Would you please be seated and take your Bibles and turn with me to Galatians chapter 3. I'm fairly confident that we will make it to verse 19 this evening. We continue along with our apostle Paul as he contends for the gospel in the midst of error among the congregations in the region of Galatia. Our reading tonight will be verse 15 through 20. Galatians 3, verse 15 through 20. Let us pray again before we do hear the word of God read. Let us pray. Father, we do come to you and ask for your help in the hearing of your word read and the hearing of your word preached, we pray, Lord, that we would hear with the ears that you give to your people. Our Lord says, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. Father, we pray that would be us. We pray that you would tune our ears and bless our ears, bless our hearing so that it is by faith. And Father, I pray as your servant, who speaks that the words of my mouth, the meditation of my heart, would be pleasing in your sight, O God. Care for us now, Lord God. Teach us, instruct us. Straighten what is crooked in us. Illumine what is dark in us. All for the glory and honor and praise of our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. And as he is glorified, so are you, O Father. In his name we ask, amen. I want you to hear this reading and then immediately join me with a little bit of imagination station. Now that might not be familiar to you, but that's from Adventures in Odyssey, if you've ever listened to that Christian radio program. Mine won't be so scary. Galatians chapter three, verse 15. To give a human example, brothers, Even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, and two offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your offspring, who is Christ. This is what I mean. The law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise, but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions. until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made. And it was put in place through angels by an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one." The word of the Lord. Imagine for a moment that you are a four-year-old. Your father has brought you along with him. on a trip to Walmart. You were safely buckled in the back seat, all is well. But this is December 22nd of any given year. Well, I guess it would have to be a year where there are Walmarts. This is December 22nd, and that means the Walmart parking lot is packed. And your dad has to park the car in a very distant lot, a very distant slot, almost as far as can be from the front doors. Now before you get to the adventure on the inside of the store, there is a significant adventure on the outside. Because you are four, you will have to take three times as many steps as your father to get from the back corner of the parking lot to the front door. Because you are four, you cannot see over all the cars between you and the front door. Because you are four, you really don't know where you're even going. If your dad gave you $20 and sat in the front seat and told you to get out and go into the Walmart and buy him some of this and some of that, There would be no hope of you actually making it to that little opening called the sliding front door. You would end up in another zip code or perhaps worse. Now, this is a simple picture. It's a common picture. But we are the little children in this story. When it comes to the law of God and its relationship to the promise of God, we are the four-year-olds. we need to be taken by the hand. We need to be taken by the hand by our Father in the faith, the Apostle Paul, and led around the obstacles, the cars backing up, the cars pulling in, the confusion, the chaos, we need to be led around all of that so that we actually make it to the narrow door. We need to understand why there's a door called the promise, why there's a door called the law. For if we confuse these, if we don't reach these, if we come up short, if we get lost on these things, the law and the promise, we will confuse and distort the entire gospel of Jesus Christ. If you get the law wrong and how it relates to the promise, you end up in another religion, even if you sit inside a Christian church. Martin Luther said, unless the gospel be plainly discerned from the law, the true Christian doctrine cannot be kept sound and uncorrupt. John Stott wisely asked, what is the difference between the law and the promise? He answers, excellently. In the promise to Abraham, God said, I will, I will, I will. But in the law of Moses, God said, thou shalt, thou shalt not. Thou shalt, thou shalt not. Thou shalt, thou shalt not. The promise sets forth a religion of God, God's plan, God's grace, God's initiative. But the law sets forth a religion of man. Even though it's from God, the law is a religion of man, man's duties, man's works, man's responsibility. The promise had only to be believed, the law had to be obeyed. God's dealings with Abraham were in the category of promise, grace, and faith. God's dealings with Moses were in the category of law, commandments, and works. If we have done a little bit of reading in these topics, the promise and the law, we already maybe have come tonight with categories in our heads that we would like to hear talked