Now, as we come to our notes this week, let me remind you of two things. Firstly, as I'm speaking, I'm not going through everything that's in the notes that you have before you week by week. and certainly not everything that's in this commentary that's there available for $3 and you'll find one of Jeff's commentaries also at the back which is a superb sort of compacted commentary. So what I'm saying week by week is not a full expression of what's in here. But this and this and Jeff's commentary and other things that you can get your hands on are all for you to fill out the letter to the Galatians in your own time and your reading. I'm trying to take you through the sort of main line of argument all the way through and how that applies pastorally to us. So as you listen, bear in mind that you've got all these other resources to read and devote yourself to. And we have a set of notes there, notionally called Galatians Week 7. We have two more sessions to go, but in fact I'll be speaking next week in Newcastle on a Lenten teaching mission for a week. So you'll have a double Trevor next week, Trevor 1 and Trevor 2. And then the 1st of April, which is appropriate, you'll have a double Noel. My mum was born on the 31st of March. We always teased her about that, that it wasn't really that date, but they changed it for mercy's sake. Chapter 3, verse 23. But before faith came, and the faith he's speaking about is the faith in Jesus Christ. There were people of faith beforehand, like Abraham and so forth, but the faith that he's speaking about is the faith of Christ, and our faith reflexively in Christ. So we could almost put, before the faith came, verse 23, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Therefore the law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, or the faith has come, the gospel, the word of Christ, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who are baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to promise. Now I say, as long as an heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave, although he's the owner of everything. But he's under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of this world. But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those who are under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then you are an heir through God. Verse 8, we'll just read but won't go into that just at the moment. However, at that time, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those which by nature are no gods. Now, there's a very strong vocabulary used here. Verse 8 speaks about being in slavery under gods which were no gods. Further up in Chapter 3 you have the language of a custodian or a guardian or being held in captivity. You have the language of a tutor which we'll explain in a moment which is not just a tutor to give instructions in the reading, writing and arithmetic. You have words here which on the negative side, so to speak, contrast with redemption. At a certain time Christ appeared, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who are under the law. Now redemption in the Old Testament relates to the matter of slavery, buying back out of debt, releasing from bondage, In one sense, Exodus, the story of the Exodus was a redemption from slavery under Pharaoh, the false god of this age. In another example of redemption, you get the story of Ruth and Boaz, which is just a beautiful picture in some ways of Christ and his church. You have the possibility of people redeeming others from debt. So that language of redemption that Christ appeared in order to redeem us, on the other side of that means that we needed to be redeemed. And that's emphasized by the language of slavery and being under custodians and so forth. Paul speaks a bit about us being shut up. He talks about us being imprisoned. He talks about us being held in captivity. So what has happened? And the answer is this, that there is nothing wrong, as we've said and as Paul says elsewhere, with the law. The law is holy and righteous and good, it is the law of God. But as the law comes to us, it meets our sinful flesh and our sinful flesh responds to and reacts to the law And the guilt of the transgression of the law, the law comes, we saw last week, not to make us good but to show us how bad we are. The guilt that is provoked by the law, the fear of condemnation, the fear of judgment, the works of the law that then flow out of that terrible mess in order to try and alleviate the fear and the condemnation, these things hold us in slavery under the law. Now Paul's writing to a group of people here who in the Galatian churches have not necessarily been Jewish people before they were Christians. You get from chapter 4 verse 8 the fact that they were idol worshippers. And we made the point that the principle of walking according to law works, applies across the human race and all societies and all religious systems, so that law as a captivity, law as a bondage, is a universal state in humanity. What the giving of the Lord did through Moses on Mount Sinai was to give even clearer expression of the guilt under which we were bound. It took a general failure of the law to achieve righteousness because it was impossible to do so through our flesh and multiplied that into myriads of specific transgressions which showed us the extent of the wickedness of the human heart by which we could never achieve righteousness. Now that law bondage across all cultures and all religious systems was broken in the Galatians situation by the preaching of the gospel. They heard Jesus Christ publicly portrayed as crucified. They received the gift of the Spirit by hearing with faith. They were brought out from under the bondage of the law In that case the idols, the law of the idols, the deep dark superstition of that idolatrous worship. But now certain people had come down with what looked like a very godly law because it came from the God of the Old Testament, God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And they were saying in effect, yes you've been released from that but you've been brought now under this and this is what life is to be about, is this new law. And Paul, in writing against those false teachers, has to expound