Bible Guys Classics: Galatians 3 & 4

Well today Paul is gonna lay down the law and talk about Grace. Boom. There you go. So he's Chris, I'm Jeff, and we are the Bible guys. Okay, Chris, So you and I have been are our horns have been locked in battle last week? Right? That's such a weird statement when you said it, I was like our horns or what. Locked in battle? You know how, like too big bucks or two bulls fighting and they locked their horns in battle. Gotcha? Yes, because of fantasy football. Fantasy football, that's right. And we are in a big time fantasy football league. So today we had solicited to our listeners two weeks ago. To type in any type of question. Yeah, mail bags right now, So mail bag segment and just fun to get to know you questions from our listeners, and we had one Kyle said, I know you guys are big football fans or either of you on a fantasy football league, and all I just want to say is thanks for bringing that up, Kyle. Right. So, in case you're wondering the reason why we're talking like this is because Jeff and I actually played last Sunday. Our two teams. Two teams went against each other and I beat him. Now, what's so interesting is I'm the worst one in the league. Yea, Jeff's one of the best in the league, right. And maybe the best. I don't have the best record, Bene probably the best manager of a fantasy. Well, just to be clear, the stats, the projection, the stats show that both of us are going to end up in the same place projected, Yes, with the same record. At the end. Maybe yes. But however, for some reason, I've had some pretty bad luck and I haven't been playing so well, so I was the the worst. So anyway, I've been averaging like maybe like eighty points a game, right, and you've been averaging like one. And thirty thirty points. Yeah, I should have just bulldozed you, which. Isn't even close, I know. However, on Sunday you went ahead, and so. I scored one hundred and thirty five point seven points, which I should have all of everybody who's playing fantasy football, right, probably out of our listeners, I would have beaten ninety nine percent of our listeners on their teams this last week too. One hundred and thirty five point seven is so far above the normal, and in our league didn't come close to all our league averages one hundred and twelve points. That's what our league averages, so one hundred and thirty five point seven should have won. And then you show up and your team plays out of their minds this last week and you beat me one hundred and thirty seven point two. You beat me by one point four points. Yes, that's it. It's just And by the way, that's really the only victory that I really wanted. It's the only victory you've had. But it's only when that mattered, wasn't. It was terrible. It's so strange my other league. I'm gonna win the whole league. Oh sure, nobody's seen it's right here. Yeah, yeah, it's on the good appu. Our entire staff can see how you're performing here. By the way, I don't know why we use Yahoo. It's written by a bunch of yahoos. Okay, okay, ESPN app it is so intuitive, it is so awesome. I don't know why anybody doesn't just use the ESPN Fantasy Football app. But anyway, I've got the best team on that league, and I'm probably gonna win the championship. Wow, yeah, sure, But do you get a trophy in that league and money and money yes. Wow. So what we do is in our office we have a super Bowl trophy, yes, that we give away, and then we also give away a Super Bowl ring right for the winner, and so you get to keep the ring. And then the trophy floats around the office and has to be prominently positioned in your office. And what do you give to the person who's the word? Still, So we have a trophy. It's a bibblehead outhouse. So you just see the feet with the pants around the ankles, and then the outhouse is a bibblehead. Like that and it says I stink and finishing football. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, it is in my office. It's in your office because you were last place last year, yes, and you have a really good shot of being last place this year. Yes. Maybe I can just keep the christ just keep it. Yeah, we may just turn it into the Zarbal Trophy. That's so funny how I drafted poorly on both leagues because remember last year I was number one pick. I drafted Christian McCaffrey. Oh yeah, yeah, it was my first pick. I was number one overall pick, and then he just went down yeah right, And so I actually had like three people go down, and so I just had some really bad luck. I have Christian McAffrey this year, and he's just not scoring touchdowns. So for all the people who couldn't care less about football, this segment is over. Now you can tune back in, turn the volume back up. Yeah, which, by the way is probably most but. It's funny, So so we have more fun. You know, we're Lions fan or well, we live in Lions Country and the Lions play so poorly we have to have some reason to pay it. Well, but you are a Lions fan though I am alliance. You corrected like you weren't. Yes, I know, I said we, and then realize I can't say we because you're not. No, I am. You are a fan, Yes, like a fan. You're a Lions fan boy, Yes, okay. I cheer for the Lions, and I root for them over every team except for Cleveland when they play Cleveland. Yeah, so I follow the Lions only, so you follow. The two worst teams in the history of the NFL. Because I live near the two worst cities of football in the NFL. Yeah. Okay, so now we are done. We're done talking about football there. But anyways, we do that for fun. It builds a lot of camaraderie with our staff. We got like how many twenty four people playing? Yeah, and it's a lot of fun. So okay, anyways, thanks Kyle for ruining my day and asking that question. And just note to self, no more questions from Kyle. There you go, all right, you ruined it right there. So we're going to continue on in Galatians, and this passage Paul is going to really unpack the whole of his argument. So we have referenced his argument, but he's only just been complaining about the Judaizers, but he hasn't really gotten into the theological argument as to why they're wrong and what real grace is all about. This is where he begins on packet. So we're going to read Galatians chapter three, and he says, oh, foolish Galatians, who has cast an evil spell on you? For the meaning of Jesus Christ's death was made clear to you as if you had seen a picture of his death on the cross. Let me ask you this one question. Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not. You receive the spirit because you believe the message. You heard about Christ. How foolish can you be after starting your Christian lives in the spirit? Why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? Have you experienced so much for nothing? Surely it was not in vain, was it? I ask you again? Does God give you the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you because you obey the law? Of course not. It's because you believe the message you heard about Christ in the same way Abraham believed God and God counted him as righteous because of his faith. The real children of Abraham, then, are those who put their faith in God. What's more, the scriptures looked forward to this time when God would declare to the Gentiles to be righteous because of their faith. God proclaimed this good news to Abraham long ago when he said all nations will be blessed through you. So all who put their faith in Christ share the same blessing Abraham received because of his faith. But those who depend on the law to make them right with God are under his curse. For the scriptures say cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the commands that are written in God's Book of the Law. So it is clear that No one can be made right with God by trying to keep the law. For the scriptures say it is through faith that a righteous person has life. This way, this way of faith, is very different from the way of law, which says it is through obeying the law that a person has life. But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse of our wrongdoing. For it has written the scriptures, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree. Though Christ Jesus God, through Christ Jesus God has blessed the gentiles with the same blessing he promised to Abraham, so that we who are believers might receive the promised Holy Spirit through faith. Dear brothers and sisters, here's an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or amend it an irrevocable agreement, so it is in this case. God gave the promises to Abraham and his child. And noticed that the scripture doesn't say to his children, as if it meant any many descendants. Rather it says to his child, and that of course means Christ. This is what I am trying to say the agreement God made with Abraham could not be canceled. Four hundred and thirty years later, when God gave the law to Moses, God would be breaking his promise, for if the inheritance could be received by keeping the law, then it would not be the result of accepting God's promise. But God graciously gave it to Abraham as a promise. Why then was the law given. It was given alongside the promise to show people their sins, but the law was designed to last only until the coming of the child who was promised. God gave his law through angels to Moses, who was the mediator between God and the people. Now, a mediator is helpful if more than one party must reach an agreement, but God, who is one, did not use a mediator when he gave his promise to Abraham. Is there a conflict then, between God's law and God's promises? Absolutely not. If the law could give us new life, we could be made reare with God by obeying it. But the scriptures declare that we are all prisoners of sin, So we receive God's promise of freedom only by believing in Jesus Christ. Before the way of faith in Christ was available to us, we were placed under guard by the law. We were kept in protective custody, so to speak, until the Way of Faith was revealed. Let me put it another way. The law was our guardian until Christ came. It protected us until we could be made right with God through faith. And now that the way of Faith has come, we no longer need the law as our guardian, for you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, and all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ like putting on new clothes. There is no longer jew or gentile, slave, or free male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God's promised to Abraham belongs to you. Think of it this way. If a father dies and leaves an inheritance for his young children, those children are not much better off than slaves until they grow up. Even though they actually own everything their father had, they have to obey their guardians until they reach whatever age their fathers sat. And that's the way it was with us. Before Christ came. We were like children we were slaves to the basic spiritual principles of this world. But when the right time came, God sent his son, born of a woman subject to the law. God sent him to buy freedom for us, who are slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children. And because we are his children, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, prompting us to call out Abbah, Father. Now you are no longer a slave, but God's own child. And since you are his child, God has made you his heir. So really, what he's doing is he's tying Jesus into being Abraham's son. Right and promise made to Abraham is fulfilled in his son. And he's saying that Moses law was the guardian until