“But Now”
Back in 1656 there was an English Puritan pastor named Richard Baxter who wrote a book for pastors called The Reformed Pastor.
And by the word “reformed” he didn’t mainly mean Calvinistic, but he meant to be born-again. By “reformed” he really meant “revived.” Because at that time in the 17th century it was not a given that pastors were even truly Christian. And so Baxter, who was burdened for the church in his country, he wrote this book urging pastors to first truly believe the gospel — be changed by the gospel yourself — and then serve others from that.
And in one section of the book he says something that has really stuck with me — [and I feel like I’ve said this before at some point, so maybe you’re hearing this again, but it helps me, so bear with me] — but Baxter, speaking of pastors, says: “He preacheth not heartily to his people, that prayeth not earnestly for them.”
In other words, if a pastor wants to preach genuinely, effectively, to his church, then he should pray earnestly for them. And I think this actually points to something much more central when it comes to the preaching of a local church, and I wanna tell you. Now this is an unusual way to start a sermon, but I want you to know the purpose for why we do this.
Every Sunday at this moment, when it comes to the preaching,
we’re not doing this just because we think “this is what you do”;
we’re not just going through the motions;
we’re not trying to talk at you,
but really, we, as your pastors, are preaching for you — which means, we open the Word of God and we want to tell you what God has to say in Christ by his Spirit!
And what he has to say to you, church, essentially, is that he loves you.
Through your faith in Jesus — not on the basis of your performance, but only because of the atoning death of Jesus in your place — God has fixed his love on you and that will never change. The only thing that can change is how much you come to understand his love, and so we preach for that.
Our preaching is for your assurance. It’s so that you would “have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth — so that you and me and us!) — it’s so that we would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18–19).
Because I’m convinced that if we are assured of God’s love, then we experience personal renewal that then flows into relational renewal. Hey, do you need help in your marriage? It starts here [pointing to heart].
So personal renewal leads into relational renewal, which then leads to church renewal. And church renewal as it multiplies leads into city renewal — and that’s the vision! We’re just trying to change a couple cities here. That’s why we’re called Cities Church. We want to saturate the Twin Cities with the gospel of Jesus Christ that has transformed US … and our relationships … and our church for our joy and the glory of God. We preach for that. That’s what we’re doing here.
And I say all this now because today’s passage aims right at the heart of this, and you’re gonna see it when when get there, Galatians Chapter 3, verses 15–29. Let’s organize the sermon this way. There are just two parts:
Part One is THE LAW (verses 15–24);
Part Two is THE PROMISE (verses 25–29).
So Law and Promise, and then some additional things to say in both of these, and before we get started, let’s pray again for God’s blessing.
Father in heaven, by your grace, we ask that you send your Holy Spirit now to accomplish your will, in Jesus’s name, amen.
Part One: The Law (verses 15–24)
And what we read in these verses is connected back to all that we’ve seen so far.
Remember that Paul is writing this letter to address a problem in the Galatian church. A false teaching had slipped into the church and it was causing confusion about the gospel. The false teaching said that in order to be saved (or justified), “faith in Jesus was not enough, but you also have to keep Jewish law.” And so Paul is writing to demolish that idea.
He does his demolition work first by telling a personal story of when he confronted Peter (2:1–21). He explains that we are justified by faith in Jesus alone — that faith in Jesus is both necessary and sufficient for salvation — and to suggest anything else makes the death of Jesus pointless.
Then Paul reminds the Galatian Christians of their own origin story — he tells them that their very existence is the because of God, not their works. And to illustrate the point, Paul brings in Abraham.
Now we spent several weeks on Abraham back when we preached through Genesis. Remember Abraham started as “Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans.” Abraham was once a lost pagan idolator in the middle of nowhere, but God came to him by absolute grace and promised to bless him and his descendants. And Abraham believed God.
Abraham had faith in God and he was justified through his faith in God — and we are too when we have faith in God! — which is a completely different way of life than relying on the law. If you rely on the law for your justification you’re under a curse. But see, Jesus died to redeem us from that curse. Jesus took the curse for us so that through faith in him we receive the blessing of Abraham — even if we’re coming from a place as lost and pagan and idolatrous as Abraham once was.
Paul says all of this to us in Chapter 2, verse 1 to Chapter 3, verse 14. He says all of this to demolish the false teaching. And he does. By this point in the letter nothing is left standing that thinks obedience to the law is needed for justification. Paul had made his point. And he still has more to say, and for this next part, he goes next level.
