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That's amazing. Okay, so we're looking at Galatians this evening, and it's my favorite Pauline letter. Um, and it's such a passionate, powerful statement. And I hope that I can communicate some of the passion behind this letter. I've given you some notes, and those notes um have got right at the top, at the beginning, something of the context. So rather than me go all the way through this happened and that happened and that happened and that happened, I've written it down for you. I just want to make one or two points here. That Paul writes Galatians after his great argument with the apostle Peter. When he saw that Peter was no longer eating with the Gentiles, and he writes it before the great apostolic conference that happens in Jerusalem in Acts 15, when they have to deal with the whole question of how to assimilate Gentiles into the church. And this letter was written to a group of churches that Paul founded. Um, it's in South Turkey, we think, these churches, in the Roman province of Galatia. And it's a passionate letter, it's probably the first completed part of the New Testament, to which you say, Well, didn't the Gospels exist? Well, the Gospels existed in various forms and bits and pieces, and Paul obviously knew uh those bits and pieces. They hadn't necessarily all been put together as the gospels, but this is the first completed bit of the New Testament that we have in its finished form. And this is a younger Paul. You know, he's in his late 30s, probably, and he's writing to a group of Christians under pressure, and the church is under pressure, and it's the pressure of idolatry. I mean, generally in the Roman Empire, the culture was idolatrous, and in Paul's world, there was no escape from idolatry. I mean, from the small portable household gods that you had right the way through to the massive temples, including the temples to Caesar and the regular festivals and the processions and sacrifices, and everyone was supposed to be joining in. And if you didn't join in those festivals, people looked at you very much in the same way that you would be looked at if you broke the regulations in COVID, except it was much worse because you probably might lose your life because of it. But the Jews were exempt, and therefore Christians could to some extent shelter under the normal Jewish exemptions, but with increasing numbers of non-Jews coming to faith, this was becoming increasingly difficult, and the authorities couldn't afford to take a relaxed view of this new group who bore none of the marks of the Jewish people. They weren't circumcised, they didn't conform to Sabbath keeping, they didn't keep the Jewish festivals, they didn't have the Kosher diet or even allegiance to the Jerusalem temple. And they weren't sacrificing to Caesar. See, see, it's an issue, isn't that? And the people caught in the middle were the Jesus-following Jews in Galatia. The ethnic Jews who had heard the gospel of freedom from the law, that you didn't have to keep the Old Testament law, that's what Paul taught. But they felt under pressure to insist on new Gentile believers keeping the Old Testament law, the Torah. And added to this were the Jewish believers in Jerusalem, led by Jesus' probably half-brother James, who were themselves under pressure from the majority of Jews in Jerusalem to conform. And they had to show they were genuine, legal, law-observant Jews. But if news got out that in the wider church, in the diaspora, that there were new converts who were hiding under this kind of umbrella of Judaism, but who weren't keeping the festivals, that could be catastrophic from them for them, not only from the imperial authorities, but from the Jewish authorities. And that's probably the motivation behind the visit to Antioch of certain men who have come from James. That's what it says in chapter 2, verse 12. Certain men came from James from the Jerusalem church to put to put pressure on these people, these new churches, these lovely new churches that were formed by the Apostle Paul in Galatia. So this letter has been written to attack a false gospel, a fake gospel. The fake gospel doesn't deny that Jesus was the Messiah, the anointed one of Israel, but it taught that you needed the Torah. You needed the 613 or 611, depending on which rabbis you kind of followed, rules and regulations in order to be to become part of the covenant people of God. Above all, you needed to be circumcised. And there's lots about circumcision tonight. I hope you're not too screamish, but there we are, gentlemen, but there we are. Um they would have taught that Paul was an unorthodox and false teacher, and the central issue was the need for circumcision, which was done to you as a baby boy on the eighth day, and was the obvious point of entry into the people of God. You can't be part of the covenant people of God. You cannot be part of God's wide church, his family, unless you were circumcised. That's what they were teaching, and it's a big issue for all the out the reasons I've outlined. So, what's Paul's answer? Well, before we even begin to