about. The three uses of the law, the three kinds of law. We are not going to talk much about those tonight. Next Lord's Evening we will, Lord willing, talk about the uses of the law. But tonight we are gonna stay with the Apostle Paul. We are gonna keep our hand in his and live in the world of logic that he creates in his dispute against those stuck in error. His dispute against the Judaizers who do not know how to distinguish law and gospel, do not know how to explain how they relate. The Judaizers are worldly theologians because they cannot rightly put in order the promise and the law. They cannot relate them and explain them. They cannot teach them. They cannot see the glory of Christ in them. This is not our calling. We are not called to be errorists. We are not called to be ignorant. We are not called to ignore this and kind of put our fingers in our ears and say, ah, this is sort of thick stuff. I'll leave it to the experts. This is a letter to a bunch of churches filled with plumbers and bakers, filled with mothers and children. This is their doctrine. And you probably heard me labor this point more than once as we've gone through Galatians. I really have a burden to persuade you to take very seriously the doctrine of the prophets and apostles. To become increasingly more competent in defending these truths in all the places they need defending. to be equipped, if you will, to have your tool bag full of understanding so that you can contest for the truth of the gospel in places far and wide. This is how the Lord is ministering to these congregations. He is not ministering to us in a different way. Now, tonight our apostle, is working out the relationship between the promise and the law. That's a simple way to say it. We're going to fill that in a little bit, but let it be understood that that's what this passage is about, the relationship between the promise and the law. So let's go through this verse by verse, and we are going to have to go back to a verse we didn't do too much with. That's verse 14. But I'm going to save that for a little while until it seems most ripe to go there. Let's begin in verse 15. Paul says, to give a human example, brothers, even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. So in this verse, Paul is making an argument about how covenants work. And he is making an argument from the lesser to the greater. The lesser, in this case, are man-made covenants. And if those are the lesser, what's the greater? God-made covenants. The man-made covenants are referenced specifically in verse 15, and you can see in verse 17 that the greater is referenced as covenants ratified by God. So if lesser man-made covenants cannot be canceled, then we should be even more persuaded that a God-made covenant cannot be canceled. This is absolutely essential to Paul's argument. He's appealing to what everyone knows, that in the lesser domain of man-made agreements, man-made testaments, man-made last wills, they cannot be canceled. They cannot be modified once they are ratified. How much more so is that true with God's own covenants? So how does this point serve Paul's argument? Well, Paul is going to demonstrate in this passage that the covenant God made with Abraham and his offspring was a covenant that was not canceled by the addition of a later covenant, the law covenant made at Sinai through Moses. Paul is simply making the point that we should not be fooled, we should not fall into error thinking that a later covenant that God made at Sinai somehow retires an earlier covenant that God made with Abraham. Paul's point here in verse 15, then, is that once God established in a covenant that salvation would come by promise, and that's what was established in the covenant with Abram, once God established that and put it in a covenant and ratified it, that salvation would come by promise, nothing could cancel that covenant or modify it, not even another covenant made by God. God can make another covenant. but not even God will cancel a covenant he previously made, especially when it's a unilateral covenant, where God himself is on both sides of responsibility. Obviously, the covenant of works was a failure, because on one side of that covenant was man, who, though made in original righteousness, was mutable. That means changeable. And he fell from his original righteousness into original sin and corruption and rebellion. And the covenant was broken because man was on one side of it. But in the covenant God made with Abraham, God was on both sides. It was a unilateral covenant of grace where God promised that salvation would come to Abraham and his offspring by God's own works and not man's. Verse 16. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your offspring, who is Christ. Now we have to notice something right away, that verse 16 is kind of an interlude to the argument that Paul is making that he picks up again in verse 17. So it seems to kind of come out of nowhere, verse 16, And then it looks like Paul's getting back to the point in verse 17. Well, that's sometimes how we think, and that's sometimes how we talk, and that's sometimes how we preach. A thought enters into our mind, and it's essential to say it before we go on with the argument that we're making. And that's what Paul's doing here, a little interlude. And his point here is to declare that the promise of salvation as gift was made to Abraham and to his offspring. And Paul wants to say this to keep the Jews from believing a lie. The lie that they are tempted to believe, the lie that the Judaizers are trafficking in, is that the promise belonged to the Jews simply because they were physical descendants of Abraham. That's the lie. Paul works this out in Romans chapter 9, doesn't he? When he makes the very simple statement that not all Israel is truly Israel. Just because you are ethnically a Jew doesn't mean you are an offspring of Abraham. All the offspring of Abraham are identified by their faith in the chief offspring of Abraham, who is Christ. And that's the point he's making here. The promise was not for all of Abraham's descendants, plural, it was for a special descendant, Christ. Christ would be the one who obtained all the privileges of salvation. Now, does that leave Christ alone, keeping all the bounty to himself? No. Through Abraham's offspring, singular, all the nations, the world, would be blessed. That is the promise that God made to Abraham. In Genesis 12, 7, Genesis 15, 18, Genesis 17, 8, the Lord says the same words again and again and again to Abraham. This is the promise. To your offspring, I will give this land. And Paul tells us in Romans 4.13 that that really was a promise that Abram and his offspring would inherit the entire world. Now this is where we want to look back to verse 14 for a minute, which set up this paragraph for Paul. Paul says in verse 14, so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles. so that we might receive the promised spirit through faith. Paul is saying in verse 14 that the offspring of Abraham, singular Jesus Christ, he would receive all of the blessings of eternal life through his meritorious work, through his vindication, As God's man who keeps the law, who takes away the penalty of sin, who comes out of the grave and ascends to the right hand, Christ would be the son of Israel who would obtain in his own person, by his own works, what was promised to Abraham, the world. the everlasting kingdom. The land, the world, are all typological for the eternal kingdom, the heavenly country of Jesus Christ. And so Christ is the primary, the chief heir of this blessing. But for what purpose? Verse 14, that it might be given to the Gentiles, but not indiscriminately, not universalism, not to every Gentile, but to those who through faith receive the promised spirit, the elect. So Christ is the son who obtains the inheritance, but by the spirit through faith, we believers become co-heirs of it. William Perkins summarizes this whole section beautifully in his commentary on Galatians, which is only $38 right now on sale at Heritage Books. who I do not work for or have any royalties due from. Perkins says, Christ as mediator is first of all elected and we in him. Christ is first justified, that is acquitted of our sins and we justified in him. He is heir of the world as we are heirs in him. He died on the cross, not as a private person, but as a public person, representing all the elect, and all the elect die in him and with him. In the same manner, they rise with him to life and sit at the right hand of God with him in glory. This is how we become also the offspring of Abraham in our union with Jesus Christ, receiving that which is his reward, becoming co-heirs of it. The promise of salvation then that would bless all nations was made to Abraham's offspring. The Jews keep looking for it. They keep looking for this promise to come to them in the world, but they keep looking past Christ, is Paul's point. They keep looking past Christ, the offspring who has already obtained it, who is already sharing it with all his brethren, the elect of God. But why do they keep looking past Christ? Because they believe that this possession, this inheritance, is only earthly. They are bound to the desires of the flesh. And so they do not see that it is heavenly. and just as real, that it is above, not below. Verse 17. Now Paul is getting back to the very argument that he started in verse 15. This is what I mean. The law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God so as to make the promise void. The law came 430 years after the Jews were taken into Egyptian captivity. The law which came later at Mount Sinai did not cancel the promise that came earlier to Abraham. If you want to track these in your Bible, the law is given in Exodus 20, the promise is given to Abraham in Genesis 12, and then again in 15, and then again in 17. The giving of a later covenant, the law covenant, did not void the earlier covenant, the grace covenant, the promise covenant. The purpose of God, therefore, in giving the law was not to make the promise obsolete. This is the error of the Jews. This is the temptation that they are struggling with in making sense of the promise and the law. The purpose of God in giving the law, therefore, was not to say the way of promise isn't working anymore. Let's try a new covenant, the law covenant. And by new, I'm not referring to the new covenant Christ speaks of. The purpose of God in giving the law, therefore, was not to weaken the promise, but