Last time we were together a month ago, we looked at verses one through 14 of Galatians 3, and we saw that the attempt at salvation by works is foolishness. That was the word he used. Excuse me. And we saw that we had an example of salvation by grace, illustrated by the life of Abraham. Today, we see the development of the argument from scripture by his referring to Abraham's seed, to Moses' law, and to God's promise. Before we get into it, let me read our text for the evening, which is Galatians 3, verses 15 through 29. Brothers and sisters, let me take an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say and to seeds, meaning many people, but and to your seed, meaning one person who is Christ. What I mean is this, the law introduced 430 years later does not set aside the covenant previously established by God and thus do away with the promise. For if the inheritance depends upon the law, then it no longer depends upon the promise. But God in his grace gave it to Abraham through a promise. Why then was the law given at all? It was added because of transgressions until the seed to whom the promise referred had come. The law was given through angels and entrusted to a mediator. A mediator, however, implies more than one party, but God is one. Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not. For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law. But scripture has locked up everything under the control of sin so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe. Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. And so the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. So in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. This ends the reading and hearing of this portion of God's holy, infallible, and inspired word. We were talking back there with the session a while ago, just a little bit about this, a little bit about that. And I opined how much easier Paul would be able to understand if Paul didn't write like Paul. What did I just say here? If I ask any of us to paraphrase that, including myself, if I didn't have my notes, I'd be hard pressed to do so. That's a lot of words in there. And in looking at all the various commentators on this text, there's a lot of different ideas about what all Paul is trying to get across to us here. I hope that I'm somewhere in the middle of them. I know this, I agree with Hendrickson, or he agrees with me, and so that's pretty good company. And let's just see then what we can get out of this. The propositional idea, of this sermon this evening is that the gracious provisions of the covenant and the mandate of the law work together in the life of the believer. They work together. And I'd like to look at it under three heads. They are the precedence of the covenant's promise. That's from verses 15 through 18. The purpose of the law's demand And we see that in verses 19 and 20. And then the promise of God's invitation, which is found in 21 through 29. First of all then, the precedence of the covenant's promise from verses 15 through 18. If a man is not saved by keeping the law, then for what purpose has the law been given to us? The gracious covenant came first 430 years before the law, covenant of grace through Moses, I mean through Abraham. Then why the law? Was there something deficient in the gracious covenant which was given to Abraham? Why the law? The answer, I think, to this question has two parts. First of all, we need to determine the position of each of these with reference to the other. The promise of grace versus the law. All of us have probably heard someone who didn't know much about the Bible say something like this. People were saved in the Old Testament by keeping the law, but now we are saved by grace. I've heard that too many times by too many people in the church who know no better. Or they might say the God of the Old Testament was not the gracious God of the New Testament. He changed. In the New Testament, he sent his son to die for people. All he seemed to think about in the Old Testament was punishing people for being bad and making them do right. You ever heard that sentiment? I bet you every one of us in here has, and more than once. I confess, before I was converted, I thought the same thing. I used to wonder why. I mean, it just looks like there's so much difference between God as he is known in the Old Testament and the New Testament. But the reality is that by the time the law was given to Moses, the gracious provisions to the covenant of Abraham and his seed were 430 years old. That's a long time. In verse 15 of this text, we see the writer make a comparison between the covenant and a human will. Not a will, but a legal document, that kind of will. And he says that a human will cannot be annulled. It just can't be done. The only person who can change that is the person who makes it. A will can't be an ought. I, as I expect and hope all of you in here do, have a will and not a thing that any of you can do to change any of its provisions. I can leave my entire estate to Bozo the Clown and nobody can go to a judge and say that I'm doing wrong and he wants him to declare my will null and void. Martha might be tempted to. Her argument would probably be something like, Judge, you know he was a screwball sometimes. Let's think this thing through again. But seriously, nobody can change it. Not even she could at that point. Wills can be contested, to be sure. But for them to be changed is a very rare thing indeed. If someone dies, the executor of his will does not have the right to monkey with its provisions. He is there to do what the testator said he wanted done with his stuff. A will is unchangeable except by the one who