investigate this, and I can only give you a kind of outline tonight, it's Paul at his rawest. He is deeply perplexed, he's deeply disturbed at what's happening. He's writing at white heat, he's very agitated. You can tell this because at the beginning he leaves out the normal thanksgiving at the beginning. You know, the the Greek custom is a kind of salutation. It says, Hi, I'm Paul. I'm giving thanks to God for you, and it's all wonderful. Thank you, it's amazing, you're amazing people. And he doesn't do that. And there are three letters he doesn't do it in. One of them is Ephesus, Ephesians, because actually the word Ephesus isn't there in the original manuscript, so it's probably a circular letter. So he's not specifically writing to Ephesus. Actually, it's not there, Ephesus, it's not actually there in the original texts that we have, but rather interestingly. He doesn't do it in 1 Timothy because there's a problem there as well, a doctrinal problem. He goes straight in. And here he starts, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. And Paul's amazement is not at their progress in the gospel, but in the quickness of their seduction by a false gospel, which is a perversion, it's a distortion, and the Greek word means to pervert into something of opposite character. And that's why he spends so long. One-fifth of this letter is talking about himself. And he's not being appallingly self-referential. He's saying, Hey, you Galatians, you need to hear what I have to say. Here are my apostolic credentials, so that you know I have the right gospel. The one you heard from me was correct, because I got it straight from Jesus. I didn't get it second hand. That's what he says in the first two chapters. Okay, it was checked out with various leaders and various meetings in Jerusalem. But it all comes from that moment when I met Christ on the Damascus Road. If you know the story in um Acts 9. Uh, when, if you don't know it, uh basically, yeah. Well, I hope you all know it. I mean, basically, Paul encounters Christ, it's a flash and wee, bang, crash, and he falls on falls off his horse and gets blind, and then he has to disappear for three days, and then a chap called Ananias comes along and prophesies over him, and he gets his sight back. It's it's an astonishing story. That is the revelation of Jesus Christ, and the word is apocalypse, and it means the revelation of something that was previously hidden. Luke 9 tells us suddenly a light from heaven shone round about him, and falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And the the revelation of the living Christ that he had was both his conversion and his calling. They happened at the same time, they were part of the same deal. His apprehension by Christ, the nature of his ministry, his conversion to Christ, and what he actually did in ministry are part of that same revelation of Christ. And actually, Ananias, uh, who's sent by God to minister to him, um, carries a prophetic word from God to him. And he it says in Acts, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name to the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. And the inclusion of the Gentiles, and the implications of that inclusion are right from the start embodied in Paul's experience of Christ. And he always understood his ministry in terms of the Gentiles being included in the people of God. Chapter 1, verse 15 of Galatians, he talks about being set apart from my mother's womb before I was born, and the one who called me by his grace. This is verse 15 of chapter 1, if you've got Bibles, was pleased to reveal his son in me in order that I may preach him among the Gentiles. And you know, that's a lovely hyperlink right back to Isaiah chapter 49, uh, where the prophetic calling of the servants of the Lord is there. And it says this in Isaiah 49. Now the Lord says, He who formed me from the womb to be his servant, right? It's the same language, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him. I will make you a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. And this was always God's intention that there would be one Israel, one covenant people of God, in which both Jew and Gentile, in fact, all the nations of the earth would participate, as promised to Abraham, before the law was given, before circumcision was introduced through the Torah. It goes back to Abraham, not to Moses. And Galatians 3:8 says, and the scripture foreseeing that God would justify, that is, make right with God, make declare righteous with God, the Gentiles by faith preached the gospel before him to Abraham, saying, In you shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. And in Galatians, Paul simply wants the churches to understand where they fit into the messianic story deriving from Abraham. So why is Abraham so important in Galatians? He's a big player in Galatians. He turns up a lot, because God has only ever had one family, the Abrahamic community of faith. And we may take that for granted, but actually at that time that was the issue, and I think it's just to an extent, as I will try and bring out as we get come to the