to strengthen the promise. Thus, the covenants are not in a simple opposition to one another. The covenants of promise and law are not opposed to one another in an absolute sense. They can become opposed to one another if you use them in the wrong way. If you seek justification by the law covenant, you do put it in opposition to the promise covenant. but they are not contrary to one another. And Paul makes this point quite clearly in verse 21, doesn't he? Which we will not get to until next Lord's Day. He says, there is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not, he says. There's a way in which the law covenant is not contrary to the promise covenant. And Paul's interested in teaching that in this confused, foggy place called Galatia. The law, rightly understood, Paul is going to teach, actually comes in to serve the promise. The law, as we will see soon, has divinely appointed uses that support the promise, in fact. Now, these two covenants do not do the same things, the law and promise, but one does serve the other. So we cannot simply choose one of these covenants and safely toss the other one away. We cannot be a Christian who says, I have no interest in talking about law or in hearing about law. I have no use for the law. Just tell me again about the promises. That's a dwarf Christian who wants to remain and think like a child for the rest of their life. That is not a Christian who's actually sat at the feet of the apostles. We cannot throw out one covenant because we think we can only have one. We must receive both and use them rightly. That's what our apostle is teaching us. Such a simplistic approach is really an instinctual approach instead of a biblical one. Now, the second covenant, as we are about to see, the law covenant, serves the first covenant in a very unique way, the promise covenant. But the second covenant, the law covenant, could not accomplish what the first covenant was designed to accomplish. And this is what Paul begins to say in verse 18 and 19. And that's what we're probably going to end at when we get down through verse 19. Verse 18 then. For if the inheritance comes by the law, and we should think of works of the law when we hear that, the law has an obligation. Work for me. The promise has an obligation, right? Believe in what God said he would do through his offspring. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise. But God gave it to Abraham by a promise. What is Paul saying? Well, he is throwing up a brick wall in front of his opponents. He knows they have already fallen into this error. They think the law of Moses has become a means of obtaining the inheritance. That's what these Judaizers, these false teachers, are bringing to the Galatian churches. The inheritance, that word, just as it sounds, is a reference to a gratuitous possession. There's something absurd that the Judaizers would think that a gratuitous possession could be obtained by earning in performing the works of the law. The inheritance that Paul means here is, in general terms, salvation. in its eternal life. It's having God as God, our God, having the Father as our Father, the Son as our mediator, the Spirit as our comforter, Heaven as our true country. That's the inheritance. All of that is contained in that word. The most common object of the word inherit, when you get to scouring it in the New Testament, the most common object of to inherit is the kingdom. And then it's eternal life, and then it's salvation. So that's what this inheritance is. And the Judaizers have come to believe that the inheritance comes by the works of the law, the law covenant. So Paul is saying the Jews are wrong that teach this. They're wrong if they think the law is now the way of obtaining the inheritance. If the law is now the way of obtaining the inheritance, then the law has canceled the promise. For God had already told Abraham he and his offspring would obtain the inheritance by promise. So if God has already said the inheritance is obtained by promise, And now the Jews are teaching that it's obtained by the law, then God has canceled one covenant by establishing another? But Paul has already said that that is foolishness. Once a covenant is ratified, it cannot be altered. And even a later covenant wouldn't cancel an earlier. So Paul anticipates the question that is coming. Why then the law, verse 19? If the law is of no use in obtaining the inheritance because the inheritance has already been obtained by promise, why then the law? And Paul has more to say on this than we will tonight. But here he says, it was added because of transgressions. until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary. Now, an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one. The law was added because of transgressions. In other words, the law was given so that man would come to know that he is transgressing the holy law of God, that he has become a lawless man before God, that he would know what his sin really is. Paul works this out in more detail in Romans. In Romans 3.20, he says, through the law comes knowledge of sin. In Romans 4.15, he says, for the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, there is no transgression. In Romans 7.7, he says, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. Just