the gospel all over again. And in that context, he's been asking this question. Why then did God give the law to Moses? And the answer we saw last week was a very unexpected answer. The law was given not to bring us more righteousness through the law, but to drive us, to shut us up, to imprison us to Christ. Because a man being deluded and deceived might think that he's kept the commandments until he sees that the heart and soul of the commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself. Hands up the person who's done that, we're all condemned, aren't we? We're all condemned. So how has that law functioned? And Paul uses here an extended illustration. It's an illustration that's taken from Greco-Roman life and the details of this we're not fully sure of because we don't have enough evidence from wider than the scriptures. But it seems to be that in certain families this practice was followed. If you particularly were a wealthy family, a patrician family, you had extended lands and land holdings, Over that family there was a father, he was called in Latin the Pater Familius, the father of the family. But that fatherhood over the whole estate extended to everyone. So there were slaves who were under the Pater Familius, there were other workers, paid workers who were under the Pater Familius, then there were his children. One of the reasons that Paul makes much about the fatherhood of God, I think, in Ephesians, is because across the whole of the Roman Empire, the emperor was the father of the fatherland. And Paul's saying, strangers and aliens of this Father on the earth, but you are citizens of the Father in heaven. And every member of Christ's body across the whole world belongs to that fatherhood, not the other fatherhood. So what did a pater familius, what did a head of the estate do? And the practice seems to be this. When the children were little, He gave them into the care of someone who is here translated as a tutor, sometimes translated custodian. The word is Paidagogos. It's a word from which we get in English things like pedagogy or however you pronounce that, educational practice, pedagogic. And this tutor was not simply an instructor, but a master. The practice seems to be that this Paidagogos was a slave within the Paedophilius' household and he was given complete charge of all of the children. As a slave, he did what the master of the household had commanded and commissioned him to do. But from the children's point of view, they experienced life under the rule of a slave, of a Paitagogos. So he taught them things, he taught them how to read and to write and to add up sums and do all those sort of things. But even more, he ruled over them as a slave ruling over other slaves. That makes sense of what you read in chapter 4 verse 1. As long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave, although he is the owner of everything. Technically speaking, that child was the heir of the entire estate. But in his own experience, he might as well have been a slave, because the Paitagogos ruled over him with a big stick, literally. So the child had to get up when the Paitagogos said, had to go to bed when the Paitagogos said, they had to do their exercises when he said, everything was at the bidding of this master. So the child therefore experienced life as a slave even though technically he was the heir of the entire estate. Now some children, even though they are fully heirs of the entire estate, like the elder brother in the prodigal story, they think that's the way life is. Even though they have been released from that slavery, they still think that this is the way life is. I've served you all thy days and I've never transgressed and you've never even offered me a goat, let alone a fattened calf. Interestingly enough, in that story of the prodigal son, There's only one son who does not deal falsely, and that's the son who's telling the parable. You can't understand the parable of the prodigal son without hearing it on the lips of the one son who has come for both sons, who are both lost in different ways. But as the Paitagogos exercised his rule, the children in the household learned the difference between being a slave and being a son. At a certain time, at a time set by the father, and we're not sure when that was, but it may be that the age of this paedagogos status was from 6 to 16 or thereabouts, but at a certain time set by the father, the child would come into his inheritance. And at that point, Paul says it's sort of like an adoption, verse 3 of chapter 4, or verse 2, we were under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. So we also, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world. We were held in bondage under the elementary things of this world. in an educational sense, your ABCs, you know, your very rudimentary things. It may also perhaps even have a military connotation, which means that you're held, so to speak, in rank and file, and you're held under the bondage of things that are held in rank and file, so there's no escape for you. It's sort of a hard military imprisonment. And if you've ever been in a situation where you've spoken to someone like these Galatian believers were before they were believers, where they were worshipping idols, you know how heavy and hard that bondage is on them. There is just no release. It's fear and fear and fear. And you have to fulfill duty after duty after duty. You're just held under it. And so also it was for the law of Israel, for those who wanted to be justified by those works of the law, so they were just held under them all the time. And Peter, you remember, says at one place, Shall we put a yoke of burden on the necks of these who are coming to faith in Christ, which neither we nor our fathers were ever able to bear? So there's a time set by the Father for us to come into our majority. But that time being set by the Father could not come simply by the Father saying, the time is here, you're free. If He could do that, then there would be no need for Christ to come. So the time set by the Father is the appearing of Christ. And you get that in chapter 4, verse 4. The fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those who were under the law. So he became