end of uh the end of the talk. The inheritance is no longer a parcel of land, that's now rather irrelevant, it's the whole world. That's the inheritance, that's the inheritance of Abraham. And actually, if you'll excuse me reading Romans back into Galatians, which is something my uh theology tutors would tell me off for, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Romans 4, 13 sums it up. For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he will be heirs of the world, right? Not just a parcel of land, it's a whole world, did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. And what you have to remember is this promise comes before the Torah is given. Furthermore, this promise is completely and totally fulfilled in Christ, therefore we share in it. That's what all the stuff about seed and seeds is in uh chapter three. If you look at chapter three, verse 16. Chapter 3, verse 16 is a good place just to look at this. Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, and to seeds, as referring to many, but to one and to your seed, that is Christ. It sounds like Paul being very pedantic. Uh, he does sometimes give that impression, doesn't he? Um, but the root of seed in the Hebrew is what we call a collective singular. You can take it as plural or singular, so it could be a single descendant of Abraham or many descendants of Abraham. The Hebrew can be interpreted either way, and in Romans 4, 18, Paul uses the same quotation, but in the plural sense of nation. So he takes it the other way. But here he's emphasizing the singular seed because he wants the Galatians to see that there is one seed of Abraham, which is Christ. It is Jesus who is the seed of Abraham, and Christ is the total fulfillment of the promises of God's blessing, of God's rescue project that he initiated with Abraham and through Moses and through the children of Israel. He is the total fulfillment all of that. Therefore, because we are in Christ, and Christos, one of Paul's favorite phrases he uses 140 times in his epistles, we also are seed. Because Christ is seed, and therefore we inherit the promises of God, the promises to Abraham that all the world will be blessed. I think that's marvelous. It's amazing. Therefore, the law of circumcision, which of course is a ceremony of belonging and of separation between Jew and Gentile, is redundant. It stands in the way of the gospel, which is why Paul is so passionate about this. At one point, he says, according to one paraphrase, he's he uses some very rude language. And he says, I wish those people who are telling you to be circumcised will go the whole hog and castrate themselves. He actually says that. That's how strongly he feels about it. Nice lips. Anyway, so there we are. So it's standing in the way of the gospel. Therefore, when we sorry, men, I don't know, um, therefore, when we're talking about this great Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, the foundation of the Protestant reformation of the 16th century, you probably heard of it, Luther and Calvin and those people, we have to understand the context of what he's talking about. It isn't just about my personal salvation, though that is important. Being declared right with God means that you are incorporated into Christ, into the worldwide Abrahamic community of faith. And the context of the first use in scripture of the term justification by faith is Paul's argument with Peter. As documented in chapter two of Galatians, when Peter refuses to eat with the Gentiles, because he's scared of the people coming from James, the circumcision party. And as Peter refuses to eat with the Gentiles because he's breaking the law, he's denying the implications of the saving work of Christ on the cross. And Paul calls him out on it. He calls him out, and then he starts what it is. He starts talking about what it means to be justified by faith. That's the context. He doesn't start with the Torah and make people undergo an unnecessary ceremony and be circumcised in public. It was a very interesting TV program I saw, if I may digress for a minute, which was about a man who wanted uh a same-sex marriage, um, a gay man, and he went, of course, to various Christian denominations and didn't get very far. So he went to the local synagogue and they said, Oh, yes, we'll we'll marry you. Uh, but you've got to become Jewish first. And so what he would have to have done is learn, I think he had to learn about 140 rules. Uh though I know there are 613, but actually, most of them you can't do because you're not a farmer. Yeah, because they had to do with agriculture, a load of other stuff you can't do because there isn't a temple to do them in. So it leaves about 140. So you have to learn those rules. You have to um have a ritual bath and you have to be circumcised in public. Well, a few people present. At that point, he gave up uh because I think probably he was worried about his wedding night, but anyway, there we go. So if you ask me what is justification by faith about, Paul would say to you, Who are you eating with? What community do you belong to? That's I'm sure he'd say that