Be honest with you right up front here, this is a sermon that I probably wanted to preach for 20 years, many, many, many years before I ever thought I would preach anything, because 20 years ago, I certainly wasn't planning on doing this for a career. But I was in college and a couple of the things I'm going to read here right up front really struck me as odd. And so I hope that you'll kind of bear with me. This is a different kind of a sermon. More thoughts that I've had that I tried to put down on paper for you. And stick with me through the sermon. Bear with me to the very end so that you hear the context of what I'm talking about, so that you understand rightly what it is that I am going to say. And what I want to do is I want to give you kind of three case studies that relate to Galatians 328. And let's read this verse again together. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Now, see if you can find the similarities and differences in the stories I'm going to tell you. First one, a popular Christian feminist author writes this. Nearly two millennia, for nearly two millennia, The approach of the Christian church toward the role of women usually has been to sanction the view current in mainstream secular society, decreeing it to be the biblical role for women. If the role of women changed in society, it would change in the church as well. This typically has been the determining factor in the stance of the church toward women, with the exception of Paul, who writes in a patriarchal culture, there is neither male nor female in Christ. That's the first story. Second, one in college. I remember a session in a certain class. I couldn't remember the name of the class, but I remember this instance very well in my life. We were talking about slavery. Slavery, I was told, used to be acceptable to God, but today it is outlined outlawed by the Bible. Under no circumstances is slavery ever allowable now, because Paul says in Christ, there is neither slave nor free. And then here's the third one. A couple of years ago, when we were visiting Israel's only reformed Baptist church, we entered into a worship service where three different languages could be heard to through interpreters and one from the pulpit. They were Russian, English and Hebrew. And there was in a room full of American, Russian and Jewish Christians. And it was pretty chaotic, but Pastor Baruch felt very strongly that this was the way things needed to be, because in God's kingdom, Paul teaches there's neither Jew nor Greek. Now, all three of these have a similarity, all use the same text of Galatians 328 to make a point. However, there are differences. The first two cases apply their situations to the city of man, while the last applies it in the city of God. By the city of man, I mean the world, and by the city of God, I mean the church. The first case is a little different still, because it tries to apply Paul's language in the church, just like the third case. But in that case, the argument is still rooted in what is culturally acceptable and that this ought to therefore be acceptable in the church as well. And so it is very firmly planted in the city of man. Now, frankly, the history of the church has proven one thing. People are capable of making the Bible say whatever they wanted to say. about almost any passage to almost any situation that they desire. Now, it is true that almost every Christian feminist book anchors their argument in Galatians 328. I can remember the first time I heard this position taught in a class, and I've had it taught to me in several classes. The professors argue that all roles or functions between men and women are now blurred together because of Paul's remarkable new insight. Nothing should prohibit a woman from doing anything that a man can do. And I can also remember thinking that's not what Paul's teaching in this verse. You might be able to prove that from someplace else, but not here. I also remember raising my hand in the class on slavery and responding like this. I don't think that verse says that slavery is inherently evil and that this verse can be used as a justification for something like the Civil War. Now, before you get the same rabid look in your eyes that I received when I made that comment in the class, please know that I think it is a moral sin to treat other human beings as subhuman at every time, in every place. But I also realize that this same passage, the context of this passage, teaches that everybody's a slave to something, doesn't it? You can't get away from slavery, and I talked about that last week. But I had a different reaction when I went into Baruch's church. Now, I was definitely not used to the near chaos of so many people packed into a little tiny room. Their worship style was different from the style I prefer. It was difficult to focus on the worship because of all the things that were taking place. But I also thought there's something right about this. I did not have the same kind of reaction to what he was doing as the other two cases. Now, why might that be? Well, that's what I'm going to muse on for you this morning. Let's go to the text and see if we can figure out exactly what it means that in Christ these distinctions are no longer there. Part of the problem people have when they abuse this passage is a fundamental misunderstanding of the law. Now, as we've seen before, it is common for people to take a verse like Romans 6, 14, which says you're not under law, but under grace. And they'll take that to mean law has no place in a person's life anymore. It is abolished, done away with, obliterated into a billion tiny atoms. Unless, of course, a lot of them will say Jesus gives us a new law, which might just so happen to be exactly like the old law, then let's say we need to obey that. This view of a law of law is a failure to understand the purpose of law. And how it was never intended when given to fallen men to be a means of eternal life. When people misuse it like this and see that grace has come through Christ, they think that God is setting aside one thing for another thing. And that's exactly what's going on. Many times in the interpretation of Galatians 328. Can you see the similarity