Galatians 3:13 | The Triumph of the Cursed Cross

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Galatians chapter 3.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

If you have a Bible, I encourage you to open it to that text if you if you don't.

We have one provided for you in the pew there.

And I encourage you to open it to Galatians chapter 3.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

It will just help you understand what we're talking about this morning if you can follow along in that way.

And if you are visiting with us and you do not have your own Bible, please feel free to take the one that is in front of you in the pew there, our gift to you this morning.

Galatians chapter 3.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

I would like us to get to the point where we are focusing in on verse 13 this morning.

But to get to that point, we need to talk about some other things in the context.

So I'd like to begin in verse 10 of Galatians 3 and work through to verse 13.

I will read that if you would follow along with me.

The Word of God says to us, For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse.

For it is written, Cursed be every one who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law and do them.

Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law.

The scriptures say the righteous shall live by faith.

But the law is not of faith.

Rather, the one who does them shall live by them.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

For it is written, Cursed is every one who is hanged on a tree.

Amen.

Walking through these few verses is designed to lead us to celebrate, really truly celebrate that together this morning.

But first I would like to take you back to sometime around 200 BC.

200 BC.

Archaeological records from that time tell us that near the city of Delphi, the mountain city of Delphi in Greece, there was a female slave named Nikaiah, who had finally come to the point of achieving her dream.

She made her way up along the mountainside to the temple of the Greek god Apollo, and there she took with her the money that she had earned somehow, somehow, that was needed to purchase her freedom from slavery.

We don't know any of the details.

We don't know really much about who she was.

We don't know to whom she belonged.

We don't know how long she had been a slave.

We only know that she came to the temple of Apollo in Delphi in order to gain her freedom.

Now, in order to be liberated, she went through the normal pattern of liberation.

She would go to the temple of a god and make a donation to that god.

In that temple, the priests of that god would come and receive the donation that Micaiah would give, and they would take that donation and they would use those funds to pay her master her freedom.

A declaration of her freedom would then be etched in stone as a permanent and living mark, a testament, if you will, to the profound work of her God in redeeming her.

It was made to appear as if the Greek god Apollo had actually purchased her freedom.

The truth was that Nikia herself paid the price for her freedom.

Apollo's name was simply attached to the process so that if anyone ever questioned her or demanded proof of her freedom, she could point to the inscription in stone and say, Apollo himself redeemed me.

It was quite prevalent, actually, that process.

Slavery was a common theme in the Roman and Grecian empires.

And so the freedom procedures would have been well known to everyone in the empire.

So they would have been well known to the people in the province of Galatia as well.

What's interesting is that there are striking parallels between the procedures for manumission in the Roman Empire and themes that we find in the New Testament book of Galatia to the Galatians.

Why would that be?

Well, it's because there were certain Jewish Christians in the Galatian churches that were seeking to reinstate a following of the Old Testament law in the church.

In other words, they wanted Christians to be like Jews.

They even went so far as to claim that one must follow the Old Testament law in order to be a genuine Christian, to be right with God.

So a right standing with God was dependent on what you did.

It was works, righteousness.

But the Apostle Paul wrote to them to tell them that if they were going to follow that, it was as though they would be returning to the bondage of slavery from which they had been redeemed.

They should not go back there.

In fact, if you just look over at chapter 5, verse 1, you can see he says there, for freedom Christ has set us free.

Stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

In other words, every person in Christ was once a slave.

We've been set free.

Going back to doing things to obtain a good standing with God is as though we were returning to a place of slavery.

That is the buildup to chapter 3 and verse 10.

For several verses, in fact, for several chapters, the Apostle Paul has been emphasizing again and again this works of the law, this doing things to be pleasing to God.

And then he says, all who rely on the works of the law are under the curse.

There are three curses in this passage that I would like to point out to you this morning.

Curses of which each and every one of us are a part to some extent.

The first curse is here in verse 10, and it is what I've called the curse on humanity.

Everyone who relies on doing things or obeying God to be right with him is under a curse.

That's what the text says.

Now in the Jewish world, there were two common styles of thought in rabbinical teaching.

One of the prominent rabbis of the time was Rabbi Shemai.

Rabbi Shemai taught that if you kept 99% of the law, you were good.

You were good with God.

You could get away with not keeping 1% of the law.

But if you failed in more than 1% of keeping the law, then your standing with God was not good.

The other prominent rabbi of the time was Rabbi Hillel.

