What Do We Do With the Law?
Texts: Galatians 3:19-25; Matthew 5:17-20
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, UT
June 4, 2023
We’re going through Paul’s letter to the Galatians to know how we live by grace. Paul could not be more clear: the Christian way of life is to live not by the law but by faith. And that didn’t just begin with Christ. It began way before that. Think about it: God made a promise to Abraham – “Trust me. Walk with me. And you will be right with me.” God asked Abraham to just have faith in what God would do for Abraham. That was 430 years before God gave the law through Moses.
Quick Bible chronology lesson: Abraham is centuries before Moses. Then Moses comes, the law-giver, the one through who God gave the Ten Commandments and the rest of the laws. So for almost 500 years before Moses and the giving of the law, God’s people lived by faith without benefit of the law. They had nothing to tell them how to get from here to there, nothing to regulate their actions, nothing in black and white to explain or define God”[1]
So, if God has always wanted his people to live by faith, then why the law? And that is exactly the question Paul asks in this passage in Galatians before us on this first Sunday of June. Why do we need the law?
From time to time there are these debates about posting the Ten Commandments. They are in a public park, a school, a judge’s chambers and someone makes a fuss. And I will leave it to others to determine what is the place of the Ten Commandments in a nation that claims to be a Christian nation, imprints “in God we trust” on its coins, and separates church and state. I will say this – it would be better for some people to stay home and read the laws of God, not to mention keep them, instead of flaunting themselves before the cameras. Nevertheless, God gave the law. What do we do with it?
Reason for the law number one: to show sin. The law was given to reveal where we are out of step with God.
Imagine you drive up to Salt Lake City to go downtown to a concert. You are driving around and trying to find a parking space downtown. You circle around block after block because you are trying to get to the concert and you finally find a spot. You park the car, go in and enjoy the concert, come out and there is a nice big fat ticket on your windshield. Sure enough, there was a “No Parking” sign right there. The law was posted and showed where you were wrong.
If we don’t know the rule we don’t know we are doing anything wrong.
One summer while in college I worked in a hospital in Oakland, California in the housekeeping department. There was a locker room area in the basement area for employees to use to store their belongings or change clothes. It seemed rather quiet except for a few women going in and out.
On my lunch break I would go in and have my lunch or read while I took a break. I did this for several weeks. One day I was sitting eating my lunch and a woman came in, sat down, and began eating her lunch. She was very friendly. She introduced herself. Asked about me. And then gently said, “Do you know that this is a women’s locker room?”
There was no sign telling me this. I didn’t know I was doing something wrong. I wonder how red my face was as I sat in a women’s dressing room. I was very grateful for this woman who calmly told me the truth and set me straight. Once I became aware of the rule I became aware of my wrongdoing. And I found another place to eat lunch and read.
Laws and rules tell us when we are trespassing, when to stop or go, to not back up over the spikes. In this way the law can also be good and helpful.
God has created this world with a moral order. We would not know that we had done anything wrong or offended God unless the law had pointed it out. You can’t be told you are out of bounds unless you know what the boundaries are. Romans 3:20 says “…through the law we become conscious of sin.”
This leads to the second purpose for the law: it drives us to Christ our Savior. We see our need for our Savior when we come to realize that we can’t do all this. The rules are too heavy and burdensome. Who can be perfect all the time?
Paul reminds the Galatians in earlier passages, of what it says in Deuteronomy: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.”[2] Yikes. There may have been an occasion or two or more where I may not have not kept all of God’s regulations. Maybe just once or twice…
We can offend God by not keeping his laws and take a bad course. But there is another way we can put ourselves at odds with God. It is when we keep his laws, or try to keep them, and presume we are OK with God based on our good life. That is what the Galatians were doing. They were trusting in themselves and their own effort.[3]
In one of her novels, the writer Flannery O’Connor says this about one of her characters, “he knew that the best way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”[4] Think about that. Do everything right all the time and you don’t need forgiveness. You don’t need a Savior. The point isn’t to just go off the rails so Jesus can save us. No, this ironic statement that “the best way to avoid Jesus is to avoid sin” is to realize we can’t avoid either of these. It’s a mirage to think the goodness of my life on my own terms will set me right with God.
Jesus himself said that he didn’t come to do away with the Old Testament. No, he came to fulfill all the laws and commandments of God meaning he came to live every one of those, perfectly. Those first thirty-nine books of our Bible was Jesus’ Bible. He heard it, read it, studied it, was raised on it, and preached it. He lived by it and did so perfectly.
Jesus said that unless a person can live as seriously as the Pharisees, who were as strict about the rules of God as you could get, then that person had no place in the kingdom of heaven.
But then Jesus says, “Maybe you think you don’t break any of these. You say ‘I’m a good person. I don’t murder. I am not an adulterer. I don’t judge other people.’ Well, if you have been angry with someone else, or called them a fool or some other name, it is to murder them. And to even look at someone lustfully is to commit adultery in the heart. And yes the law says ‘Love your neighbor’ but that also means to love your enemies, not just the people you like.”