like you, when you're driving down a road that you've never been on before, and you finally see a speed limit sign, and it says 45, what's the first thing you do? You look at the speedometer, and you're going 59. suddenly the law has exposed you for who you really are. You thought for the last five miles you were the most reasonable, safe driver on that road. And now the government and its law has just told you that no matter how careful you are to keep your speeding tank of metal between the lines, you are actually a transgressor in the land in which you are driving, you're a transgressor. And that's the purpose of the law. The law comes and exposes you as a transgressor. Before you sinned indiscriminately and your conscience was barely touched, even though you didn't regard yourself as a transgressor, and of course I am now speaking in the terms of redemptive history, even though you did not regard yourself as a transgressor, you still saw the effects of your sin. You still saw hatred, violence, murder, theft, grief, misery. But then the law came. And then now you saw your sin not just horizontally. Now you could see your sin vertically. Now you could see what your sin was to God, what your instinctual way of life was to God. Transgression. Rebellion. The law was added to expose our transgression. Why? So that we would seek a place of refuge. so that we would go run and seek a high tower, that we would go find a place of safety, not only from the penalty of our transgressions, but from that thing within us that seemed to always keep generating new transgressions, the corruption of our sin. The law was added to drive us to Christ, to bring us to Christ, to get us seeking for Christ. Someone said Satan would have us prove ourselves wholly by the law, which God gave to prove us sinners. Listen, this is the truth about our faith. Christianity is a religion of promise. It is a religion of promise. It is not a religion of law. There is a use for the law. And we have to keep working with Paul through Galatians to see what language he uses to describe how the Christian can come to love the law. But Christianity is a religion of promise. It is a religion of God promising to us that he will perform everything necessary for us to be right with him. You've heard this before. Christianity is a religion of what God has done not of what God is always telling you to do. It's God telling you what he has done to put you at rest and at righteousness before him, not God always telling you what to do to be put at rest. If we begin to think that we can add to the works of Christ our own good works, and then really secure our salvation. Jesus tightens three of the screws, we come and tighten the last one with our good works. If that's the way we begin to think about our faith, I'm here to tell you tonight that that is a different religion. If you are going to top off your salvation, top off your acceptance before God by adding your good works to the crucified Christ, No matter how good that makes Christ sound, because you still regard him, it's not Christianity anymore. Galatians helps us, but it first radicalizes us. What does that mean? Well, don't think Islam. Think grace. Galatians first radicalizes us by putting the grace of God on the altar alone, and it puts your hands bound behind your back so that you can do no works until you are united to Christ through his works. Let us pray. Gracious God, we thank you for our apostle Paul and the care with which he has taken to defend the gospel in these verses. And Father, we pray that you would aid us in our own understanding. We pray, Father God, that you would bless us, your people who have been pleased to sit under your word. Father, bless us by fastening it upon us, granting its illumination within us. Granting, Father, the correcting grace wherever we are crooked, And Father, we pray that we would ourselves take every thought captive, especially on this matter, of the priority of the covenant of promise, that all things are received by faith, and then we rise in newness of life. Oh, Father, help us not succumb to the errors, the errors that are even nipping at our own heels and biting at the edge of our own hearts to seek our satisfaction and rest and acceptance with you in the things we are doing. Oh Father, we pray that we would not diminish the glory of Christ by such pursuits. Father, set him large before us. Let us hear his words, it is finished. Help us believe them tomorrow. and rise up and find the right reason for why we obey. Find the right reason for why we do the good works we do. Find the right reasons for why we come to church. Father, if any here tonight are engaged in the duties of the Christian life, to somehow pull down your blessings, to somehow leverage you to do things for them because they're doing things for you. Father, I pray that you would mercifully forgive them of these sins and lead them in the way of understanding and give them a better reason to do the things they are doing. Give them the gospel reason, the Christ-honoring reason, the Christ-glorying reason. Help them think about these things and let them not go, Lord, until you bless them. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.