to you. Of course, in Middle Eastern culture, who you eat with is of extreme importance. It means you're connecting with them in a special way, sharing values, sharing life and a degree of commitment. Eating is a form of belonging. Which community do you belong to? Are you part? Really part of God's uh worldwide family of faith, the Abrahamic community of faith. Are you part of that through Christ? Or are you still holding to the D visions and the distinctions that we have had in the past? So the letter, I think, is primarily about who are now the covenant people of God. Yes, it is about individual salvation, it is about the fact that we individually are justified by faith, that's part of it. But the overall thrust, I think, is to do with the fact that we God now has a people, He has a covenant people that involve Jew and Gentile, and there are other distinctions that are got rid of as well, as we will discover. So I think there are kind of like three main strands of thought in this epistle, and I've put them down there for you. And I haven't got time to talk about them up. I can only got time to talk about the second one, which I think is quite important. Um, firstly, this letter has throughout a theme of the new creation. You know, this letter is a bit like listening. Now, I'm a musician, okay? So, and I'm a classical musician, and I love listening to the 19th century symphonist. I love the music of Brahms, for example, and Marla, and those people. And the whole point is if you listen to those people, what they do is they give you themes at the beginning. You then have a development section in which the ideas are interwoven with each other and they're transformed, and you hear that, and then you hear that idea, and then that idea, and they're all kind of weaved together, and then you have a recapitulation at the end of the ideas to show you where you've come from. And this is the way Paul writes this letter. There are it's not a straight line of argument. When you read it, you're like, Oh, he's talking about that. Oh, now he's talking about that, and now he's talking, it's a bit like listening to a piece of symphonic music, and the ideas are interwoven with each other. I think there are three big themes here. One is this the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob has done what he always said he would do, and launched his new creation through Christ, the anointed Messiah of Israel. Right at the very beginning of the epistle, it says he has delivered us out of this present evil age. So out of one age and into another. And at the very end in chapter six, he says, Well, our circumcision and uncircumcision are nothing. What's important is the new creation. So the whole thing is bookended by the stuff about the new creation. Secondly, this means that the law, the Jewish Torah, is fulfilled in Christ, and therefore the demands of the law are superseded. I'm going to investigate that in just a minute. And thirdly, there's an awful law about the Holy Spirit, particularly in the second half of the letter. Let's look at the second one because that's all we have time for tonight, uh, which is about Torah, the Old Testament law. Because there's a new creation which comes into being through Christ's work on the cross, we're rescued from the dark powers of this present evil age, that includes the power of death and every demonic power, every oppression, and very potent for the Galatian epistle, the power of religious legalism, particularly those parts which separate the Jew and Gentile, we're rescued from it. And again, reading Romans back into Galatians, Romans 6, 6, we are now released from the law. Though 613 or 611, depending on which rabbi you go to, uh, rules and regulations that you have, and you have those of them, aren't there? Exodus through uh the Leviticus, Dutch or Honory, they're all there. We are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive. So if the Torah is not needed for salvation because we trace our spiritual ancestry to um uh Abraham, not Moses, what on earth do we do with it? I mean, why is it there? What do we do with the Old Testament law? All that chunky stuff at the beginning, and you do read your Bible in the year and you groan when you you get to you know what I mean, don't you? You get to your deuteronomy laws and the laws about this, and then you're supposed to take your teenage children out if they misbehave and stone them, and you yeah, I mean, there's all kinds. Of extraordinary things in it. Well, if there you read it, um go to the elders first and get their permission. But so so the question is I kid you not, how does what do we do with it? Now, one myth I want to dispel straight away is that Paul is going to say something different from Jesus. I was having a meal the other um month with my uh very, very clever cousin Jolyan, who's a leading theologian in the whole area of peacemaking and just war and pacifism and all that, we were in Edinburgh, and I had with me my friend Tom, who's actually here tonight, sitting over there. Uh, and uh Tom um asked you asked Jolyon a question. And that question, I don't