No Longer That, Now This
No Longer That, Now This by Rev. L. John Gable
June 19, 2016
When was the last time you heard someone say, “What we really need is a few more laws?” Never, right? Yet we are a people who are continually adding new laws to the books in order, somehow, to try to regulate other’s behavior. Note I said, “other’s”, we rarely think we need to take measures to regulate our own.
When I was ordained, now 34 years ago, the Book of Order, the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church, was this thick, and then over the years, through the actions of the General Assembly, which happens to be meeting right now in Portland, it got to be this thick. (For those who can’t see my hands or are listening on the radio or a podcast, my fingers are getting wider apart.) It got to the point several years ago that the collective wisdom of our denomination that all these rules and regulations was getting ridiculous, that we should give individuals and churches more freedom to act according to their own wisdom and dictates, so they revamped the whole system and made the Book of Order much smaller and trim-lined. But you’ll never guess what happened in the succeeding years? Yes, you will. More and more rules and regulations have been added, and likely more will be added at this General Assembly, until now it is almost as thick as it was before.
And that’s all in the way the Church does business not to mention the US legal system or the tax code.
Admittedly we seem to come by it naturally. Originally God had only one or two commandments: “Don’t eat from that tree- or that one.” After the Fall, those guidelines expanded five-fold to the 10 Commandments and then, over time, to consist of 613 separate laws in the Old Testament, but that hardly seemed sufficient to corral human behavior so the legal code expanded to include tens of thousands of rules and regulations which seemingly only the Scribes and Pharisees were able to keep straight and try to follow, or at least try to get other people to follow. Recall, the Scribes and Pharisees were the only ones Jesus ever really seemed to get angry with. It may have had something to do with this issue of their dependence upon the Law.
Jesus tried to redefine the legal code by saying, “It all boils down to these two: Love God and love your neighbor, all the rest is just commentary.” But even that didn’t seem to last for long.
So, why all the rules and regulations? Organizations, governments, churches, families all seem to create rules and regulations, particularly in times of nervousness and anxiety or when parties don’t agree with or trust one another. When people are anxious about the way other people are behaving, or could possibly behave, we make up new rules and regulations to try to control what we think is flying out of control, but that doesn’t ever really seem to work, does it? Paradoxically, adding more rules doesn’t seem to regulate right behavior.
This is kind of what Paul was getting at when he wrote this letter to the Galatians. As we’ve seen during these past several weeks, Paul knew these people he was writing to very well. He was their first pastor, the one who had first introduced them to the Gospel of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. But Paul had a missionary’s heart, so once a church was founded and believers gathered, he moved on to new communities to tell still others about Jesus. Yet as we’ve read, after Paul left the churches in Galatia other teachers came in and began teaching a gospel that was different than the one Paul had preached.
This so called “other gospel” was being taught by a group of people known as Judaizers and their message was simply this. They taught that one must become a Jew before they could become a Christian, which meant that any new convert must not only believe in Jesus as Savior and Lord, but must also practice all the rules and regulations of the Jewish tradition, including the numerous dietary laws and even more controversially, the law of circumcision. To their way of thinking: this was the way the people of God had always done it; a right relationship with God was based on obedience to all the rules and regulations of the Torah, the Law, not just the 10 or the 613, but all of them. So it is little wonder that there was some pushback when this fellow named Paul came along and said, “I have had a revelation from God. The law is no longer necessary. All one has to do to be made right with God (justified, saved) is believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Period. We are saved by grace through faith, alone. The law no longer holds sway over those who put their trust in Christ.”
That all sounds good and well, if it is true, and it is; but what then do we do with 2000 years of Law-keeping? And what is the function or the purpose of the Law for followers of Jesus? Surely if there were given by God we can’t just abandon or totally disregard them. Remember Jesus, Himself a Jew, said, “I have come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.” And every time someone asked Him what they should do with the Law He said, “Obey it.” So clearly the Law still has some purpose for us as Christian believers, but what is it?
In this section of Galatians we read this morning Paul uses the analogy that the Law was our disciplinarian, other translations may say tutor, guardian, custodian, school master. The Law was intended to keep us in line, to contain or restrain us from sin, until the time of Christ. This is really how the Law was perceived until about the time of the Reformation. The Law had two primary functions: to restrain our behavior and to convict us of sin. It wasn’t until John Calvin came along and introduced a third use that the Law was seen to have any positive effect on us at all – as a guide for Christian living. Prior to that the law served only to make us aware of our sin and then to make us feel guilty when we couldn’t live up to it. It was such a harsh taskmaster and disciplinarian that Paul is quick to point out that no one could fully obey it, so he rightly says, “no law is able to make us right with God.”