a man under the law, But the point of being under the law was that he might redeem us from being under the law. Now he was not under the law in the way that we were under the law because in his own body there was no sin and the law therefore was his delight. The law was just the way of life because the law was the law of love as it always is. The law was fulfilled in him completely. He loved the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. And he loved his neighbour as himself and he delighted to do the Father's will. And so his yoke was easy and his burden was light. And he came to people who were under the law in the sense of being under its curse and its wrath and its judgement because that bondage was fuelled by our guilt and our shame. And where in being fueled by our guilt and shame, it drove us to works of law, it drove us ever deeper, deeper, deeper down into a bondage of heart and mind and conscience and darkness and wrath and depravity and so forth. So the Son comes as the Redeemer to redeem those who are under the law. He has to bring them out from their slavery. Paul has already told us in chapter 3 how he did that, and the answer is he came under the curse of the law. The curse of all of the transgression of the law, the curse of the broken law, the curse of all of the guilt that the law has revealed in us. The law itself is not wrong, but it has come to reveal how wrong we are under it. And once it's revealed that, if you run to works of the law in order to try and remedy the situation, you get yourself in even more bondage. So Christ came in order to bear the curse of the law in his body on the tree, which we've spoken about from Galatians chapter 3. And in bearing that curse and bearing his judgment in the body, in his body on the tree, he released us from the curse of the law. He released us from the law in the sense that we were under the law beforehand as custodians and guardians. And he's released us in the law of love to have that law written on our hearts by the Holy Spirit. The New Covenant promise was that in the totality of the forgiveness of sins, everyone would know God from the least of them to the greatest of them. And in knowing God from the least of them to the greatest of them, they would no longer teach their neighbor, sowing know the Lord, they would all know Him, because in forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, He would write His law on our hearts. So Paul says in another place to the Thessalonians, for example, you have no need for anyone to teach you how to love one another because that law is already written on your heart. You have no need for anyone to teach you how to love God because that law is already written on your heart in the New Covenant promises. So that law, which is the perfect law of liberty, the perfect law of love, comes to us in Christ as our redeemed status as sons. Does that all make sense? Now, when Christ came and redeemed us from the law by being under the law, he redeemed us through an act which removes once and forever, for all time, the judgment that attaches to law. So that you are never under the judgment of that broken law in Christ. You're a justified man or a justified woman. And the old statement was what? Just if I'd never sinned. Now there is a difference. There's a difference between just if you'd never sinned and having never sinned. Being just as if you'd never sinned means you have to know that by faith and you have to hold it by faith. And that's why you need the gospel all the time to come to us, and why you continually need to hear the word of Christ crucified to tell you that you are a justified person. But it is the reality that in regard to judgment, which is the point that John makes in 1 John chapter 4, in regard to judgment, as Christ is, so are we in this world. As Christ is, so are we in this world. that Paul cannot separate the life of a believer from the life of Christ. If you just run your eye back to chapter 3, verse 24, for the law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ so that we may be justified by faith. Now it's important to note that you're led to Christ You are not justified by your doctrine of justification. There are many people who will have a very poor doctrine of justification and never have any assurance and never be certain that God has loved them and they can never be confident that God would welcome them because they say, I'm such a sinner and my sins will debar me. But if, even in a very small sense, as it were, they are trusting in Christ, not themselves, they are justified by Christ. So are there many, many, many Christians who in the world have never heard or understood that there is a doctrine called justification by faith? Or it's actually better expressed, justification by grace through faith. Would that be true? But does that make them any less united to Christ? No. So you stand in Christ as a justified man or a woman, and you hold that by faith, that justified status that you have is what you know by grace, and in that status, being justified by grace through faith, you are no longer, verse 25, under a tutor, custodian, guardian, because you're fully united to Christ, and you're a full heir with the Father, to use the parable of the prodigal son language, you have a robe upon you, and you have sandals on your feet, and you have a signet ring put on your hand, and your life now is hidden with Christ in God, and you are wrapped up in Christ, to use Luther's expression. And so he says, verse 27, for all of you who are baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There can be no thought that you can separate yourself now from Christ. You will know from your own experience that as soon as the accusation of the law comes to you, because the evil one, as one British theologian said, the evil one has a one-sided obsession with law. And he operates continually as an accuser. Sorry about that. He operates continually as an accuser of the brethren because, put it this way beloved, who of us here has something of which he could accuse us? Like in the last 24 hours? Or less? You've probably heard me tell the story once, which I believe to be a true story, but these men like Spurgeon and them, they're