02.13. ESSAY NO. 13

ESSAY NO. 13 In Galatians 5:1-26, Galatians 6:1-18 especially, Paul exhorts his readers to apply his teaching by giving the doctrine of sanctification (personal, practical righteousness) by grace an honest trial. In effect he says something like this: "Your false teachers tell you that, unless the principle of law is woven in with the principle of grace, the moral standards of the church will suffer, and the highest type of Christians will not be produced. But I, Paul, (with all my apostolic knowl­edge and authority, which was proved in the first of this letter), tell you that the workings of grace alone will sanctify as well as justify men; and that any ad­mixture of the legal principle will fatally pervert it." Paul insists -and warns that the two systems being "contrary, the one to the other" will not coalesce, but that pure, unmixed grace will sustain standards, ful­fill the law, and make Christians of the highest order.

Christ the Emancipator

"For freedom did Christ set you free." "Everyone that committeth sin is the bondservant (slave) of sin ... If therefore the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed" (John 8:34-36). If men are left in Adam’s sin and their own sins, being slaves of sin by nature and by practice, imprisoned in themselves their doom is eternally sealed. The story of the Negro slave who, upon being sold by a brutal master, heard his new master graciously say, "My purpose in buying you is to set you free," illustrates Christ’s freeing men. Christian freedom is not incidental; Christ’s purpose in buying enslaved men is to make them free. "For ye, brethren, were called for freedom" (Galatians 5:13). "I am the door; by me if man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out (freedom of a child in and around the house of its parents), and shall find pasture ... I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:9-10). In these simple words, Christ offers men, in the language of another, "free­dom, fodder, and fullness."

"Be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage." Could the Negro man, after being free for a time, re­turn to his former, hard master? Yet, this is what the Galatians were doing, Their being circumcised and building hope on the law, nullified grace as though "Christ died for naught," and made them debtors "to do the whole law." Thus, they were being ensnared again in the network of legalism, for Judaism, like the heathenism from which Christ had delivered them, was also a legal system—a "ministration of death." To be thus circumcised was to reinstate law, which was powerless either to prevent or forgive sin. It was to be "severed from Christ" and "fallen away from grace" altogether.

Christians today without falling into Judaism, heathenry, or gross sins, may nonetheless fall "away from grace" into an entanglement of dead formality, Pharisaic self-righteousness, and Christless human merit, "holding a form of godliness, but having denied the power thereof"—form without power. In principle, this is the same deadly perversion of the gospel that filled Paul with apprehension for his "little children" in Galatia, and led him tearfully to warn them that "a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump." May not this powerless form of religion be a termite, now eating out the inner, spiritual life and strength of the church, leaving a hollow, outer shell to collapse later? Christ said to his church in Sardis: "I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead" (Revelation 3:1). Sardis must have been bustling with com­mittees, programs, and various activities, a church much alive and gratifying to the flesh, but dead to Christ. Could his church today be drifting into such a state?

Freedom and Obedience

Freedom is not free; nor can it ever be had at a bargain price. It may be possessed only at the same, original, high price. Like peace and happiness, it is not to be sought directly, but as a by-product. Obedi­ence, not freedom, is the primary law of life. When a carnal man seeks freedom by flouting law and author­ity and by living as he pleases, he soon finds himself physically and morally enslaved. But when men live in obedience to the laws of life, freedom follows as a shadow follows its objects. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God . . . and all these things (including freedom) shall be added unto you." Seek freedom first, and it escapes. Men are free only within bounds—within the frame of law. They are chained back in freedom by law; and the more lawful, the freer men are.

Christian freedom has both a negative and a positive aspect. Men are freed from some things and freed for other things. Christ liberates men from the yoke of traditional, creedal and ceremonial law, for it chokes the freedom he proposes to give. He frees men from the curse of the moral law—from the penalty, power and practice of sin; and from the fear of self, the world, death and hell. Men who fear God rightly, know no other fear. On the positive side, Christianity brims with freedom, Christ gives men the liberty to search the Scriptures with open, yet cautious mind, and in free conscience to accept what they find. Christianity is on the way to dissolution when Christians are afraid to follow their conscience. In Christ men have liberty and privilege to worship, to work, to ponder, to wonder, to wait and dream, to do the right thing, to grow and ripen, to "press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus," and to go on endlessly with God unto perfection even as He is per­fect. Verily freedom, unto speechless wonderment, "above all that we ask or think!" The secret of Christian freedom is that a Christian chooses to go Christ’s way. He believes that since Christ’s and his own interests are identical, either both are served or neither is served ; that Christ’s will for him is his own will at its highest and best. There­fore, when he chooses Christ’s way, he also has his own way. And what is this but freedom? It is the blessed freedom of a Christ-captivated soul — a new kind of slavery, to be sure. But inasmuch as man by purposive creation is a dependent being, the more dependent, the more fulfilled and freer he is. God has worked out a unique plan by which Christ’s slave becomes his own master! Christ gets the essential law of life obeyed, human nature fulfilled, and his slave in possession of life abounding — all this without slavish drudgery or "dragging of feet" on the part of the slave. "To him be the glory forever." "In willing chains and sweet captivity," a Christian is the only free, fulfilled, happy man. Who could be a lukewarm Christian?