here between these two things? Law has no place anymore in a person's life. And in Christ, there is no longer male and female. Both view a new situation. As replacing an older situation. But the older situation, they think, has passed away has been misunderstood in the first place. I'm not bringing together two unrelated things here, this isn't just my hobby horse rather in the text itself, they are woven together like a fine tapestry in the passage, you see, it is because the law is not contrary to the promises that Paul ends up concluding there is neither slave nor free. So if you get three Galatians three, twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, twenty four wrong, you will misunderstand Galatians three, twenty eight. And likewise, if you get Galatians three, twenty eight wrong, it's because you misunderstood law and grace at its core. Now, to explain this better, it will be helpful to look specifically At some of these verses, I look at verses twenty six to twenty nine. Let me read them to you again. In Christ, you are all sons of God through faith, for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free. There is no male and female. You are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. Now, the first thing I want you to notice is how verse twenty eight is sandwiched between all sons of God on the one end and Abraham's offspring on the other end. In other words, the removal of the distinctions between slave and free. Jew and Gentile, male and female, is directly related to becoming part of God's family. And in other words, this is about status, not function. Now, one of the problems somebody might claim against my view of Galatians 328 is that in some sense, all six of these groups were allowed to have the same status in the Old Testament. Actually, that's going to be my very argument against them, but hold on for that. This view, they will argue, presumes that it's not true that everybody had the same status before. And so to say this is primarily about status might imply that somehow Paul did not think Gentile slaves and women were ever included in God's family in the Old Testament. Is Paul saying that the Old Testament, that in the Old Testament only free male Jews were slaves? were saved. Three male Jews were saved. Is that the implication of saying that now in Christ, women, slaves and Gentiles are included into the family of God? Is that what he's doing? Of course not. Paul knows full well that Gentiles were included in the family of God in the Old Testament, doesn't he? He knows about Rahab and Ruth. Gentile grandmothers of Christ. He knows about Manasseh and Ephraim, Joseph's two sons born to an Egyptian woman who are two of the twelve tribes of Israel. But Paul also knows that for a Gentile to be saved, they had to become Jews. They had to undergo the religious ceremonies of Jews, particularly to undergo circumcision. That's the concern here. In other words, these Gentiles had to come under Israel's covenant law. They had to become proselytes. They had to convert to Judaism in order to be saved. He's saying that this is no longer the case. Similarly, there is nothing in the Old Testament that says slaves or women were not saved. In fact, you're told the very opposite. Now, if that's true, then how is Paul talking about status and not function like feminists or liberation theology likes to claim? They say this is about function. This is about. Being able to be pastors in the church. If people were all saved back then and all these people are saving Christ today, then what's the difference? Well, I kind of just mention it. I want you to look at verse twenty seven. As many of you as were baptized into Christ to put on Christ. Now, that is not a proverb, OK? It's coming in the middle of a letter that is an argument that is being worked out in Paul's thinking. This is a direct allusion to what? Anybody know? You've been in this church a long time. The ordination ceremony of the priest in Exodus, twenty nine, one through nine. In that ceremony, before he could begin his ministry, the priest had to undergo a baptism in water in the labor of the tabernacle or the sea of the temple. Then he was given his new priestly clothing, and after his ordination was complete, he was able to perform his ministry. Now, again, you might say, well, but doesn't ministry deal with function? Well, to some degree it does. But first and foremost, it deals with status. Prior to his baptism and clothing, he was not a priest, he was just a Jew. After his baptism and clothing, he was a priest. His status changed. Now, Paul relates the status here not to a priestly ministry, though I will talk about that in a minute. But to being in Christ, you see, that's what the verse says in Christ. At baptism, a person has moved ceremonially, it's a sign and a seal of something else that's happened. He's moved ceremonially from being outside of the kingdom to being inside of the kingdom. To be in Christ is to be saved. Baptism points outwardly to something that's taken place in the heart, the new birth or the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now, baptism also points to a new status within the community from an ordinary Jew to one able to serve before God as a priest. But first and foremost, this passage is talking about salvation here, isn't it? And he's doing it through an analogy directly related to the Old Testament law. You see, it was a law that the priest had to be washed and clothed. If he did not undergo this law, he did not get to be a priest, just pure and simple. This status of priest was only available to free Jewish men. Slaves could not become priests. Gentiles could not become priests. Women could not become priests. And this is exactly the same way it was with Gentiles who wanted to come into the kingdom of Israel. They had to become Jews. The point, then, is of our verse that the legal requirements for coming into the kingdom have been erased by Christ. And actually, they were never there to begin with, but perverted people think that that's the case. And Paul's dealing with the perversion of the law to be baptized into Christ is to be clothed with Christ and to be in Christ. No longer do Gentiles