makes it. Now, the words will and covenant and testament are all interchangeable here. And so Paul says, in effect, that God established his covenant with Abraham and the provisions of it are inviolable. With whom did God establish the covenant? With Abraham and his seed. Now this is an important idea. I think, I hope that I am getting the interpretation right here because not everybody agrees with me at this point. He goes on to say, with Abraham and his seed, He does not say with his seeds plural, but his seed singular. This causes me some problem, and I think that I've got it worked out. And Hendrickson and I do agree on this, so he's pretty good company. Why does Paul emphasize singular here? I think, and Hendrickson thinks, that seed is a collective noun. It can be plural or singular, and that is the case in both Greek and Hebrew. And it says in verse 16 that the seed can be understood in the singular sense to mean Christ Jesus. But it also says in verses 7 and 29 that if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed. Heirs according to the promise. Look it up, 3-7, 3-29. So seed, I think, means both Christ and those who belong to Christ, envisioned by God as one people in Christ. The blessings are promised then to Abraham and to his seed, all one people, not ethnic Jews and not folks who are not part of the adopted family of God. Remember the big argument here. The big argument here is he's fighting against the Judaizers who are saying that you must do something, you must keep the Mosaic law in order to be saved. That means that those who don't do it are not saved, and he's arguing against that, and I think he's saying no. Those who are of faith Those are the, quote, children of Abraham, which is what, again, verse seven and verse 29 tell us exactly. Then we are one body, one body in Christ. In Hebrews 11, we read, by faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place that he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, Even though he did not know where he was going, by faith, again that phrase, he made his home in the promised land, like a stranger in a foreign country, lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God, and then down to verse 16, Instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them." It seems to me that there's an awful lot of interaction here between singular and plural here. And I'm just not sure that we can make a hard and fast, I understand what Paul says here and what he's just written, but that we should say that the only focus there is Jesus to the exclusion of Jesus' people. I think that it is to all of us who are in Christ that the promise is made. And again, you're gonna get tired of hearing me say it, but I do think that that's the implication of verses seven and 29. And this is right in the middle of that. That, to me, seems to be the context there. Adam knew that the promise then, I mean, Abraham knew that the promise referred to more than just physical descendants. Those who are Jews aren't necessarily the inheritors of the promise. The primary heir of the heavenly country is, of course, Christ. By God's grace, believers are made co-heirs with Christ of all heavenly blessings. We've had that terminology over and over, co-heirs with Christ into adoption of God's family. Again, he said in verse 7 of 29, it is those who are of faith, those who are in Christ, who are heirs to the promise of Abraham. They are the descendants that God has in mind and so the many are blessed in the one. And I hope that I'm right in my interpretation. If I'm not, I don't think I'm that far off. I think that's the teaching here. Now, back to the original question of this first point. What is the position of the covenant made to Abraham relative to the law which came 430 years later? It is that the covenant was a testament It was a will. It was unchangeable, except by the one who made it. And so when the law came in 430 years later, it did not change the gracious provisions of the covenant. People were saved by grace, which was received through faith before the law came, and they were saved by grace, through faith, after the law came, it was still in effect. God did not change his way of saving people, dispensationless notwithstanding. He did not become less gracious. Salvation has never been a result of law keeping. That is what we mean then when we talk about the precedence of the covenant. It was already there. and had been there a long time when the law was given later, and the giving of the law did not change God's gracious way of dealing with men. Seeing the position then of each against the other, we now turn to the second question, which is the purpose of the law's demands, verses 19 and 20. If a man is not saved by keeping the law, then for what purpose was the law given? If keeping it is unable to save a person, unable to justify a person, then what good is it? Is it only to show us how to do right after salvation? Well, it is that. But it is more also. When someone takes seriously the law of God, then it convicts him of his having broken it and of his being legitimately the object of God's wrath and curse. Becomes very important to us at that point. It is not enough to have some vague sense that not all is right in a person's life. That is not enough to drive him to despair. It is not enough to make him cry out to God for forgiveness. If he doesn't see himself as the wretched person which he really is, then he is not at all likely to seek appropriate relief. If he thinks things are just a little not right, but he doesn't see himself as subject to an eternity in hell, then his remedy is really quite simple. He makes a change here and there. makes some