When I was younger, I watched the less than spectacular motion picture Ghost Rider, starring Nicolas Cage. Do you remember this one? It was an early comic book to movie adaptation. And the movie didn't sit right with me at all just because of the general crapificity of it, but also because of the premise. Didn't work, didn't feel right. Ghost Rider is a motorcycle riding dude with a whip, like a flaming whip thing, and he has a flaming skull for a head. I mean, you know, I could see how that would appeal to the sturgist crowd. I mean, I get that there's some culture there or whatever. But what I don't like about it is that he's under some kind of curse from the devil or something, and that's the very thing that makes him special is that you know, because he's got this curse, he's destined to go and ride the lonesome highways in some sort of perition or purgatory and dishing out justice. I I don't know. I didn't get it. I'm sure there are a couple of ghostwriter fans out there right now who are really mad at how much I just screwed up the whole ghostwriter lore. But look, the thing that didn't work for me as a young man when I watched that was I just don't like rooting for a hero whose main feature is that he's cursed. That seems backwards. It doesn't fit with notions of heroism, storytelling, and all of that. And likewise, in Galatians 3, 13, you got a verse that happens in two parts. And the first half of it, if you like Jesus or Bible or redemption, the first half of it, you're like, yay, that's great. I love the Bible, God's super. But the second half of it kind of feels icky because it says Jesus is cursed, or even worse, maybe, became a curse. Here's how it goes Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. Yay! We want that by becoming a curse for us. Uh see, we really like Jesus. It's portrayed with a halo, and all of his judgments are right, and he's God in the flesh, and Christianity is named for him as Christ right there in the name. The Bible is very, very pro-Jesus. I am very, very pro-Jesus, but there's some visceral ghostwriter-like reaction to hearing that phrase. Christ a curse? What? I mean, he's the holy one of God. He's God in the flesh. He's the promised one, he's going to reign on the throne of David forever. It's given to him to judge all the nations. All of his judgments are right. He's sinless. He's Jesus. He's awesome. Not a curse. What are we doing here? That's clearly what Paul is saying in Galatians 3. And I think he's trying to shock us. Now, for the sake of context, here's how we got here. Galatians 3 10, just backing it up a couple verses. All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law. Clearly, no one is justified before God by the law, because, quote, the righteous will live by faith. That's the Habakkuk thing we went and did a few days ago. The law is not based on faith. On the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them. But Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. So this is all happening in the context of whatever role it is that the law plays. What does the law do? One thing it definitely does is reveal the character of God. Another thing it definitely does is point out the high standards, the holiness, the set-apartedness, the rightness of God, and another thing it therefore does is reveal the not holiness of us. It reveals that humanity is woefully sinful and woefully insufficient to save itself through just behavioral control. The law is what paints a picture of the human problem and our need for a savior, our need for Christ. So how do you fix what's going on in the law where there's this big heavy curse that goes along with it? Well, apparently, the way God saw fit to fix it was for Christ to become the curse for us. It goes on a little bit here. For it is written, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree. Okay, well, it feels weird. I don't like my heroes to be cursed, let alone cursed for me. But let's unpack this just a little bit. The idea throughout the whole New Testament seems to be that Jesus took on sin for us. And not just that he took it on for us, but more than once, the New Testament indicates that he became that for us. 2 Corinthians 5.21 is another one of these just ghostwriter-like revulsion kind of passages where it all feels backwards and wrong. Same author, this is Paul writing to Christians in Corinth. He says in 2 Corinthians 5.21, this is a good one to memorize if you haven't, by the way, God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Do you catch all of that transformative language? Jesus becomes sin, the curse, so that we might become the righteousness of God. These are transformations at the level of the essence. This isn't some legal paperwork clerical stuff like, oh, you know, we stamp this, we notarize it properly, and now this thing becomes that thing, and this thing becomes that thing. This seems to go even beyond legal standing and all the way down to the essence. The true being of the thing is that Christ didn't just take on the penalty for sin. That language is in here too. He didn't just take a bullet for us like a hero diving in front of somebody he loves at the last minute in slow motion, yelling, Noo, which is always what they yell when they do that. Instead, he kind of became the bullet. I don't know, am I understanding the metaphor properly? What I'm saying is this is stronger language in Galatians three and second Corinthians five than what you often hear repeated in church, because these are two very shocking passages. He became the curse. He became sin. Why? So that we might become the righteousness of God. What's going on here? Well, but the curse isn't going away. The curse is real. I mean, the curse is natural, if you will. It's logical, if you will. The curse is you got two parties in the game here, two parties in the relationship. One of them is perfect. Whew, those are tough standards to live up to. It's God. He existed before existence as we know it. He made existence out of straight up nothing. He's very good at everything. He's unlimited by anything. He never had to learn anything because he always knew everything. Time can't stop him or slow him down. He knows not only everything that