the Sun was grown up enough to be able to inherit. I like how Paul did the math for us and said it was exactly four hundred and thirty years from Abrahad. That was helpful, Otherwise we would have been like many. It was a lot. Well. To be honest with you, I say that tongue in cheek, but actually it's it's it's a testament to Paul's knowledge because Paul was a pharisee. Paul was a person who was probably a you know, at least if he wasn't in the Samehedrin, he was, you know, working toward that. And so I've always believed this. But Paul was the perfect qualified person. God chose the perfect person because he was a Roman citizen and at the same time he was a Jewish you know, person who was also a pharisee, so he understood everything. Yeah, so my profession, and let me say this, he was perfectly positioned to argue against the Judaizers. Yes, he was the perfect one that God could use. Because he was over them at one time. He was in a position of authority right underneath Caiaphas. So these people are coming in acting all pompous and know it all, trying to impose the law on these new Christians. And Paul went, hey, wait a minute, right, you know this much, I know this much about the law. Let me explain it to you. He's like, hey, you know who you're talking to. You know who I am? Right, that's what he's saying. And by the way, my college professor told me that it was customary for in order for Paul to become a Pharisee. They would take the five books of the Torah or the pentitook, and they would actually. Take this Exodus, Sleaviticus, numbers, and Deuteronomy. Yes, and they would close them. Those are the laws of Moses, the books of Moses. They would close the book, and then they would pick anywhere on the book and drive a nail through the book. And the final exam was the person had to quote every single verse that the nail had passed through by memory. In other words, they had to know where on the page the verse was. That's how much he knew it. Now, I don't know if that's true, but I've heard that enough over the years to believe that maybe you know, it was very customary, and. It was true one of the tests. It was one of the tests or the final example. And so all that to say, when Paul's quoting four hundred and thirty years, my guess is he didn't have to look it up, right, And he also doesn't have to look up anything that he's talking about. He knows it backwards and forward, and he has the authority to make this conclusion. So think about this for someone to understand how all of the Old Testament law points toward Jesus. It makes the law that which you knew before Jesus. You knew the law. All of a sudden Jesus comes along, and that law now comes to life's right. It comes to life. It has a brand new meaning, which is pretty cool. Well, Jesus said, it didn't come to destroy the law came to fulfill it. Right. So the Judaizers, they had come in and they had built this argument. They genuinely believed that there was the promise of Abraham that through Abraham's son would come salvation. But then they believed that when the Law Moses came that God changed the process, and so that then now the Law of Moses is the new way to God. And as if God changed his mind, And what Paul is saying here is God didn't change his mind. Your opinion of the purpose of the law is wrong. So the promise has always been that through Christ, all of humanity. This is why God had said, the whole world will be blessed because of you. Through Christ, through the son of Abraham, all of humanity will have opportunity for forgiveness of sins, right relationship with God through faith. All the Jews, the gentiles everybody. But then they said, well, once Moses' law came in, God excluded everybody else. God made all these rules, and this is how you get to God. And he said, no, the law was just supposed to be like the guardian. It was like the nanny for us. It pointed out the fact that we needed a savior. That's what the law did. He mentions it here that it showed us that we were dead in our sins. In the Book of Romans, he mentions that the whole purpose behind the law was to point out to us that we needed a savior. But the promise was not the law. The law was just the nanny that was letting us know we did wrong. Instead, the promise was fulfilled in Jesus, and that was the point. The Abrahamic promise and the fulfillment of it in Jesus was the point. And the law was a tool to say, boy, you really need Jesus. And it's just a great argument. It's so easy to understand why people get confused, because even if you don't know anything about the Bible, you understand that it's filled with rules and commandments. Sure, you know, God is pleased when we obey and God is not pleased whether we disobey or well or wilfully sin. But it actually says that, you know, like people always revere the Ten Commandments, and they when they believe that you have to be good to go to heaven, they say, well, I've tried to obey the Ten Commandments my whole life. And people seem to view the Ten Commandments as I on eight out of the tent, right, or they don't know it, right, they think that they've kept them, but or most of the time they think it's percentages. Right, they think it's a passing grade. But you know where you're. Gonna have to sixty nine. Right, if I get a sixty seven and I failed, But if I got a seventy, I'm in right. You know, well, it's your good has to outweigh your bad. That's what most people believe. But you think about it. The Ten Commandments were given to us to show us how pitiful we are. The Bible actually says that the law was given to us to reveal our sin. Right, So people think that the Ten Commandments are the highest bar, but think about it. When God give us the Ten Commandments, he actually set the bar extremely low to show that we can't even