resolutions, turns over a new leaf, and he's set back on course once again to go on about his business before he falls off the wagon again. It is only when someone sees himself as a guilty lawbreaker, a cosmic rebel, standing before God's bar of justice, about to be sentenced to an eternity of torment and loneliness and pain that he comes and throws himself with abandon before that bar and seeks relief, understanding himself to be completely devoid of anything which would move the judge of all men on his awful throne to grant him mercy. Only then. Paul said in Romans 7, 7 that had it not been for the 10th commandment, that he would never have known himself to be a lawbreaker. He had not murdered. We, of course, know that he was implicated in Stevens' stoning, but as far as Paul was concerned, at that point, he was not a murderer. He had not stolen another person's goods. He had not committed adultery. He was a pretty good guy. But when he understood the 10th Command, which had to do with the heart, coveting, Then he realized he was a sinner in spite of what he had thought about himself before. Today, a great many people realize they just aren't all that right. There's something wrong. They say they're not in sync with the world or with astrological forces. They attend seminars. They go to counselors and advisors. They go to big get-togethers and conferences of like-minded people and promote unity and peace and dabble in mysticism and do other things that men have determined are avenues of getting right with themselves. And none of it does any good toward fixing the real problem, which is the fact that they are God-haters and they are in a war against the ruler of everything. And that is not something that can be dealt with by our own efforts. Even churches sometimes get on this bandwagon. Some preach positive thinking. Others emphasize counseling or small groups or self-help programs. Anything but face the confrontation in which people are told. that their most basic problem is that they are sinners who are at the brink of a terrible pit, and that unless they repent from that, that they will be out of sync with the whole rest of creation forever in a way that they would not have dreamed of in their wildest nightmares. Many people do not get that in their churches. Why did God give the law to Moses? What was the purpose of God's righteous law and its demand? One reason then was to enable them to see themselves as they really are. They're in need of saving, to see their need of grace. And so you see the righteous demand of the law and the righteous, gracious provision of the covenant of grace go hand in hand. By grace, God gave the law, and by grace, he saves from the law's condemnation. We see this explained further in the next section, which comes to us from verses 21 through 29. This is the promise of God's invitation. He begins the section by asking the question, what purpose then does the law serve? Verse 19. Consider first, law and grace work as opposites only if both are legitimate ways of salvation. Only if they are competitors. But when the respective objectives of law and grace are understood, then they are recognized as working together. The law cannot save. The law condemns. What saves? The gracious promise of God savingly applied to the individual's heart. The law then accomplishes its very design. Listen to this. The law accomplishes its very design by showing what it cannot accomplish. It never saved anyone. It never was designed to save anyone. Instead, it locked people up, to use the wording here, According to this first clause of verse 22, it locks them up. Now what does that mean? The law is like iron shackles placed on the legs of a criminal. People who try to get free from those shackles by their own efforts only make their misery worse. But then someone comes along and offers to release him. The prisoner does not ask when that happens for the credentials of the one who has the key to the shackles. He does not ask for proof that he really has the authority to release him from his misery. He begs it from whomever can give it regardless. He simply accepts the rescuer's promise to ease him from his never-ending pain on his ankles. The rescuer alone, alone can do what the prisoner could not do. namely, break the lock which the bands have on him. He alone can set the prisoner free. And this brings us then back to the promise. What is the promise of God? It is not only a promise of some future benefit of getting pie in the sky by and by when we die. That is not it at all. It is not only a promise of future benefit, it is also promise of fulfillment here and now, right here, Sunday night in this church, now, fulfillment. It is not just a promise with only a future orientation, heaven when we die. The promise of God is that he will release today from the curse of the law, all those who come to him in trusting faith, and their redemption is actualized in the here and now, as soon as they place their trust in Christ, the one who has rescued them from the terror of being breakers of God's only law. It's important, I think a lot of people don't understand that, because when that happens, 16 implies, and as is stated elsewhere, the one who does that will be a son of God, a co-heir with Christ, dividing equally all the heavenly blessings laid up for him and his elect because of what God did for him. And most folks, I'm afraid, don't understand that. And I wanna flesh that out just a moment when we get into the conclusion. The promise of God's invitation, It is release from the curse of the law and adoption into the family of God, full and complete now. And that brings us to our conclusion. Three points, if I