In our passage Paul steps back and he compares the two biggest covenants in the Old Testament, the Abrahamic covenant and the Mosaic covenant.
[Y’all ready to see this? Now look, I gotta set it up for a minute. First we need to have an idea about what a covenant is.]
What Are Covenants in the Bible?
A covenant is simply an agreement between two parties with mutual obligations. And when it comes to the relationship between God and humans, this idea of covenant is central. You could say the whole Bible is a series of different covenants that God makes with humans. The idea of covenant is another way to talk about how God relates to us.
And God makes several covenants in the Old Testament, and they’re all important, but there are two really big covenants. The first is the covenant God made with Abraham. God came to Abraham and promised to bless him, and God said that through Abraham’s offspring all the nations of the earth will be blessed (see Genesis 12:3; 22:18). A lot of times this is just called the Abrahamic Promise.
The second big covenant is the one God makes with the nation of Israel at Mount Sinai. We just preached through this in the Book of Exodus. The covenant at Sinai was a book of laws for Israel that God gave them through Moses. And it included the Ten Commandments, and then a bunch of other detailed laws that Israel should follow, and blessings and curses if they do or don’t. A lot of times this is just called the Mosaic Law.
So two covenants: with Abraham there is the promise. With Moses (or Sinai) there is the law.
[Everybody tracking?]
The Promise Came First
Now with that established, look at verse 15:
In verse 15, Paul gives a human example on the way covenants work. Paul says that even on just a people level, nobody makes and ratifies a covenant and then annuls it or changes it. Once the covenant is made, it’s made. That’s the point. A covenant is a settled commitment, and everybody gets this.
Then in verse 16, Paul says that God’s promise to Abraham (his covenant with Abraham) was also with Abraham’s offspring (singular) which is Christ.
Look at this:
In verse 16 Paul quotes a phrase from Genesis 22:18, which says: “And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” And Paul says that God made that promise to Abraham and to Jesus, who is Abraham’s descendent. Jesus is the offspring in view in Genesis 22.
So in the Book of Genesis, God promised to Abraham and Jesus that one day the nations, the Gentiles, will be blessed in Jesus by faith. God promised that by covenant. And in case we’re still unsure about what Paul is trying to get at here, Paul says verse 17.
He says: Hey, this is what I mean.
And I love that Paul says this. He’s spelling it out for us. He wants us to track with him. So if we’ve zoned out a little. If we’re confused on how it all comes together, Paul says, Look, this is what I’m saying.
God’s promise to Abraham came first. The Mosaic law came 430 years later, and it did not cancel out the promise. The promise stands.
Verse 18: The fulfillment of the promise, the blessing we have in Christ, our “inheritance” as the children of Abraham by faith, our justification, that comes in the promise to be received by faith. It’s not found in the law. Our hope and salvation comes through God’s promise, not God’s law.
And now that brings up a super important question: “Why then the law?”
Why the Law?
Why do we even have the law? If our hope is not in the law; if our obedience to the law doesn’t save us; if God’s promise to Abraham still stands, why did God give us the law?
Well, Paul is about to tell us! In fact, he’s going to tell us three important things about the law. Why did God give the law?
#1. The law was added because of transgressions. (v. 19b)
Have any of you parents in here ever left your kids unsupervised (like in a totally safe way)?
Say, for example, that you gotta run to the hardware store to get a bag of salt. It’s a little icy on the front steps, and you need to some more salt; so you tell the kids, Hey, I’m going to be gone for half an hour. That’s all you say, and you leave.
And you know your kids know you’re their dad; they know you exist; and things are stable. However when you get back, and you walk in the front door, and it’s just a complete mess. The house is trashed. It looks like a zoo — a dirty zoo. You come back to a situation like that, and you know what you do? You start looking around and you say:
Hey, guys, don’t eat candy for dinner.
Hey, don’t throw garbage on the floor.
Don’t leave the fridge door open.
Don’t leave the milk out (and where’s the top to the milk?)
No, don’t bake brownies with orange juice.
Don’t pull your sister’s hair.
Don’t forget to flush the toilet.
See what’s going on? You’re adding rules. And you’re adding rules because of transgression. You have to go all Mount Sinai on the kids, and if the kids are really bad — like if the nation is totally depraved — then you’d have to say things like:
Don’t set yourself on fire.
Don’t be gross with animals.
Don’t murder your children. (See Leviticus 18:21–23)
God added law because of transgression, verse 19. The law acted like guard rails to keep Israel from self-ruin, because without any prohibition, if they were left to themselves, the nation of Israel would have pranced into destruction like [snap of fingers].