ever was, is, and will be, but he knows everything that might have been, could be now, and might be later. Infinite processing power, never wrong in any of his judgments, no sin. God is perfect, capital P perfect. And yet he's a relational God, existing in three persons since before time was even a thing that you could count or measure. It's part of his necessary perfection. Because if you could imagine a God just like the God who's in the Bible, but he's just one guy and he was alone forever and ever and ever and couldn't do any of the things that are expressions of fullness that can only happen in relationship. Well then I could just come along and be like, I thought of a better God. Thought of a better God. I thought of one that is all the things that your God is, but also has relationships and has eternally had relationships and is dependent on nothing created or imperfect for those relationships to exist. Logic dictates that God must be inherently a God that is within relationship with Himself. The Trinity is kind of a goofy mind-bender when you first encounter it, when you're getting to be around the Bible and Christianity a little bit. But the more you think about it, the more you go, huh, not only do I see it in the text, but dang, if that doesn't make a lot of sense. But we're talking about the curse. We're talking about the conundrum, and I'm making the case that it's just inherent. It's just built into the fabric of the deal. You got a God who's like that, unlimited in every way, totally perfect. Then you got people. You've met some of those. They're great. And also, you know, there can be issues from time to time. They make mistakes, and even if they don't make mistakes, they still get old and their bodies still break down and they still die. They're very finite. We're very finite. They make mistakes. We make mistakes. Sometimes they're downright nasty. Sometimes we're downright nasty. The point is the very proposition of a right relationship between these two parties, a right standing before God on the part of fallen, broken humanity is a pretty ambitious thing. There's a curse. There's a built-in problem. And the problem is one of these two parties is perfect and the other is the farthest thing from perfect. But really, perfect and imperfect, it doesn't even matter how imperfect you're talking about. This is a one and a zero thing, logically. You're either perfect or you're not. One not perfect is about the same amount of imperfect in a zero sum equation like this as a billion imperfect. It's one or zero, one or a zero. God is the one, we're the zero. God is perfect, we're imperfect. That is a real conundrum. The consequences of that divide the consequences of human sin and failure, not just morally, but logically. There's a curse baked right into it. So who's gonna fix the curse? Like maybe if people just worked really hard and they were like, let's get together and just build an anti-curse tower. It's gonna be the biggest tower that anybody's ever thought of. We're gonna bring in the best engineers and we're gonna build the tallest anti-curse tower ever. It's gonna be the pinnacle of human effort and achievement and morality and discipline and philosophy and art and logic and design and studying the inherent mathematical language of the universe. It's gonna be so tall and so good that we are gonna uncurse the curse and bridge the gap to God. Well, it's been tried, but doesn't get it done. There's no amount of human effort, even if you eliminated everything that divides us, even if we all could think each other's thoughts and speak each other's words and understand each other perfectly, can't do it. The divide between the one and the zero is too big. So big as to even rightly be described logically before you even get into morally as a curse. So we've explored the idea of the curse being solved on the human side of it. That's not promising. That's not gonna work out. So if the curse is to be solved, it's gonna have to be solved on the God side of it. Well, what does that look like? I mean, can you kill enough sheep in the sacrificial system to make up for that gap? What about like 10,000 rams? Would that maybe be enough sacrifices? Would that get it done? What about like my firstborn? Would that get it done? What if I brought that? No, there's no amount of regret or sacrifice or religious activity or gestures that can bridge this simple one-zero gap. This simple logical, rational one, zero, zero sum game curse, it isn't bridgeable by anybody or anything other than the miraculous work, the supernatural work of God who's bound by nothing. He's not even bound by that gap. He can fix that. He can address that, but it's going to be all about him because of the two parties involved in this equation, the God side and the people side, he's the only one who's in a position to have the power or the character to really efficaciously do something about the curse, about the problem. So when we really step back and think about it, the ghostwriter vibe, even though it doesn't feel good, it actually kind of makes logical sense. If somebody's gonna eat this curse, it's gonna have to be God. If somebody's gonna overcome the logical divide between a one and a zero, perfect and imperfect, it's gonna have to be God. If somebody's gonna write the check to solve this problem, well, the entirety of the human account just doesn't have enough to draw on. It's gonna have to be God. And Paul leans hard into that language under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in 2 Corinthians 5 21, when he says things like, God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And Paul's leaning into that same idea real hard, no matter how much it might make our stomach churn or feel weird and backwards, when he says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it's written, curse is everyone who's hung on a tree. Well, that's some food for thought. And this whole conversation has done nothing to make me like Ghostwriter more, but it has done something to help this uncomfortable phraseology go down a little bit better. More on this stuff next time around. I'm Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour card. Let's do this game so much.