know if you remember it, but I thought it was brilliant. And the question you asked was very simply um, if there's one thing about your um profession, which is that of theology, if there's one thing about your discipline you would change, what what would it be? And Jolian said, uh the distinction people make between Jesus on the one hand and Paul on the other. And it's an insidious thing in theology, it's there. The idea of Jesus was a rabbi, a slightly strange rabbi. He believed in uh had various apocalyptic views, he believed the end of the world was coming and he was something to do with it, and then you got Paul who invented Christianity, and it's not true, that it's absolutely not true, it's not the case. You cannot, if you are going to truly handle scripture properly, make Paul say things that are somehow different from what Christ didn't say. Therefore, if we are thinking about what Paul says about the law, we find it in Christ as well. They don't contradict each other, and Paul is aware of the gospel material. I don't know how he what form he had it in, because the gospels were not completed by the time that he uh was writing this letter, but he was aware of it. He must have been to write the things that he did. So, what do we say? Well, firstly, let's be positive about the law. The Old Testament rules and regulations, the 613 or 611, depending on which rabbi you speak to, all that stuff, are supposed to give life. They were supposed to give life. Listen and you will have life. They were supposed to help shape the community, form the community, bring a community into existence which would show something of the character of God to the world. There's much that's wonderful in the law. I mean, the Sabbath would have broken the power of the accumulation of wealth by making everybody just stop. And that's a powerful liberating thing, particularly if you compare it with what they experienced in Egypt, where they worked the whole time with less and less materials in slave labor. And the Sabbath, amazing. Um, the Jubilee of Leviticus 25, where every seven times seven years you set your slaves free and you uh all debt disappears. It's amazing stuff, and it was incorporated into Jesus' community, which practiced free forgiveness, which would have been a radical thing, and that's the jubilee outworked in the life and ministry of Jesus. Okay, and what about all those sojourners and aliens who were incorporated into Israel? Fourteen times in the book of Deuteronomy, the outsider, the non-Jew, is included in the provisions of the law. Yeah? I mean, Israel was never, never a totally ethnically pure nation. Never. And actually, you know, a lot of the leading people um think Caleb wasn't Jewish, actually. If you look at his ancestry, he was a Hittite. Um Rahib the prostitute, who is regarded as a great woman of faith, included in uh he was she's justified by her works, it says actually. She's justified, she wasn't Jewish. So there were all already in the Old Testament there's something marvelous going on. But the whole thing is, though there's a lot of grace there, and there is some odd stuff actually as well, some rather nasty stuff, which we we could have a discussion about, but uh I won't go into it now. It can't get you declared right with God, it does not justify you. You cannot be justified by it, you cannot be made right with God through observing those 613 or 611, depending on which rabbi you speak to stuff. You can't do it, you know. It it doesn't happen that way. So, what is the relationship between Christ and the law? Firstly, the curse of the law is dealt with, and Galatians 3:10 says this for all who rely on works of the law are under a curse. For it's written, cursed be everybody who does not abide by all things. Right? If you're gonna be circumcised, um, you've got the other 611 rules to deal with as well. That's what it's saying, and do them, but then he tells us in chapter 3, verse 13, Christ redeems us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, and he's quoting Juteron 21, 23, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree, so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised spirit through faith. Now, Paul is very careful with his language here, a little digression. Um, he doesn't say that Christ was cursed by God. The Hebrew could simply mean an affront to God. But significantly for thus, there's something rather interesting here, which I it's rather nerdy, but I really like it. Um forgive my nerdiness just for a minute. You understand that there is a Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. I don't know if you've heard of it, yeah? It was about 200 BC when all the, I think roundabout then, I think, well, when they all when they get when they kind of created this Greek version of the Old Testament. And in the Septuagint, it does say that he is on the tree. He who hangs on a tree is cursed by God. But Paul, when he quotes it, misses out the by God bit. He just says he is a curse. He deliberately misquotes the septuagent because otherwise he would be contradicting his view that Christ was enduring the cross