Remember the golden calf? Moses had not even come down from the mountain yet, and the people were gone.
The first thing Paul tells us about the law is that the law was added because of transgression.
#2. The law was never meant to impart life, but be a guardian. (v. 21)
Now we see this in verse 21, but first, what is this about angels and an intermediary (or mediator) in verses 19–20?
Quickly here: remember that Paul is making the case that our hope is in the promise, not the law. The Abrahamic promise is superior to the Mosaic law.
And to make help make the point, Paul adds at the end of verse 19 that the law was “put into place through angels by an intermediary.”
He’s saying that the Mosaic law, which was handed down at Mount Sinai, involved some kind of angelic administration and a human mediator, who was Moses.
In other words, God did not say the law directly to the people, but the law had creaturely mediation. And what’s implied here is that the promise is different! God spoke the promise directly to Abraham.
And these covenants are so different it might imply that there’s more than one God, but Paul assures us: God is one. There is one God who gave two different covenants, and the promise is superior to the law. But does that mean that law is contrary to the promise? Does the law contradict the promise?
No, it does not, because of the law’s purpose, verse 21 —
the law was never meant to impart life.
If the law could give life, then we don’t need the gospel. But that’s not what the law was for. Rather, Paul says, the law was for:
v. 22: imprisoning everything under sin
v. 23: holding us captive
v. 24: being our guardian
And you can see, this is the same idea.
Hey kids, I gotta run to the store again to get another bag of salt, BUT I’m leaving this nanny here — who honestly is more like a security guard-bouncer with tattoos on his face, his name is Sinai, and he’s got some rules for ya.
Look, Sinai is not here to bless you; Sinai is here to keep you from drinking Clorox.
The law was never meant to give us life. That’s not the purpose. That’s the second thing Paul tells us about the law. The third is:
#3. The law had a temporary role in salvation history. (v. 19, 23, 24)
And really, this point is the most repeated throughout this whole passage. And I mention the salvation history part because, to be clear here, because Paul is not being exhaustive about the law and its uses and what Christians can learn from it. Paul is focusing on the role of the law in the saving action of God throughout history, and Paul says in that light the law is temporary.
Notice all the temporal language here:
We see first in verse 19:
the law was added because of transgression, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made
Verse 23:
Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, [that is] [we were] imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.
Verse 24:
So then the law was our guardian until Christ came
“Until” “before” “until” “until” — the law’s role was temporary. We see that plainly here.
So these are three things Paul tells us about the law [right hand]:
It was added because of transgression;
it was never meant to impart life;
it had temporary role.
And all of this is setting up verse 25. Verse 25 is the hinge. Verse 25 is the change. This is where we go from Part One on the Law to Part Two on the Promise.
[We tracking?]
Part Two: The Promise (verses 25–29)
The change happens with two simple words, verse 25: “But now.”
And it’s hard to overstate how big a deal this is for Paul. Because up to this point he’s been saying the law is until, until, until. The law was temporary until faith came, until the coming faith, until Christ came.
But here in verse 25 he says, Hey, BUT NOW that faith has come … now that Jesus has come … now that the gospel is here —
See, this changes everything.
It’s interesting: if you were to read through the whole letter of Galatians you’d notice that, compared to Paul’s other letters, he doesn’t say a lot about the Second Coming of Jesus, or our future resurrection, or really, in Galatians Paul doesn’t say a lot about the future at all, which is unusual. But the reason is that the Galatians didn’t need to be reminded of their Christian future, because they had forgotten their Christian now.
Oh how we need to be remember the NOWs of the Christian life!
Do you know the NOWs of gospel reality that are true of you in this moment?
Think about your life for a minute. Think about the hardest, most difficult thing you have going on right now. [Are you thinking about it?]
Well look, it is good news that in Christ your future is bright; in Christ, truly the best is always yet to come — now that doesn’t mean that every circumstance is going to go the way you want it to go in this world; sometimes God calls us to suffering and disappointment— but we do hope in the future. We’re called to hope.
However, we can’t begin to imagine our future hope if we don’t recognize the grace that God has already given us now. God says something about you now that transcends your circumstance.
How do you get through the hard stuff? Yes, you think about what God will do. Yes, we look forward.
AND ALSO, we remember what God has done. We look forward and we look back to the cross of Jesus Christ and we embrace the NOW of who God says we are.