so big. He was a big man, Spurgeon. I can hide behind him on this point. He had someone in his congregation on one occasion said something to him like this. Oh, Mr. Spurgeon, he said, she said, I just want you to know that for these last six weeks, I have not sinned. And Spurgeon had a great sense of humour. He said, oh madam, you must be very proud of that. She said, oh yes I am. That's the problem, isn't it? That we could be so conscious of the fact that we've not sinned by transgressing whatever law it is about anything, that you then stand off and look at the younger brother who's transgressed everything and say, thank God I'm not like him. And then we look at the older brother and thank God we're not like him. And so it just goes. So the evil one has huge arsenal of accusation. He can dredge things up from 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, how old are you? 80 years ago? You're not that old, I know that, I'm joking. He can dredge things up from two seconds ago. And he has a one-sided obsession with the law which says, look at this, look at that, look at that. How can you call yourself a Christian? How can you come to these classes? How can you believe that you're free? You deserve death and hell and damnation. You deserve nothing but wrath and judgment. Your conscience says, well, that's right, isn't it? But it would be even better to say, well, yeah, that is right. I've been killed. I've been put to death in Christ, so say what you like. And that death in Christ has not covered me just up until today, that death of Christ has covered me from when I was born to when I die. Because nothing is more certain in this world, I'm going to stumble and fall. Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. When you're just at the point of thinking, I could never be tempted by this or that or the next thing, bang! I'm getting better and better and I'll make it in the end and I always come a cropper just when I'm filled with pride. So you just have to stand as a justified man or a woman every day. And as believers with one another, we have to relate to one another as justified men and women every day. There are a number of married couples I can see in this room. What happens if you don't relate to that man or woman next to you as a justified believer every day? What starts to emerge? Bitterness, wrath, envy. Is that true? Jealousy? So we stand in Christ as Christ's justified people, those who have been redeemed under that curse of the law, and instead therefore of coming to God in an attitude of slavery, where we cringe and hide because we think we have no right to be there and He wouldn't want anything to do with us, we come in Christ as His sons and daughters, But because we're all in the Son, we're all sons. No longer male nor female, just sons in the Son. And the writer to the Hebrews puts it this way, you approach boldly the throne of grace. Therefore, having been justified by grace, we have peace with God and we stand in a reconciled relationship with God. And we have access in one Son to the Father by the Spirit. And what emerges in your heart as a justified man and woman, united to Christ, is a cry that was never there before. Abba. Abba, Father. You never had that cry in your heart before. The closest you might have got was perhaps a formal recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Before you ever got to that, it would have just been God, or perhaps if you'd had an evangelical upbringing, dear Lord Jesus. But the dear Lord Jesus, if I can be a bit bold in saying this, is not good enough. because he's come to bring us to the Father. Our faith does not terminate on the Lord Jesus Christ. It's through Jesus Christ that all glory is given to the Father. And as we come to the Father, by faith in the Son, as his adopted sons in Christ, as his justified sons in Christ, we cry, Abba, Father. So that cry, Abba, is a cry which we find also on the lips of Jesus Christ. It's his habitual means of addressing God. Now there's been a lot written on the cry, Abba, Father. It is a cry, it's a cry, the emphasis is on the verb as much as on the noun. It's not just that we call him Abba, the noun Abba, in some formal sense, but we cry Abba. Because under the weight of the accusation of the evil one and sin and death and everything else that presses in, if you don't have Abba to flee to, but the cry comes out, Abba, Abba, Father. It comes from the very deepest depths of your heart by the Holy Spirit. And we sang that beautiful hymn last week. I know not how to pray, O Lord." So that when, in the midst of the perplexities of life and what Luther called the Anfechtungen, those great spiritual crises that come upon us, and we're very, very quick to blame ourselves for a lot of happens, but stuff comes upon us too. The Lord gives permission for Satan to come sometimes. But you just at that point, as Luther says, you cling to Christ and you sigh. And the sighing is, as he says in Romans, too deep to utter. The sighing is not the gift of tongues because tongues can be uttered. The sighing is something so deep it cannot be uttered. It's a sigh and a cry of the heart. And sometimes during times of grief or sorrow or testing or accusation and darkness from the evil one where death is near and life is vain, all you can do is sigh. You don't have a word. And there will come a time for each of us somewhere when death comes so gently, finally. where we won't be able to formulate a word, but there'll still be that sigh going on from within. Because it's not our prayer, it's the prayer of the Spirit of Christ in our hearts. And the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 8 says just a beautiful and remarkable thing. He says that God searches the hearts, and when God searches the hearts of his children, what he hears coming up from the depths of their heart is the prayer of the Spirit. So we may think at a certain point that we do not know how to pray, and that's true, we don't. And we may think that death is near and life is vain, and we may think that all is darkness and all is lost, and we may stand for some time in Psalm 88 where there is no resolution. to the darkness and the depression. But all the time the spirit is sighing within