as an act of supreme obedience to his heavenly father. How can you be cursed by the one who you're obeying in that context? It doesn't make any sense. And that in Christ Jesus, in Christ, God was reconciling the whole world to himself himself. No, this is the full curse Christ has taken upon himself, the full implication of not fulfilling the demands of the law. Because Christ's identification, this is an important thing for us to understand, is so complete. He has saturated himself so completely in our human experience, including the implications of not keeping the law, that we can say of him, everything was made his, that sin had made ours, everything in sin except his its sinfulness. The curse has been absorbed by Christ and has been taken away. So that's the first thing. The implications of not keeping the law have been taken by Christ on the cross and they've been dealt with. So that's gone. But the other thing is that Christ has fulfilled the law. Galatians 4:4. When the fullness of time fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son born under the law to redeem those under the law. And of course, in Matthew chapter 6, verse 17, you probably know this, you're probably going to say, Yes. Uh sorry, Matthew 5, verse 17. Matthew 5, 17. Do not think I've come to abolish Torah or the prophets. I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Literally, to fill them up. And Jesus isn't saying, now I'm here. You can tear up the Torah, you can throw it in the bin, you don't need it anymore. And that's actually what one theologian thought we ought to do. There's a guy called Marcion in the second century, uh, who's a heretic actually. I he was a bit misguided. He he threw out the entire Old Testament and he only kept Luke and ten of Paul's epistles. And it was partly in response to his activity, um, nefarious activity, that the church started to get the canon of scripture together. It's partly in response to that. Um, so he kind of believed, Marcion did, that the old there was kind of a naughty god in the old testament and nice god in the new testament, which is what a lot of people still believe. You you realize that poet, the poet William Blake, you know poet William Blake and those feels on ancient times, yeah, all that stuff. That's William Blake. William Blake believed that. He believed actually the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were two completely different things. And if you look at his poetry carefully, you'll find he said, Oh, this great Christian poet William Blake. He was he was complete nutter, really. Complete nutter. I mean, theologically, he was completely round the bend. He wrote some lovely poetry. Little lamb who made me tiger tiger in the night and all that stuff. But no, he was he was he was completely loopy, and he had visions of angels around his house. I do I do wonder if they were really angels. Perhaps they were the other lot, I don't know. Um sorry, I'm I if you're an English student, I'm I'm I do apologize. Um, rather, Jesus says, I'm here to fill the whole thing up to full measure, to bring out its full meaning, to bring out what God wanted all the time. And this is what Paul means when he says in Romans 10, verse 4, for Christ is the end of the law, the completion of the law for righteousness. And it's a kind of double meaning. He Jesus sums up the law and he goes beyond it, he transcends it. And that's why he says in the Sermon on the Mount, you've heard it said, but I say to you. And we don't have to look at this time in detail, but I would suggest to you that his actions and his teaching about on and his teaching about the Sabbath, his teaching about murder isn't just enough not to kill someone. I mean, it's quite easy not to kill someone, really, but what's going on in your heart, yeah, and all the stuff about forgiveness from Leviticus 25:5 and the Jubilee and the release of forgiveness, Jesus not only fulfills the law, but goes beyond it to the condition of our hearts. And this is what God wanted the whole time. You remember that bit in uh Jeremiah 31, 33. Uh, looking ahead to the new covenant, I will write my law in their hearts. That's what God wants. And I will be their people, and they shall be my people, and no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest. The law is supposed to be written on our hearts. And how does that happen? By the Holy Spirit. And Paul, in the second half of the epistle, spends a lot of time talking about the Holy Spirit. He emphasizes it a lot in the second half. And if you are uh walking in the spirit, you will bring forth the fruit of the spirit: love, peace, joy, patience, gentleness, self-control against these things, there's no law. All that stuff will happen. So you are then asking the question, or you should be asking the question, why the law? And you'll be delighted to discover that Paul asks the same question in Galatians. So read 3.19. Now, the most exciting bit is at the end, and I've got to move quickly here to get to the end. Um, but the bit I really like is the last bit of page. Uh, we'll get there. But a couple of things first. Um, 319. Why the law? It was added because of transgressions until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made. That's Jesus, of course. A temporary fixture. It's a temporary fixture until Jesus comes. Jump ahead to verse 23. Now, before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then the law was our pedagogos. If you've got the word teacher, cross it out. It's a slave attendant. I'll tell you what they did in a minute. Until Christ came, in order that we might be justified or declared right with God by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a pedagogos, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is this is theological fireworks, right? This is dynamite. Absolute dynamite. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female and black and white. Shall we extend it? Perhaps not completely tonight, so I'll be accused of being a heretic. But for you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring heirs according to promise. So the first thing is very simply that the law is limited in scope, it's limited in function, it's limited in outcomes. But it was necessary. And there's a kind of paradoxical double role for the law, because on the one hand, it gives boundaries and was there to protect the widow, there to protect the orphan, and there to protect the sojourner and to protect the um illegal alien. But on the other hand, Paul says, again, I'm reading Romans back into Galatians, for while we were living in the flesh, right, our old life, our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members. And the law gives opportunity for sin. If you go around thinking to yourself, I must not eat naughty cakes, you will eat a naughty cake. Because the idea has got into your soul, into your mind, into your heart, you have a high probability of doing it. So it has a double role. Now, what's the antidote? The antidote is chapter 5, verse 18. If you are led by the spirit, you are not under the law. And if you're leaning into the spirit, if the spirit is the source of your life, then you will produce the fruit of the spirit. Yes, there's an act of will. Yes, there's a choice, yes, there's discipline, but it's not the discipline of law, it's the reliance on God's Spirit, and it comes from a different source. Now, what's the end result of all this? And we're and we're getting to the end. Right. In order to understand the significance of what Paul is saying here, and it is theological dynamite, actually, we have to understand that he is very big on being in Christ. The big concept he has, and he says it 140 times in his epistles, is that we are in Christos, we are in Christ, that our identity is in our incorporation into Christ. Therefore, what he is, we can also share in. And that happens through baptism. Baptism, and he talks about it here, doesn't he? Right? In Galatians, those of you who are baptized into Christ, something happens to us when we are baptized. It does, it's not an empty ceremony, though a lot of people treat it as such. And there is a relationship between baptism and circumcision. And if you go forward another 12 years to when Paul writes Colossians, in Colossians 2, verse 11, he says this in him you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism in which you were also raised with him from the dead. And actually, that passage sums up that bit of Colossians, sort of sums up the whole of the argument of the book of Galatians. Actually, circumcision is still part of the gospel, but thank goodness it's a spiritual circumcision. You can imagine, can't you, a street evangelist in broad mead. Come to Christ, your sins forgiven. We can arrange your circumcision. I mean, thank goodness that isn't gonna happen. Baptism is a powerful sacrament, it is not the equivalent of circumcision, like some kind of rite. It is not a rite of passage. And it's treated as a rite of passage by many people who want some kind of welcome to the world ceremony for the little sweet little kids. It's there, it's not there to encase people into a kind of bourgeois lifestyle. It's there to create an alternative society, it's there to create a radical community that is different from the standards of the world round about it. It's it's it's it's a political thing, which is why in the past in Europe, people who were baptized as adults were persecuted and murdered and burned at the stake, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them in the 16th century, particularly in Austria and in Switzerland, because it was a political threat, because they are saying we belong to Christ and we're different. And the whole point of baptism is that it's just so powerful, and yet bits of the church, including the bit of the church I've been in for the last as a late pastoral minister for the last few years, have I treated it as a rite of passage, and it ain't, my friends. It's dynamic and it's dying. If you haven't been baptized, get baptized. So now we get to the theological theological right. I've got to say this bit. What does it mean to be part of this new community, this uh community of Abraham, this faith, this new