And I want to tell you what that is. And I know that what I’m about to say you may not feel. But it doesn’t matter. In Christ, this is your reality now. Two things:
1. You are a child of God (v. 26)
This is verse 26.
Verse 25 says “But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian,” verse 25: “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.”
The apostle John says the same thing in the Gospel of John, Chapter 1, verse 12: “But to all who receive [Jesus], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God.”
John also says in 1 John 3:1, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.”
Paul says it again in Romans 8 and Ephesians 5.
The New Testament is super clear: Christian, through your faith in Jesus, in Jesus you have become a child of God.
And I’m gonna guess that for many of us in here, we’ve probably heard that before — and we’re gonna see it again next week in Chapter 4 — we’ve read this, we’ve heard this. We know that in Christ we are the children of God, but do we really get it?
I mean, on a daily basis, in our felt reality, do we know what it means to be God’s children?
Toward the end of last year I had been studying Galatians and meditating on this point, and it was an early morning; everyone’s asleep; it’s pitch dark outside; I’m in my study, Bible open, lamp on, house is silent — my favorite time of the day.
And I’m reading and journaling on Galatians 3 into Chapter 4, and I’m just chewing on this fact that in Christ I am a son of God. And I’m trying to put together that this is a fact not just to be known, but to be practiced. We actually relate to God as his children. It means that we call God Father.
And I’m journaling this, still trying to grasp what this means, and as I’m in silence, writing the words in worship “I can call you Father!” — as I’m writing “f-a-t-h” — my study door cracks open, and a little voice on the other side says “father.”
I was stunned. Not a normal quiet time. It was Micah and I told him to come in, and I said, “Buddy, that’s crazy! I just was calling God Father at the exact same time you said it to me. That’s crazy!”
And it is crazy … that in the same way my children relate to me, I can relate to God. Because he is my Father, and I am his son through faith in Jesus — and so are you, Christian. Brothers, sisters, in Christ we are the children of God.
And that means something vertically, but also horizontally. This is the second NOW of gospel reality. It’s that…
2. You are part of a new family (verses 27–28)
Verse 27 Paul says, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” And the point of baptism here is the metaphor of incorporation. When you are united to Jesus by faith, baptized into him, you become a new person and you live like a new person — and that new person is part of a new family. That’s verse 28:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Now within the Jewish worldview, the major distinctions among people, next to Jewish/Gentile, was slave/free and then male/female. These are the three categories of ethnicity, economic capacity, and sex. And these categories, of course, are still very much active today. These are distinctions among people within our world, but the issue in Jewish thought was not just that these distinctions existed, it was that these distinctions were used as primary markers to determine different degrees of religious access. Under the law, the best-case scenario — the way to have the best standing before God — was to be a Jewish free man.
But Paul is saying that in Christ it doesn’t work that way. In Christ there is nothing about ourselves that keeps us from God OR brings us to God. Differences among people still exist, but those differences have no bearing on our relationship to God — because our relationship to God is solely based on our union with Christ. We are all one in Christ.
Now some have taken verse 28 the wrong way. This does not mean we become androgynes humans and everyone is an exact replica of everyone else. No! We’re different people, but NONE of those differences are an advantage or a disadvantage in our standing before God, because all of us can only come to God one way: faith in Christ.
By faith in Christ, everyone, no matter where you’re coming from, no matter what your story is, by faith in Christ you become a son or daughter of God; in Christ you become part of the family — in the family tree of Abraham, where by faith in Christ we all have the same status and the same access. God is the same kind of Father to all of us because of our union with Jesus. And understanding that union leads to radical unity.
In the church, in this new family, we’re not competing with one another, but we’re encouraging one another. We’re building up one another because we’re convinced that when my brother and sister are built up, then we’re all built up. And so we become this kind of family that is all looking toward and praying toward and working toward one another’s good.
And what is that good?
What is the “good life” in the Christian life? Is it position or status? No.
Our good that we seek is our being assured of the love of God.
Brothers, sisters, your good is to know more deeply that God loves you. That through your faith in Jesus — not on the basis of your performance, but only because of the atoning death of Jesus in your place — God, your Father, has set his love on you and that will never change. What “good” could possibly be better than that?
To be assured of the love of God, for our joy and his glory. This is what we want, Cities Church, and this what brings us to the Table. …
The Table
… because at this Table, as we take the bread and the cup, we move a little bit closer to comprehending with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God in Christ that surpasses knowledge. If you receive God’s love in Christ, if you put your faith in Jesus, eat and drink with us!
His body is the true bread.
His blood is the true drink.
Let us serve you.
