under the control of the father or the master of that household.

He explains further, verse 2, he's under guardians, stewards, money managers, babysitters, tutors, until the time appointed by his father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world. He's describing life under the law. We were under the law. We didn't have the freedom of enjoyment of the inheritance of God. It was all about do this, don't do that.

Notice the little phrase in verse 3, the elements of the world. It means the basic principles, better translation, the ABCs. We were little kids under the ABCs of the law of Moses. So Israel, the nation of Israel, the Jewish nation had been in kindergarten for 15 centuries, as long as the law of Moses, that religious system was in view, in play, in action. They were like children under that bondage of what they can and can't do until the Seed came, Christ came. And now there's no longer a need for that.

But, verse 4—one of my favorite verses in the New Testament—"But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law." Just like a father in a Greek, Roman, or Jewish household determines what the right time is for that child to be presented as an adult, so God the Father at just the right time sent his Son into this world on a rescue mission which would effectively end the law.

Guest (Male): Thanks for joining us today on Connect with Skip Heitzig. Before we go, remember, your generosity helps share God's word around the world, bringing truth and hope to people who need Jesus. And this month, we'd love to thank you for your support by sending you a special resource bundle.

Skip's book, Biography of God, along with his six-message CD series, Expound: Galatians. Together, these resources help you explore who God really is and how to live in the spiritual freedom he offers. Give today at connectwithskip.com/offer or call 800-922-1888. See you next time on Connect with Skip Heitzig.