us. And while we feel the weight of the accusation of the evil one in our conscience and everything else pressing in upon us to kill us and condemn us, from within this sigh goes up because we are united to Christ as sons of the living God. And because of that union with Christ, and because of that work being as complete as it is, and because of that union being as inseparable as it is, and because of that union actually being brought to us by the living person of the Holy Spirit as it is, God hears the Spirit. Not all of our doubts and our fears. Not all of the accusations that press him. Not all of the darkness and the despair and the death and the gloom. God hears the voice of the Spirit crying, Abba Father. And Luther in another passage says when a little child is attacked by a wild dog, the father doesn't get angry with the child. The father comes to drive off the dog and bring the child home to himself. So right to our very last days, we are under an attack. Would that be true? The world, the flesh, the devil? And in that place, because we're united to Christ by faith, God's whole purpose is to bring us through that to himself. Now you and I can never take on that spiritual conflict. Like if you try and stand against the devil in all of the darkness of all that he brings to you, how do you get on? You try and answer him and what happens? You just spiral down further and further and further and further, don't you? I remember Jeffrey telling me on one occasion he was going through a certain spiritual period of great testing. And he said, for hours I just had to say to myself, no, I am a man in Christ. No, I am a man in Christ. No, I am a man in Christ. Because you are not your own. You've been bought with a price. And that price has brought for you an inheritance which is reserved in heaven for you, which is imperishable and unable to be defiled. And you are now as one of God's beloved sons, heirs within his household. And he teaches you to cry, Abba, Father, all the way through. I'm getting a bit older now. I'm sort of the age that I am now when my dad was, when I was about nine or ten or something. And I can remember looking at my dad at one of their wedding anniversaries. They were dancing around the hall at Nyiripa and I looked at all these old people doing the military two-step and stuff and I thought, how embarrassing. But as you get older, the reality of justification has to get more powerful to you. When you're younger, you can just sort of press on. But as you get older, there's not enough strength for you just to press on. And when you get older, you've got more history. Like, there's people here in this room older than me, so you take my age, which is not going to be given away on tape, and your age, and try and compute the difference. Unless you've lived spotlessly between my age and your age, you've got even more stuff, haven't you? So as you get older and as death draws nearer, the doctrine of justification grows more beautiful. But it's not the doctrine, it's the person. Because we are heirs through God, not heirs through our understanding of the doctrine. We're heirs through God. So here we are as God's beloved children. Verse 7, no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir through God. The purpose of being a son was that you could range through the whole estate just in utter freedom because it was all yours. Now Paul comes to that matter of freedom in chapter 5 and we're going to spend some time on that when we come to it in our double session on April the 1st. But that freedom is the freedom of love. He tells us that the law is fulfilled in this one word, you shall love your neighbour as yourself. He tells us in Romans chapter 13 about the law being fulfilled. If there's any other commandment, it's fulfilled in this law of love. The liberty is in the liberty of love. The liberty is in the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience and so forth, they are your freedom as a son. Now what the law does in the negative sense, trying to bring us back as an agent of the flesh and the devil under captivity, is to snatch away our freedom. Because the very first thing that happens when you start to walk law way instead of grace way is that love goes. Love for God goes because he becomes a hard taskmaster who is always demanding more and can never be pleased. Love for your neighbor goes, because all you see in them is the way they failed. And love for God's people, the church goes, because you think, well, they're just all hypocrites. So, Paul is very concerned here for them, the Galatians, to live in the freedom that they've been brought in Christ, not to be brought back under captivity again. It doesn't mean that they would lose their salvation. It does mean that instead of living as free sons on the estate, so to speak, if I could put it this way, riding out on this free range of love, joy, peace, patience and goodness, you could just ride in that for all eternity and never bump into a fence. They are sort of hedged and boxed in. I remember in one of the very early missions I heard Jeff speak on, he said a man came to him and said, You're too free. I live in an iron cage of verses. Lots of Christians live in iron cages of verses. So, he reminds them of where they came from and he says, I don't want you to be enslaved. Verse 8. However, at that time when you did not know gods, you were slaves to those things by which in nature are no gods. But now that you've come to know God, or rather been known by God, how is it that you turn back to the weak and worthless elemental things to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? See the language of slavery coming back in? You observe days and months and seasons as the years. I feel for you that perhaps I've labored over you in vain. I don't want you, having come to this point of liberty, by whatever law it is now, might seem good, might seem strong evangelical law, when you come under it, your love will go, your freedom will go, your joy will go, your peace will go, and it will just be hard. We're going to stop there. We have got the last two and a bit chapters to finish in two sessions, so it's going to be a race. I'm sorry I've not worked this out very well.