have to become proselytes. No longer do slaves have to seek their freedom because they are free in Christ. No longer do women have to feel like second class citizens to men because they are one in Christ. But if you do not understand that Paul is making a specific point about becoming heirs of the promises given to Abraham, if you don't understand the Gentile, the law background of this, if you don't understand that Paul's breaking down the divisions in order to make a point about how the strict demands of the law have been erased in Christ. By using an analogy of the law, then you're going to make Galatians 328 say more than it's trying to say. You will squeeze more juice out of this verse than it has to give you. You will pit this verse against other scriptures in such a way that you have to turn the entire New Testament ethic into cultural relativism. Where this alone is the higher principle in all other commandments regarding marriage or women or children or slavery were accommodations. Listen to this accommodations by the apostles, because, well, they knew it would take a long time for the government and culture to change their attitudes about this higher. Now, what am I talking about? I want you to think about some examples of this. In Ephesians six, In verse five, Paul says slaves obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling. And by the way, he wrote Ephesians after he wrote Galatians, did he forget what he wrote in Galatians? When we make Galatians 328 say more than Paul's trying to say, you end up pitting the in Christ, there's no more slaver free against this verse. So the question becomes, how can Paul, who said there's no more slave or free, turn around and tell slaves to obey their masters? You see that? That's a contradiction, and therefore, these people will say Paul accommodated himself to the sinful culture of the time. That law is culturally relative. Today, you could just as easily throw it out of your Bible for all the good it's worth. If he had his way, he would have told that slave to do everything in his power to get his freedom or else run away. Because really, in Christ, there is no slaver free and he needs to live like that in the real world. This is nonsense and it is a deep confusion of the two kingdoms. Notice in Galatians 328, Paul's concern here is with the kingdom of God. being in Christ, right? He isn't talking about how Christ has somehow magically eradicated all slavery in the city of man. But people torture the text to make it say all kinds of things it doesn't say, of course, in Philemon. Remember what that little letter is about? It's about this issue of slavery, isn't it? And Paul writes to Philemon, the slave owner, and he asks him to set his slave Onesimus free. But he doesn't force him to do it based on some universal principle of Galatians 328, that Christ has eradicated slavery in the city of man. He asked him to do it for Christ's sake, because this slave has been a great value to Paul and the furtherance of the gospel. But these people twist the scriptures and force them to contradict, make utter nonsense out of many different laws and turn the whole biblical ethic into cultural relativism. I'll look at another example, feminism. One feminist writes this in the new covenant. That's her starting place in the new covenant, all members are equal members. Now, I want you to stop right there. What does that imply about the old covenant? In the new covenant, they all have full privileges of membership in the spiritual body of Christ, men and women are not just equally saved, whatever that means, she says. Rather, men and women have equal status in the community to which their salvation has secured their membership. All are not simply equal in the community of believers, but all enjoy equal opportunity to participate in the spiritual and religious life of the community. That is what Galatians 328 is all about. In other words, women can be pastors. That's really the issue behind all of this. In other places, she writes that this is the most important text in the Bible on biblical equality and concludes, quote, It is a broad, broadly applicable statement of the inclusive nature of the new covenant, whereby all groups of people, regardless of their previous religious status under the law, have now become one in Christ. Have now become one in Christ. This misses the point entirely. And it shows you exactly what I've been talking about. Paul is not saying here that somehow now. In Christ, everybody is equally saved. That isn't his point, and I don't know anybody that argues that. Nor is he saying that now everyone has become one in Christ as it previously in the Old Testament, Gentiles like Ruth were not one in Christ with the rest of them. Do you see how this pits Old Testament against New Testament now? Law against grace. This verse is about eliminating the obstacles for people to achieve that equal status. That all Testament saints enjoyed, but had to jump through hoops in order to obtain. It isn't about pitting faith against law, as if somehow saying that Old Testament Gentiles were saved by law and faith and not faith. It's about showing how in Christ the laws that set one aside as God's people have been torn down in Christ. It isn't about the functions that God's people have in the church, much less about annihilating inborn distinctions between males and females. I want you to think about it this way. For verse after verse, it's been justification, justification, justification, justification. Now, all of a sudden, women can be pastors. Then justification, justification, justification, justification. See that? That's why they don't ever exegete this passage. Couldn't a person argue on the basis of this kind of thinking that because in Christ there's no longer male or female, that now homosexual marriages are acceptable in Christ? In fact, not only could people argue this way, they do. Couldn't you extend this to say that in Christ, there's no longer child or parents and that this would mean children should be allowed to reverse the roles of their parents. Discipline them or maybe sue them. Has that happened in our culture? Or maybe parents are no longer need to worry