Rabbi Hillel taught that if you kept the law 51% of the time, you were good with God.

Now can you imagine which one was more popular?

It's common sense, isn't it?

Nevertheless, the popular teaching said that you had to obey the law to some extent.

And as many Jews came to Christ, they carried that tendency with them.

They came to Christ, they came into the church, and they said, no, no, no, no, we have to keep following that.

We have to fulfill the law, at least to some extent.

But then the Apostle Paul enters in and he just blows that away in verse 11 because he says, it is evident that no one is justified.

No one is made right before God by what you do, by how well you keep God's standards.

The reason is because we all fail.

Being a good person or obeying God to the best of our ability is not enough to satisfy God's wrath against our disobedience.

Think of it this way.

Church attendance is good.

And God expects it.

He says to the people of the Hebrews in Hebrews chapter 10 and 11, he says, don't forsake the assembling of the saints.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

Don't keep from fellowshipping and worshiping and learning and discipling one another.

But that doesn't make you right with God.

It doesn't matter if you come every single Sunday and you even get up early on Sunday and come to the first service every single week.

Doesn't make you right with God.

Doesn't matter if you read your Bible every single day.

Doesn't make you right with God.

Praying doesn't make you right with God.

Giving to the church doesn't.

Doing what's right doesn't.

Obeying your parents doesn't.

Being a good roommate doesn't make you right with God.

Because we all fail, don't we?

And if we fail, we are under a curse.

And that's that's that's ancient history.

It goes back all the way to the first pages of Genesis.

You remember when God created Adam and Eve and He set them in the garden, right?

He told them you can eat from any tree in the garden except this one.

And if you eat from that one, what's going to happen?

There will be a curse.

God cursed the ground.

God cursed creation.

God cursed Adam and Eve.

That carried through to God's chosen people, the people of Israel.

And we see in Deuteronomy chapter 27 the situation where God had brought his people through the desert and into the land that he promised them.

Deuteronomy 27 · chapter mention

And as they were getting ready to go out and conquer that land and to settle it, God brought them to a place where there were two mountains, side by side and a valley in between them.

And he told the people, I want you to stand, split up, and stand on those mountaintops, and I want the Levites to be down in the valley in the middle.

And we're going to have an exercise here.

One side of the mountain is going to declare the blessings of obeying God.

The other side is going to declare the curses of disobeying God.

And the Levites in the middle are going to serve as the choir directors.

At the end of that process, God said this cursed be anyone who does not conform, confirm to the words of this law.

How?

By doing them.

And all of the people are to say, Yep, that's right.

We agree with that.

Blessing if you do it, cursing if you don't.

As a result of that, the consequences of disobeying God for the people of Israel meant that they could not be a part of Israel if they disobeyed.

But even more than that, they could not be part of God if they disobeyed them.

Because they would be cursed, they would be driven out from God's people, they would be separated from God Himself.

Now we might think or be tempted to think, wow, I'm glad that's not me.

Well, friend, it is you.

It is me.

Because in the New Testament, we find in Romans chapter 1 that God has set things in place in our creation, that all we have to do is look around us to be able to understand that God is great and God is powerful and he has expectations of us.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

A little bit later in Romans chapter 2, verse 14, he talks about our consciences.

Romans 2:14

And he tells us that you know when you do something wrong.

You know, you get that guilty feeling, you feel terrible because you've done something wrong.

That in and of itself tells us that God has a law and we have to obey it, he says.

God has expectations of all of us that we obey him, that we walk in his standards, that we keep his law, and if we don't, we are under a curse.

And if we break his law, we are all outside of his covenant people, and we are outside of his blessings.

Because divine judgment comes against anyone who does not keep God's law to perfection.

Both Shemai and Hillel were wrong.

If you break the law in any point, you're guilty of it all.

That's why Paul says in verse 10, no human being is exempt.

For all who rely on what you do.

Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all the things.

In our humanity, we desire to be made right with God.

And all of us want that ticket to heaven, right?

We want to make sure that we know what our eternity is going to be like.

So what we end up doing is we we give our pitiful, broken attempts to obey and please God to him, hoping that just this little bit of obedience will be good enough.

But Scripture says we we fall short of his standards.

And falling short of his standards means we're under the curse of God.

There's no human escape.

There's no escape because we cannot keep God's law perfectly.

We cannot escape the curse of our slavery, of our bondage to sin.

That is the curse on all of humanity.