I hear this from Jesus and all of a sudden I am not as good as I thought. I think Jesus is intentionally severe and strict in some of his teaching because he wants to drive us to himself as our Savior. He wants us to feel the burden of the law and the demands of God’s holiness so that we can also come to the freedom of grace.
A lot of people who claim to be Christian are really practicing what we might call “moralistic religion”. Moralistic religion works like this: If we think we are living a good life and doing all the right things then we might begin to believe that God owes us for how good we are. But if life starts to go badly, we become angry with God because deep down we believe he owes us because we live up to his standards.[5] Now, if that describes you, then you are trying to live by the law and the rules. You are living in kind of a religious exchange with God, not by faith or grace.
I go back to something I said a couple weeks ago, the gospel is really good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good. And Jesus puts us right with God even when we fail to be good.[6] Which is good news to me.
The pastor and Bible teacher John Stott said, “Not until the law has driven us to despair of ourselves will we ever believe in Jesus. Not until the law has humbled us even to hell will we turn to the gospel to raise us to heaven.”[7]
One of the main purposes of the law is to show us our need and to drive us to faith in Christ. It was to show that we are out of a right relationship with God. The law shows the futility of coming up with some religious system for getting by on our own efforts.[8]
This brings us to the third purpose of the law. In verses 24 and 25 Paul says,
“Before the coming of this faith we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.”
We were put under custody of the law. It was our guardian, our disciplinarian until Christ came.
Paul uses a term from Greek culture to refer to how the law was a guardian and in charge of us. Well-to-do families would often hire a guardian whose job was to take the child of the family, usually between the ages of 6 and 16, and make sure the child got to his teacher every day (it was almost always a male as it was a patriarchal thing). The guardian was not the teacher nor did he have responsibilities for education. His job was only to get the child ready, make sure he had all his writing utensils and supplies needed, and get him to the one who would educate him. He was to get him there safely and make sure the child was where he was supposed to be, in the way he was supposed to be, when he was supposed to be. This guardian was often known to be a real taskmaster. But when the child came of age that servant was no longer needed.
This is the idea Paul uses about the law. The law was like our guardian until the time of Christ. It was in charge of us. It says that we were locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. We were in a cell, heavily guarded, until grace came and unlocked the door and let us out into the freedom of grace. Paul is pleading with the Galatians not to go back into the cell but to realize a life acceptable to God is one of faith and grace.
The purpose of the law was always to bring a person to Christ. It was to bring us to our true destination which is a relationship of faith, grace and love with the Lord.
The law cannot forgive sins or give life. It was merely a way to get us to who really can give us life.
Growing up, I went to church mainly because that is what my parents did and I had to go. I had to do certain things and not do certain things because I lived under their roof and I knew the rules and lived by the rules. When I graduated from high school and left for college I felt I was finally free. I knew I could live anyway I wanted to. I was free to stay up as late as I wanted, go where I wanted, do what I wanted. And free not to go to church! I was done doing this and that.
And then God confronted me, got a hold of me, convicted me. My faith in Christ became personal. I started reading the Bible and it was nourishing my soul. I found a nearby church and started going because I wanted to! (What was wrong with me?) God’s Spirit changed my heart. And I started seeking the Lord and living for God not because I was forced to by any rules but because I wanted to. To live by faith was my desire. And grace has been the dominant note of my life ever since.
God doesn’t want us to relate to him by rules but by faith, which is about our hearts.
Hear the next verse Paul writes in v. 26: “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” We don’t need that guardian anymore. We are sons and daughters of God. We exchange a relationship based on law for one based on faith.
As for the law, it is still present. It is helpful to know what the boundaries are. It is helpful that someone tells us which way to go into the car wash so that we don’t ruin our car. We still need to know how God wants life to be lived. Augustine, who lived in the 300’s and who has been one of the big Christian voices over the centuries, said, “The law is given that grace might be sought; grace is given that the law might be fulfilled.”
The law was the old covenant, the old relationship of living with God. Grace is the new covenant. It is the way we live with God through the Spirit.
The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel foresaw a day when God would give us a new heart and put a new spirit. He said, “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” [9]
Again, in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah the Lord makes a similar promise. He says a day is coming when he will make a new covenant with his people, not like the covenant they broke. In this covenant, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.”[10] When something is on your heart you just live into it naturally.
That is what the Spirit of God does. He makes it natural to live by faith in Christ. Paul reminded the Galatians that it is by faith that we receive the promise of the Spirit.[11]
It was at that table before he would go to the cross that Jesus spoke of that new covenant, saying specifically the cup pointed to that. And so we come to this table this morning to celebrate, remember, and recommit ourselves to that new covenant of living by faith and by God’s Spirit in us, that comes through Jesus Christ.
[1] Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light, p.103
[2] 27:26
[3] See The Reason for God, Timothy Keller, p.183
[4] ibid
[5] Tim Keller, The Reason for God, p.188
[6] See Living for Christ, February 23.
[7] Commentary on Galatians, p.93
[8] The Message
[9] Ezekiel 36:26,27
[10] Jeremiah 31:33
[11] 3:14