So, in part, what the Law does is it makes us ready and dependent on a rescuer, a redeemer, a savior who will set us free from the demands of the Law. So we read, “Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith” and all who put their faith in Jesus are entitled to become Children of God. Don’t miss how radical that statement is which Paul is making. Up to this point someone was considered a child of God, part of the family of God, the people of God, by their birthright, their bloodline, by their obedience to the law, but no longer. Paul is bold to say, from now on “there is neither Jew or Greek, there is neither slave or free, there is neither male or female; but all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Suddenly the closed circle of those who belonged to the people of God by obedience to the Law was blown wide open to include all who put their trust in Christ. That is radical, then and now. Our relationship with God is based not on obedience to the Law or rules or regulations, but on faith in Jesus Christ. That is Paul’s first point and it is very Good News!
But then he uses a second analogy to further drive home his point that we are made right with God, not by the Law, but by faith, when he says, “My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father.” We get that, a child may be in line to receive a great family inheritance but it doesn’t come to them until they are of age; until that time they are under someone else’s guardianship. The inheritance is promised to them, but not yet. That is how Paul viewed the function of the Law. It was necessary for a time to serve as our guardian, our trustee, until the time of Christ when the shackles of the Law were removed and the promises of God were fulfilled.
But listeners to Paul’s argument, then and now, could push back and say, “Yes, but there still have to be laws in order to protect people from others and from themselves. Without any laws all we would have is anarchy!” Perhaps, unless we were able to understand our relationships and responsibilities to one another and to God in a new way, governed not by laws but by love.
I recently finished reading a biography on Robert E. Lee which picked up his story at Appomattox and followed his life after the war. I had not known that he was made President of Washington College (later to be renamed Washington and Lee) in Lynchburg despite the fact that he had previously had no academic experience. It offered him a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate his leadership abilities beyond the confines of military life.
At one point young men on campus were causing some mischief, quite minor by today’s standards I’m sure, but of such significance that the faculty and trustees came to Lee requesting that he impose some rules to govern their behavior. Lee basically refused, instead he issued a campus wide memo which said, in effect, “I expect you gentlemen to act like the civilized gentlemen you are.” And that proved to be sufficient.
I will confess that I am inclined to agree with that kind of discipline. I do not believe we need more rules and regulations, in fact, I believe less is more and fewer would serve us better, if in fact we would each take individual responsibility to “act like the civilized people we are.”
The Judaizers were trying to add more rules and regulations and Paul fewer which are actually followed. Our relationship with God and with one another in the community of faith is based not on our ability to live up to all the rules and regulations, much less on our insistence that others do so, but on our faith in Jesus Christ and Him alone as Savior and Lord, and, friends, that cannot be legislated. Love God and love your neighbor really is sufficient, all the rest really is just commentary.
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians we read, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right…and fathers/parents, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” We get that. That is good, sound teaching for parents and children, but what if someone tried to legislate that? Imagine if someone said, “Parents aren’t loving enough to their children and children aren’t obedient enough to their parents, there ought to be a law that from now on all parents and children must love one another.” It is a lovely idea, isn’t it? No more abandonment, abuse, neglect. Families would be happier, marriages would be stronger, communities would be safer, the world would be a better place. So what’s wrong with this idea? Only this: it is completely untenable. Such a law could never be enforced. There are plenty of laws that state that parents must care for and protect and provide for their children, but love cannot be mandated, regulated, legalized. By definition love must be freely given and received. It is a value of the heart that finds expression in our words and actions.
So it is in our relationship with God. God’s love for us and ours for God cannot be mandated, nor can it be measured and quantified by rules and regulations alone. It is a relationship, a response of the heart, an act of trust and faith. This is what God has done for us and shown us in Jesus Christ. Our relationship with God is no longer based on the Law, but on love. So Paul closes this section of his letter by writing, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem (set free) those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. (This is, we are children of God by love, not by law!) And because we are children God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father! (a term of endearment, like any child crying, Daddy! Papa!) So you are no longer a slave under the burden of the law, but a child, and if a child, then an heir of all of the promises of God.”
So, friends, hear and believe this Good News: You are a beloved child of God, not by Law, but by love. Amen.