Now I'd like you to jump down to the end of verse 13 with me.

This is the third curse in this text, but I'd like to approach it before the middle one.

And this is the curse of the cross.

Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.

Curse of the cross.

Background for this comes from the Old Testament as well.

In Deuteronomy chapter 21, verse 23, it says that a crucified or a criminal who has had his life taken because of capital punishment, if you hang him on a tree, he says, Your body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day.

Deuteronomy 21:23

Why?

Because a hanged man is cursed by God.

Now, the original context referred to an executed criminal.

And the pattern would be that the executed criminal would have his body hanged publicly as a demonstration that they were under the curse of God.

Now, they were not cursed because they were hanged on a tree.

They were hanged on a tree because they were under the curse.

And Jewish law fulfilled and carried out that pattern of the Old Testament of capital punishment, and so after execution, the body of a lawbreaker would be hung to identify the hanged one as a transgressor of God's law.

For example, Joshua chapter 8, verses 28 and 29.

Joshua 8:28

They go into the land of Canaan and they conquer the land.

There's a particular king, king of Ai, says Joshua burned his city and made it forever a heap of ruins.

And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening.

And at sunset, Joshua commanded, and they took his body down from the tree.

Just an example of that curse being fulfilled, carried out.

But by the time we get to the New Testament, the Romans had taken that method of hanging a person and perfected it as a torturous way to execute slaves and criminals.

So the Jews came to despise the process of hanging someone on a cross.

They despised it in part because it was, well, it was Roman.

It was a Roman means of crucifixion, and they hated the Romans.

The Romans were the enemies, and so they saw that as a means of Roman cruelty to be done away with, but it was also a gruesome picture of the fullness of God's curse on disobedience.

Hanging on a piece of wood vividly pictured God issuing a curse on the condemned.

No one who hung publicly on a piece of wood could be blessed with the favor of God.

I mean, can you imagine?

How could you see a crucified criminal as being under the blessing of God?

Never, that wouldn't happen.

Therefore, the cross was despicable.

It was the opposite of blessing.

It was rejection of all that Israel stood for.

It was scandalous, it was horrid, and it was shadowed under the curse of a holy God.

The amazing thing is that in God's grace, the curse on humanity became connected with the curse on the cross.

And they come together.

Whoever does not perfectly obey the law of God stands condemned to death under the curse of the Holy One.

We're without excuse.

Every human being is without excuse.

We cannot escape the curse.

We are enslaved to it, we are imprisoned to it.

But God also, on the other hand, clearly declared that anyone who hangs on a tree as a condemned breaker of God's law is automatically under his curse.

Two separate, distinct situations, but with the same result.

Under a curse.

In our thinking, we might never bring those two together.

We might never draw a link between our curse against our sin with the curse against a publicly displayed condemned criminal.

But God in his wisdom did connect the two.

And he connected them in the curse of the Christ.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

There's no conjoining word between verses twelve and thirteen.

There's no no and, no, no, but no then, no however, or therefore, whatever.

It's just boom, right there.

There it is.

An abrupt, intrusive statement declaring that Jesus has stepped in and freed us from God's curse by becoming a cursed one himself.

God's enemy thought he was victorious when Jesus was hanging upon that cross.

When in divine irony there is a triumph in the curse of the cross.

Jesus did not deserve to be under a curse.

He's addressed here as Christ, Christos, the Messiah, the anointed one, the promised one.

If you look over at chapter 4, verse 4, you will see that he is the Son of God.

It says at the right time, when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his own son to be born of a woman, born under the law.

That simply means that he was born as a human being.

God the Son came in the form of a human being, being born just like a normal woman would give birth to a normal man, and he was born under the law.

That means he was born as a Jewish person submitting to the law of God.

But that's not a curse in and of itself, is it?

The curse comes if you disobey the law, if you fail to keep it in any form.

Did Jesus Christ ever fail in the minutest point of obeying God's law?

Let's have the scriptures speak for themselves.

Isaiah 53, 9 says that there was no deceit in his mouth.

None.

1 Peter 1, verse 19, he was a lamb without blemish or spot.

1 Peter 1:19

2 Corinthians 5 21, for our sake, God made him, that is Jesus, to be sin, who knew no sin?

None, zero.

And if those aren't clear enough, Hebrews 4.15, talking about Jesus, it says, in every respect, he's been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

As a matter of divine law, there was no way for Jesus to be under the curse of humanity.