humanity, which is Christ in all his fullness? Right, there's neither Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female, you're all one in Christ Jesus. Now we already know that the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile is shattered in Christ. But you can imagine Paul dictating to his scribe, and incidentally, the the the scribes in those days were probably slaves, so it's probably a uh enslaved scribe he's using, and suddenly seeing it. Yeah, God, it's not just not just race, it's class as well. It's the social class divisions of the culture we live in are now smashed. The slaves and and the free and while we're about it, why not men and women? You can imagine him, but Paul, you're not talking about men and women. You're talking about um you're you're you're talking about Jew and Gentile, it's not part of your argument. Do you see how he it's he's realizing this? He's getting excited. Yes, yes, yes. What would he add today? I wonder, I'm not going to speculate in public. But I think he would write it differently today, probably had a few other things. He definitely had black and white, I'm sure of that. Right. The early church had slaves in leadership. I don't know if you were aware of that. The Roman culture was built on slavery, and enslaved persons were subject to violence and coercion at every level. They lacked bodily autonomy, they couldn't refuse their enslavers anything. But in the church, they enjoyed equal status. I mean, read Paul's letter to Philemon. He sends Onisimus back to Philemon, no longer as a slave, but better than a slave as a beloved brother. And he was probably the Onisimus who was bishop of Ephesus half a century later. We know from Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the early church fathers, writes a letter to the Ephesians. It's rather good, some of this early church uh father stuff. Ephesians 1, 3 from Ignatius, and he talks about him. He's a bishop. Calixtus, as an early bishop of Rome in the third century, was certainly a former slave. We know that. And similarly, of course, women had free ministry in the church for a time at least before it got institutionalized. They claim they they they they claimed they prayed in public, they prophesied Junior, not Junius, but Junior, because the Catholic Church changed it to Junius because they were embarrassed about the fact that she's called an apostle. Junior is noted among the apostles in the end of the book of Romans. Phoebe is a deacon. It's a fallacy to suggest that Paul is anti-sing on this before, I'm sure, so I'm not going to go into it. But Paul is never never anti-woman in that way. Right. So what are the I I'm now stopping and I'm going to just kind of pull it together, and I'm going to say, because you've all got to go and watch a game of football. Um, but I'm not interested at all. What are the lessons for us today? Well, firstly, you do meet people who live under the law. You know, you met them, the people who actually create their own law and live under it in order to make themselves acceptable to God. And actually, you know, I've worked in churches uh, you know, in the past, particularly in my particular uh denomination I just moved from, are you just full of people who've done the flower roses, you know, the flower roses for years and they've done that for years and that for years, and I think that that actually genuinely think they're justified by God because of all the all the things they've done, and and it's a kind of religious legalism, and I think it's still an issue. Secondly, um, Galatians teaches, and this is perhaps a really important point, Galatians teaches us a way of reading scripture, which is that the only way you could read it as a Christian is to see everything fulfilled in the person of Christ. The whole point of the Old Testament is that everything in, and when I say everything, I mean all of it is fulfilled in Christ. And the biblical hermeneutic, a hermeneutic, you know what that is, it's the the way we we read and interpret something. The biblical hermeneutic we use as Christians is that everything has to go through the prism of the gospels. That's how we understand it. So when a little bit controversial, when Pete Hesgeth, the US Defense Secretary, says God is a God of war, well, what's he doing? Well, he's using the same hermeneutic that the people who wanted everyone to be circumcised was using. It happens in the Old Testament, is it you do it now? And you could say to him, Well, Pete, if you want to go and bash other nations up and use that as you know, that text to help, why don't you just follow everything you have to do in the Old Testament if you wage war? And do you know, I bet you wouldn't do it because the first thing that Joshua did, yeah, the first thing Joshua does in Joshua, you know what I'm gonna say, don't you? Before they go to Jericho, he gets they get flint knives and they circumcise the entire uh Jewish uh male population. What I think to do just before you're about to go and uh fight a battle, you disable everybody, so Pete, you know. We are I I really ought to shut up because I've got