meet that bar. He's like, hmm, try not to kill anybody today. Yeah, try not to sleep with any wife that isn't yours. And so so. He says, the law takes stuff that's not yours. Don't take stuff that's not yours. He sets the bar so unbelievably low. And then what happens is humanity is slithered underneath the bar. And so we say all the ten Commandments are revered as the highest bar. No, these are the basic fundamentals of human living and decency, and we've managed to slither under them. The law was given to reveal our sin, to show us our sin. You know what. It reminds me of my father in law came up when we bought our house and he's like, you need new grass. So he rents this big like machine and he's like, oh, just like like scrapes all of our grass off, all of it, and he's like, you need to, you know, repurpose all this, and he kind of landscape our whole thing. It was really weird. He brought a dirt and all these kind of things, and I was like, okay, and he's doing his thing. So then we spread we went get you know, seed and then hay and everything else, and most of our lawn was like redone. And what happened was in the spring, what happened was the grass was growing fine, but there was all these weeds. And listen when I tell you this, Okay, like my entire lawn it's decently big. Every three inches in every direction was this grassy weed. And it was just everywhere. It was just it was there was millions of it. It seemed like. So I'm thinking, okay, I get to go into a professional. I picked a weed. I went in because the because the hay was batter Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I went in and I said to them, I need a weed killer to just kill this weed, but not this grass. And the guy says, well, that's impossible because actually that's a form of weed. But it's a form of grass. It's a grassy weed. He said, So you no matter what you get to kill, you're going to kill your grass. He said. You only have two choices. He says, Hey, you can go ahead and wipe it all out and start all over again, or be you can actually wait until the weeds because the weeds grow faster. You can wait until the weeds grow super tall, and then pick them all out by hand, the four million weeds that are in your lawn. Thanks right, thanks. So here's the deal. I went in trying to buy weed killer to kill the sin in the lawn. Instead I came out with fertilizer helping him to make it grow, for them to become more prominent. So well, who would have ever thought that I went into for a weed killer thinking it was going to destroy them, and then only to come out with fertilizer to pronounce them. That's what the law is, and. So it exaggerated the weeds. Then exaggerated it made the weeds tall. And made it more evident that you needed to pull those out. So I fed. I fed my weeds food. And it turns out that, like my whole lot, was an embarrassment to the You know, I wanted to put a sign that says, I'm not negligent, I'm just waiting for them to grow because it looks so bad. And I got on my hands and knees, and I kid you not, for like three days solid, I was on my hands and knees picking every single weed by hand. Wow. And I did the entire lawn, and so I have pictures of it at home, just how ridiculous it was. And so it is a perfect picture of the law. Isn't weed killer? The law is we'd fertilizer. Oh right. It pronounces our sins. Yes, that's what it's supposed to do. That's the whole point. And that's what he's trying to say here. That's what he also impacts in the Book of Romans. Same thing that it just points out the need for a savior. So it's important. Paul says, Abraham was saved by faith. Right, and I really love the Transformation study Bible. This Warren Wereersby's study Bible. He says Abraham was saved by faith. Paul began by quoting Moses to show that God's righteousness was placed to Abraham's account only because he believed God's promise. The word counted in Galatians three six is also used in Genesis fifteen. In Romans four and some translations reads, it's imputed means that God puts it on his record. The Greek word means to assigned a one's account. When the sinner trusts Christ, God's righteousness is assigned to the sinner's account. So what he was saying is so the fertilizer shows look at this debt you owe. It just expands it. It makes it bigger. The numbers are bigger, the problem is greater. And then he says, the only way that Abraham was saved, the only way is the only way you can be saved. It's not by trying to pay off that debt or to pull all those weeds. Instead, it's letting God's goodness be accredited to your account. And that's that's Paul's entire argument, which is consistent with everything we read in Galatians. It's what's consistent in everything we read in the Book of Romans and throughout all the rest of Paul's teaching. And what Paul is saying is I know this for a fact because I tried to live your way and I was better at it than you. Right the Judaizers, and he said, it's not possible to have forgiveness of sins and right standing with God by works. Now Jesus said, if you love me, keep my commandments. It's not so we can get into heaven. But because he saved us, now we're inspired to do the right thing and to honor God. And you know the book of Deuteronomy ends with you know, this whole book of the Law ends with So now I put before you the choice between life and death. Oh that you would choose life. God says, your life will be better when you live a good, clean life. But it's your choice. You can never get to heaven that way. So instead we honor God because of what he did, not in order to get saved, or not in order to go to heaven, but because we are saved, then we choose to do the right thing. Well, that sounds like a really great place to end. And we will see you next time on the Bible. Guys,