remember right. I rewrote the last four pages this afternoon when I woke up from my nap, because I just wasn't happy with what I'd written. think it makes sense this time and that it's somewhat applicable, so that's why I said I think there's three points of application here. But point one, what place does the law have in the law-grace relationship? The law prepares the elect individual to receive God's grace through faith by instructing him that he is without hope because he is a lawbreaker. We don't still have the problem of Judaism with us. We don't still have people telling us that we gotta receive some part of the Mosaic law in order to be saved. Now there are some, I'm told, who do that. They're called root Hebrews or something like that these days. I just was made aware of that a few days ago. But we here in this part of the world, we don't have people telling us we've got to accept part of the Mosaic Law in order to be saved, but we do have people telling us that we must be baptized to be saved, or that we must walk an aisle in a revival or make some other outward sign of faith in order to be saved. And we still have our nagging consciences, don't we? When we know we have not measured up reminding us that we are sinners when we drop the ball, speaking to us and saying to us in whatever form, can a person be as bad as you are and yet still be a Christian? Can a person be like you are and still be loved by God? And so we're not completely free from the problem plaguing these Galatian Christians. And so we must understand that, secondly, the result of true or saving faith is union with Christ. Look at verses 26 through 29. Let me read them again. If I can find them down here. Verses 26 through 29. In Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith. All children of God through faith. For all of you who are baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. The iron bands of the law had served to prepare many people to receive Christ. And to use the wording of verses 24 and 25, the law was like a tutor, T-U-T-O-R, a tutor to teach them about themselves and their need. And in the day and time when this was all written, a tutor was often, or was always a teacher and usually a slave who escorted the student and an authority to discipline, and his job was to educate him and to train him in aristocratic lifestyle. But when one reached adulthood, he no longer needed that tutor, a chaperone, a disciplinarian, because, ideally, because the outward precepts had become the inward and abiding principles of life. That was the whole purpose of it. Well, in the same way, the outward precepts of the law should become the inward principles of life in those who are God's people. They showed us how far short we fall. They should now instruct us in how to be right in our daily living. Therefore, as Paul says in verse 28, there is no male or female, no Jew or Greek. All in God's family are simply redeemed. All are saved on the same ground by the same grace, and all are going to the same place. All are part of Abraham's seed, singular. All of us are part of the body of Christ. And third and finally, since all of this comes through faith, the final part that I would discuss is that of living by faith. In other words, if one wonders whether he is among the redeemed or not, then let him remember God's gracious promise first and then look at his life. Two things. If the promise has been trusted in, if you have placed your trust in Christ, in other words. Is the law of God now becoming your principle of life? Or, to put it in modern lingo, is there change? Can you see spiritual development and change? Not change based upon how we think we ought to do or how we want to do, but upon how God's law says we ought to do. Is our orientation changing from self to Christ? When we have a big decision to make, do we say, as trite as it is, nonetheless, what would Jesus do? Do we wonder, what would God have me to do now? Or do we think only about what I would like to do or what would further my own situation or something like that? The man of faith demonstrates that by ordering his works and his life according to the light of God's revelation. It becomes evident by his altruistically serving both God and man as God gives opportunity. And when that happens, that is his inward evidence that he is indeed a child of the King. We have the promise of God, and we have the inward evidence of a changed life. That is what God gives us by his grace, and that is why all of you can leave this room tonight knowing, as I'm sure you did when you came in, but nonetheless, that you're a child of the king, that you are numbered among the elect, and you never have to wonder, never, ever, if you're good enough or have measured up enough to be called a Christian. Thank God for that wonderful, gift of grace which he has given us. It's all we have and it's enough. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you, oh God, for your goodness and your grace made not just available to us, but which has been poured into us. I pray, oh Lord, that all of us in here would always place our trust in the promise that we would always, oh God, live our lives for the sake of Christ and the kingdom according to your divine word, that we would, oh Lord, approach that day when we will pass over, as we all will one day, as more than conquerors, Indeed, it's looking forward to the great next step of our lives because of what you have done for us. Thank you, God, that you brought us to repentance. Thank you for showing us to be the miserable creatures which we were. And thank you for making us your children by adoption. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.