He was perfectly obedient to God's law in every way.

He was sinless.

He could not be under the curse of the divine curse for sin because he had no sin.

That's why it tells us he became a curse.

He became a curse.

Why?

Why did he become a curse?

Well, Romans 6.23 tells us that the wages of sin is death, doesn't it?

That's the result of our curse.

We have to die.

That's what God told Adam and Eve.

If you disobey, you will die.

What we earn for our failure to uphold the law of God is death.

That is the curse.

We have deserved it.

And so Jesus endured the penalty of the curse directed toward the breaker of the law when he had never even lifted a finger against God's law.

From a human perspective, the cross was the greatest failure of justice the world has ever seen.

He became a curse.

That's a deliberate, willful choice.

It's a deliberate action by God himself to take on, to assume something that otherwise would never have been his.

And he assumed, he took on the Father's curse.

That was expected.

Isaiah 53, verse 6, speaking of the promised Messiah, said, All we like sheep have gone astray.

Isaiah 53:6

We've turned, every one of us, none of us are left out, to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him.

My sin.

Your sin.

That's why Peter could say in 1 Peter 2.24 that in an emphatic way, he, Jesus, himself bore our sins, my sins, your sins, in his body on the tree.

That's incomprehensible.

How can we really understand God, the Holy One, innocent, taking on a curse?

Now we can have some human examples, perhaps, that might give us some comparisons to imagine, that they're incomplete, though.

For example, perhaps we could imagine a criminal coming before a judge and a judge issuing a declaration of the sentence on the condemned.

And then the judge stepping down from the bench and saying, I'm going to bear your sentence.

I'm going to take it for you.

That kind of gets there, but it's incomplete.

I've been watching a couple of episodes lately of a British television show where there are some modern people who are leaving behind their modern lives and assuming the life of an extremely poor slum dweller in the 1860s and 1870s London.

They have no food.

They struggle to have a place to sleep at night.

We can imagine something like that maybe where somebody is setting something aside to assume something else, but that still doesn't get us to that, or what God did.

We might be able to imagine a young child who has just had a bath and new clothes, clean clothes put on him, and he dashes out the door and starts splashing in the mud.

His clean is now dirty.

We can imagine something like that, but none of those get to the point of a holy God becoming a curse.

It says here that he did this for us.

For us.

He took upon himself the curse that we earned.

Prophet Isaiah said in Isaiah 53, 12, he was numbered among the transgressors.

How could that be?

To be a transgressor, you have to break the law.

Jesus didn't break the law.

How could he be numbered among the transgressors?

God the Son, who deserved no curse, willingly took it upon himself to be cursed in the place of, for, in the substitute place of, each and every one of us who believes in him?

Why?

You need to ponder that a little bit.

Why would he do that?

Why would the Lord of all creation, who has everything that he could ever want or imagine, how could he become one of the accursed?

Why would the sovereign Lord of all creation take the form of one of his creatures, the form of a slave, and be killed as a slave would have been killed in that time period in order to put himself in the position to cry the cry of the cursed?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why would he do that?

Someone has rightly said that the two most beautiful words in all of Scripture are for us.

For us.

We're unable to free ourselves from the bondage of slavery to God's law.

It's not within our ability to do that.

We have no power to keep it perfectly, but instead are slaves to it.

We can't even pay for our own sin.

It's too high of a price, much less pay for somebody else's sin.

For us.

You know it required a curse to cancel a curse.

Jesus had done no wrong, but the absolute perfection of Jesus enabled him to be the holy and perfect sacrifice.

And the means of paying for our curse was by becoming the cursed one who hung on the tree.

My curse was cancelled by his curse.

On the cross, Jesus then died the death that was ours.

And he did it to redeem us.

To redeem means to secure the deliverance of something.

So in a commercial situation, it meant to buy, to purchase, to buy up in order to obtain for yourself.

It was often used in the ancient world in Roman times for the buying and selling of slaves.

We are redeemed, it says, from the curse of the law.

In other words, we were enslaved to it, imprisoned within it.

As a result, we are obligated to obey it, and if we don't, we are under a curse.

But Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law.

That means that by taking on the curse of the cross, the Lord Jesus Christ himself actually did pay the price for our redemption.

He actually did.

That means we are legally freed.

No one can come and claim that we are still slaves to sin.

The law can no longer exercise its demand over us because we have been purchased out of its grip.