about exercising their authority over their children. They can abdicate their authority now and not train them up. After all, there's no more distinctions in Christ. See, these are absurdities, and there's almost no end to where you can go with this kind of thing. Feminists take specific commandments where Paul clearly forbids women from being elders, or where Jesus clearly chooses twelve men to be apostles, and they make them culturally relative. If Paul were living in modern, enlightened American culture, he clearly would not have made such old-fashioned arguments. He would allow women to be elders and pastors today. If Jesus were living today, he we are told he probably would have chosen six men and six women, but his culture didn't allow it. As if Christ was all about cultural sensitivity and he didn't want to rock the boat. You will even read people saying that Jesus did not even need to be a man. But God accommodated to the culture of the day and sent Jesus as a man, because that was acceptable and a woman couldn't have done the things that he did. Now, you might hear my argument with the priestly law in verse twenty seven and say that this means there are no longer distinctions in the priesthood. After all, doesn't the New Testament teach that we are a priesthood of believers? It does. Doesn't the New Testament teach that we're all able to offer our bodies as living sacrifices? Yeah, it does. Aren't we all attending God's New Testament temple right this very moment? We are. Wasn't attending the temple of the Old Testament the exclusive right of the priest? Yeah, it was. So doesn't that mean women can be pastors? No, it doesn't. There is a disconnect going on here that is subtle and dangerous. The disconnect is that even in the Old Testament, there were different classes of priests, of priests. Even back then, not every priest was able to serve in the holy places. Levites were considered priests, but their duties were restricted to diaconal services. But even within the priesthood of Aaron, there were distinctions. Only the high priest could go into the most holy place. The others were never allowed to go inside there. So the functional distinctions in the Old Testament, even though they were in some sense, all priests were still in place. Even though they all have this special status of priest, over all the rest of the Jews. So I try to solve this tension by doing two things. First. One of my presuppositions is I try as hard as I can not to pit one scripture against another, and nobody does this perfectly, but I try really hard not to do that. I think everybody tries to do that in some sense. But, honestly, if Galatians 328 is saying what I'm telling you that it says, that this is about showing how Gentiles don't need to become Jews anymore, then we don't have contradictions with other passages about women or slaves or parents or any of the rest of it. They just go away. The other view cannot say this. But my second thing is that I refuse With all my heart and soul to accept the premise that New Testament laws given to the church are somehow culturally driven. This is a confusion of the two kingdoms again. Now, yes, case laws in civil societies are culturally driven because we're talking here about cultures of men. People don't have fences on the roof today, so I'm not going to go and say everybody needs to go home right now because the Torah says, put a fence on your roof and say, if you don't do that, you're going to go to hell. That's the city of man, but the church is not the city of man, friends. It belongs to a transcendent culture, the culture of heaven, the unchanging culture of God's invisible temple. If there are laws pertaining to functions that seem to contradict principles like Galatians 328, then maybe I've misunderstood the principle. I'm arguing this morning that this is exactly what's been going on, and the results have been devastating. To the transcultural kingdom of Christ, there is no question that these kinds of arguments have been made, have made the church look exactly like the world. rather than being different from it. What's the point of all this? The point is not that to somehow suppress slaves, women and Gentiles, and that's always the way people that disagree with this view turn it into. They always do that. Heaven knows the goddess always viewed people as equal in his eye. Anyone who ever uses the Bible to create a subclass of human being to justify racism, to justify treating other humans as cattle, like some men do to their wives or other women in general. Because of their very nature. That God put them here to serve me, that person is worse than an unbeliever. This kind of sin knows nothing of the image of God or the love of Christ, but this passage is talking about that. I want you to learn to read your Bibles properly. To see how you can make proper applications, we don't want to be Christians who are forced by our theology. To continually have to figure out ways to justify contradictions that we created Or to turn the culture of heaven into something that is always changing with the whims and whims of fallen sinful human beings. Look again at the point of the passage and this time view it in terms of Galatians three twenty eight. Verse twenty one, the law could not impart life. But Scripture imprisoned everything under sin so that the promise by faith in Christ might be given to those who believe, you see, The law here has nothing to do with cultures and accommodation. This is not talking about the role of women in churches or whether or not you should make slavery outlawed or whatever. It's about. Salvation. The point of verses twenty one and twenty two is that God imprisoned and made people slaves of sin so that God might make the promise of Abraham real through his grace, his power, his sovereignty, his election. Through faith, you receive the promises through faith, there's no distinction in the classes, nor has there ever been. But when you view the law improperly, You think in an entirely different way and you create distinctions that were not there. And you confuse the entire passage, not just verse 28, the whole thing. Verse 23, before faith came, we were held captive under the law, but the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. It is justification that is in view here, not functional outworkings of slaves. Until faith came is not talking about there being no faith in the Old Testament. It's talking about faith coming to you. Before faith came to you, the law was given as a guardian, not as a means of salvation, but as a means of teaching you the need for faith. But now that Christ has come to you and he has come in such a way that you no longer. Such a way that no longer do you look to the promise of Abraham for a coming of Christ, but you look at the promise fulfilled in Christ. And by looking back at his death and resurrection, you are saved by faith in what he did. You see anything in those verses about functions within the body of Christ, I don't see him. Verse 25. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. That does not mean we are no longer have any use for law whatsoever. It means that now that you are saved, the law has performed the work God intended it to perform, which is to lead you to him and the need for faith in him to save you from slavery. Christ has set you free. Even if you're still a slave, Christ has set you free, even if you're still a woman, that's the kind of idea you're justified by his grace. But of course, the law still functions in a person's life, and that's the key component missing in the misreading of these verses, they suppose that whatever laws were given were actually culturally relative, in effect, eviscerating the laws. and making them of no purpose. Paul isn't making that kind of an argument here that I don't think anything further from his mind than what people try to do with this verse. Don't make the text say something it isn't trying to say. Brothers and sisters in Christ, you are all sons and daughters of God through faith If you are Christ in your Abraham's offspring, heirs, according to the promise, the whole section and continuing on into the next section is about showing you how the promises that were given to Abraham have come true. They've been fulfilled in the God man. God has torn down the walls that once divided our entrance into the blessings that came by the law, and he's torn them down in the obedient work of the son of God. So, if you've been baptized into Christ, you've put on Christ. You've become priests of the living God. You're able to serve Him in His temple. Gentile, free, male, female, child, adult, unit, slave, whole, Jew. This isn't talking about functions in the body, nor the roles that obtain in it. Think for a moment about marriage and creation. This goes all the way back to Genesis two. It says the two shall become one. Does that mean that marriage in Genesis two obliterated male and female? Even feminists won't argue that, but that's the very same argument they're trying to make in Galatians three twenty eight. Their whole premise is that these role distinctions are erased by the new covenant. But right there in Genesis two, twenty four, you have the same basic idea of merging two into one, and they refuse to make the same argument back there. If you're in Christ, you belong to him and he's made the way easy for you to come to him. You don't have to become a proselyte. You don't have to try and search out your freedom. You don't have to become a man. You don't have to wait until adulthood to become a Christian. You don't have to try and seek physical wholeness if you're paralyzed or something. All you do is trust in Christ by faith and a promise is yours. God has proven true and you are Abraham's child, sons and daughters of the living God. That's what this passage is about. Let's try and make the Bible say what it says. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word, and sometimes it's hard. I know that if there were people that are my friends that hold to these other positions, if they were in here to be a really hard sermon for me to give. The Lord, I'm convinced that this is the truth about this passage, and I'm really concerned about how people take things and make them say what they want them to say because of a hobby horse, because they don't like something in the city of man and they try and change things and they end up creating all sorts of problems for themselves. But, Lord, it seems to me that if we really just read this verse in the light of all the other verses that are around it, it's pretty clear as to what it's saying. And we don't create all sorts of problems with the rest of your word. And father, you give us your word so that we would conform to it, not so that we would make it conform to us. And I would pray that you would help all of us to do this. I think we all have problems with different parts of your word. This is just one verse out of thousands and thousands, and none of us is perfect in the way we read your word. And we all have text that we make hobby horses, that we are reading wrongly. And I would pray that even if this isn't one of them for us, that you might help us to have a desire when we come before your word to conform ourselves to it. That we would not be self-righteous as we hear things that we might even agree with here in this sermon, but that we would be humbled knowing that we are no better than anybody else. I pray that Your word would do its work in our hearts, that it would just show itself to be plain and simple, perspicuous, as our confession teaches, easy to understand. And this is not a hard thing to understand. I thank you that you have made us one in Christ, that you've taken away these divisions that you created in the law in the Old Testament and that you did so because you wanted to show people that through the law, it's impossible. It's impossible. And you've removed that law and you've showed us what it's always been about through faith in Christ, whether we are Adam or Noah or Abraham or Moses or David or Peter or Paul. Or us. We're saved by faith in Christ alone. And it's such a gracious thing that you've done, you've eased our burden, even if we were slaves in this room, we would know that our slavery is a temporary thing. and that we are free in Christ and he's made us free through his grace. And we thank you for it. In Jesus name. Amen.