02.14. ESSAY NO. 14

ESSAY NO. 14

"Not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but . . . the righteousness which is from God by faith" (Php 3:9). This half verse, written by Paul a few years later than Galatians is a distillment of Galatians. Had Paul possessed legal righteousness, it would have been his own because he had earned it as a deserved wage for his perfect law-keeping. Instead, when he believed on Christ he re­ceived gospel righteousness from God as a gift.

"Ye are severed from Christ, ye that would be justi­fied by the law . . . for we through the Spirit by faith wait for the hope of righteousness." Note the con­trast between legalists and Christians. Christians being already clothed in Christ’s righteousness do not wait for righteousness itself, but for its fulfillment, "the crown of righteousness," after earth-life. While they wait, their hope and "faith working through love" fill their lives with patient, joyous work. By grace, through faith, in love, unto crowned hope. Inasmuch as Christians find in Christ every need for life, death, and beyond richly supplied, legalists who desert him for a "weak and beggarly" religion of the flesh are foolish indeed.

If Paul doubted the Galatians, he found hope for them in Christ and wrote: "I have confidence to you-ward in the Lord" that you will not fall away into the entanglements of legalism. He did not judge indis­criminately, but distinguished between the leaders and the led. Out of tender, fatherly love for the Galatians, he spared not the troublemakers, wished they would sever themselves from the church, and warned that they could not escape the judgment of God. It is evi­dent (v. 11) that these "evil workers," willfully for­getting that Paul refused to circumcise Titus because to do so would have compromised essential Christian doctrine, took his circumcising Timothy when only expediency and Christian liberty were involved, and twisted it into the malicious, damaging lie that he was an unprincipled man, who preached circumcision when it suited his purpose to do so. Behold, religious partisanship, prejudice, and bigotry at work!

Men Are Triune Beings The natural man has a fleshly nature and a spiritual nature living within his body. When he experiences the spiritual birth, the Holy Spirit so identifies him­self with and so indwells the man’s spirit that a new order of life, the Christian life, which eventuates in eternal life, comes into being. Instead of this spiritual life extirpating "the mind of the flesh," which "is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be" (Romans 8:7), the two live in perpetual strife within the Christian until his death. At the resurrection when Christ comes, a Christian’s body, which was "sown a natural body" and "is raised a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:44), shall be his again to live in forever. Wholly spiritual then, "spirit and soul and body" (1 Thessalonians 5:23), he is forever free from strife.

During this struggle between flesh and spirit throughout the Christian’s life on earth, the arrogant flesh is only counterworked and kept in subjection, never eradicated. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh" (John 3:6); it remains flesh in a regenerate man, and cannot become humble and spiritual. The best a Christian is promised, before death and resur­rection deliver him from his fallen fleshly nature, is that sin shall not dominate him, and reign over him. (See Romans 6:12-14).’ A Christian is still pursued, but no longer ruled, by Adam’s sin. This world-old conflict heads up in God and Satan, who are deadly, personal enemies. God works through the spirit, and Satan through the flesh of men, "created half to rise, and half to fall." With the passing of time, Christians should increasingly become less sin­ful, carnal and worldly, and more saintly, spiritual and other-worldly. (On this background, Galatians 5:12-26 may mean more to us.) "A New Commandment"

"For ye, brethren, were called for freedom; only use not your freedom for an occasion to the flesh, but through love be servants to one another" (Galatians 5:13). Satan is man’s resourceful, stubborn, wily foe. One stratagem he uses to trick Christians into the indul­gence of their flesh is to prompt them -to reason: "Where sin abounded, grace did abound more exceed­ingly"; therefore let us "continue in sin that grace may abound" (Romans 5:20; Romans 6:1). Jude calls such as this "Turning the grace of God into Lasciviousness." But Christian liberty may be abused in many other ways. Satan was beguiling the Galatians into making their freedom a pretext for uncharitable treatment of their brethren. Apparently, they thought they were as free from moral law as from Mosaic ritualism, and had license to be lawless. Paul tells them to serve one another in Christian love, and they will discover: "That the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"; that God has perfected a way of making men, without their becoming legalists, lawful. As the character of Christ proves, law itself and love are not incompatible; Phar­isaic legalism, not law, is what contradicts gospel grace, truth, and love.

Codified law is not necessary for Christians, because their "faith working through love" leads them into doing even more than codes can specify. A servant under law, after meeting all requirements, may be off duty for a time; but a servant under love, being unable to do all he wants to do, can never find a stopping place. A Christian often sins more than he pleases, but he never can love and work enough to please him­self. His creed is: "Since I am at best only an un­profitable servant, I must ever be going onward, out­ward, upward, and beyond." Only this attitude can account for the incomparable lawfulness, labor, love, suffering, and success of the author of Galatians. To human merit and all other forms of "confidence in the flesh," Christian love is as dangerous as an atom bomb is to a city.

Just before he went to the cross, Christ said to his apostles: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you ... . By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples" (John 13:34; John 13:5). In giving the prime and pivotal place in his coming kingdom to love, he was launching a strange, new religion that would distill the Mosaic law into an eleventh commandment, so to speak, and create an immeasurably better social order than any order built on law could ever be. A wonderful King this, who loves men, without their being sensible of law, re­straint, and duty, into lawful living plus! Verily, a strange, new religion then, and alack a strange, new religion yet. "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out!”