We are no longer under its curse.

The deed of ownership to our old master is dissolved and put away because Christ nailed it to the cross once and forever.

He took it upon himself to pay the price by becoming a curse.

God himself performed that action.

He came as the purchaser of our freedom, becoming a curse for us and redeeming us forever, forever severing the obligations, the demands, the expectations, the commitments, the indebtedness, and the slavery to our old master.

That's not all he did.

If you look over at chapter 4 and verse 5, you'll see that after he did all of that, he even adopted us as his own sons.

Just mind-boggling.

The church in Galatian needed to understand that.

They needed to know and to be reminded that they were freed from the law and its curse.

There was no sense in going back to slavery.

Christ purchased that freedom.

He redeemed them.

And so going back to that was a false gospel.

To say that you earn your freedom, your right standing with God by what you do was a false gospel.

Somewhere around 200 BC, Nikia came to the temple of Apollo to gain her freedom.

She took her hard-earned money, silver or gold, and she paid her own price into the treasury of the temple.

The temple priests took her money, and they paid the price of her freedom to her master.

It was all fake.

It was all fake.

Apollo didn't pay for her freedom.

Apollo never redeemed her.

She paid the price of her own freedom.

Of course, Apollo isn't even a he, not even an it, he doesn't exist.

There's no way that Apollo as a god could redeem Nikaia from her slavery.

She had to pay her own way.

So all of that procedure was a sham.

What history records as Nikaiah's action was a false hope in a false faith.

In the end, Apollo did nothing for her.

She paid her own price to gain her freedom from slavery.

And sadly, this is happening all over the world today.

Millions, maybe billions of people, are attempting to gain their freedom from the curse of the law by what they do.

You might be one of them.

You might be trusting in your own efforts.

Oh no, you wait.

Oh, I believe in Jesus.

I believe in Jesus.

But then what you end up doing is you adding b add baptism to it.

I believe in Jesus plus baptism.

I believe in Jesus plus communion.

I'm a really good person.

I do really good things.

It doesn't work, friend.

It's a sham.

It's fake.

It's a false gospel.

You know, sometimes the stories that we make up about our lives, about reality, sometimes the stories are not nearly as amazing as the real thing.

And in this case, I think that's true.

God the Son left the glories of heaven.

He was found in human form, being found as a human being.

He humbled himself to the point of death.

Even death on a cross.

The true God does indeed offer you freedom from the curse against your sin.

You don't have to pay anything, because He did indeed pay it.

We owed everything and paid nothing.

Our debt was supreme, he covered it.

But the price was beyond comprehension.

It wasn't something that was paid out by silver and gold or from your bank account or your debit card or your credit card.

No, it was with precious blood.

Blood as of a lamb, without spot or blemish.

See, the reality is that the curse has to be satisfied.

The curse cannot go unfulfilled.

It must be paid.

If the law is broken and the curse comes in, it has to be satisfied.

The wrath of God must be satisfied against each and every person who has ever broken the minutest part of his law.

Because everyone has been imprisoned in slavery to sin, and we face the just and righteous curse of God.

But Jesus, the innocent, Christ, the righteous Messiah, became a curse so that those who were in bondage to the curse might be set free.

The cross was indeed Jesus' curse, but it was also his great glory.

The cross was was my judgment for sin.

But because Jesus became the curse, he triumphed over it.

He offers full freedom to you.

Will you set aside all of your efforts, all of your work, and just trust in him?

And he will pay your price for you.

Our Lord Jesus, it is beyond us to really grasp fully what that is, what that's like.

How?

Why that you would that you would demonstrate your love for us and that we while we are yet sinners, you would die for us.

That you would become that curse.

It's beyond our comprehension, truly.

But we ask that you would enable us, even now, to begin to get a grasp of that.

To get a glimpse of the glory of the triumph over sin and death and the curse in what you've done.

Enable us to be the people who can say, Truly, my God redeemed me.

And now as we we take an opportunity to celebrate that by by being reminded of your broken body and your shed blood for us, enable us to celebrate that.

Enable us to see it as our redemption, our freedom.

We have sinned.

We confess that to you.

We we do sin.

But we also know that in your great and awesome character you are faithful to forgive us, and so we confess our sin to you, asking for your great and gracious holiness to be ours, that you would wrap us with your robes of righteousness, so that we might stand indeed in Christ alone.

Not because of what we've done, but because of the triumph of the cursed cross.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.