Why Contest the Will? (Galatians 3:15-22)

Grace you and peace from God the Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Our text this morning is our epistle reading from Galatians chapter 3.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

We hear again these words.

Is the law then contrary to the promises of God?

Certainly not.

Thus far the text.

Two errors have wrecked more souls than perhaps any others in the history of the church.

The first error is to preach the law so gently that sinners never feel its full weight.

The nice pastor telling the nice congregation how nice it is to be nice.

And the result?

A congregation of comfortable, self-righteous hypocrites.

The second error is to preach the gospel with an asterisk.

Your sins are forgiven if.

And the result's exactly the opposite.

Broken, frightened sinners who can never be sure whether they have done enough to be saved.

Preach the law without the gospel and you raise Pharisees.

Preach the gospel with strings attached, and you drive the despairing deeper into despair.

St.

Paul told Timothy that the burden of a pastor was rightly dividing the word of truth, cutting a straight road through Scripture, letting neither law nor gospel lead into the other's territory.

But to distinguish two things is not the same as setting them at war with each other.

A surgeon distinguishes bone from muscle.

That does not make bone and muscle enemies.

The body needs both, each doing its own work, and together they hold a body upright.

And so it is with law and gospel.

Someone in Galatia was apparently arguing that since God gave the law through Moses at Mount Sinai, the old promise of grace to Abraham must have been overwritten, amended, added to.

And Paul will have none of it.

Is the law then contrary to the promises of God?

Certainly not.

Law and gospel are distinct.

They are not opposed.

God does not contradict himself.

And our text this morning shows us exactly how this is true, how the law does not cancel the gospel, and how the law, rightly understood, actually serves it.

And Paul starts with something we all understand: a will.

You know that document you dread thinking about, but which your loved ones are going to need when you die, so as to know how you want your earthly goods distributed?

Well, Paul says, even with the man-made covenant, a will, no one annuls it or adds to it once it's been ratified.

Your last will and testament, once signed and witnessed, is not something a stranger gets to revise later.

And the promise God made to Abraham was exactly that: a will, ratified, unconditional, complete.

Long before Sinai, before a single tablet of stone had been carried down that mountain, God had already promised Abraham that in his offspring, one descendant from his family, Paul emphasizes, one, and that one descendant is Christ, all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

That promise was the gospel preached to Abraham centuries even before Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

And the law came after that promise was made, 430 years later.

Which is Paul's way of saying that whatever purpose the law serves, it can't possibly be to replace or amend a promise already sealed before the law even existed.

For if the inheritance comes by the law, Paul writes, it no longer comes by promise.

But God gave it to Abraham by a promise.

Your standing before God is either based on your keeping of the law, or it's based on God's promise to you.

It cannot be both.

And this was never merely a hypothetical point for God's people.

Ask David, who lived under the full weight of the Mosaic law with all the sacrifices and the rules and regulations, and yet he did not point to his law keeping when it came to knowing whether he was right with God or not.

He pointed to the very same promise Abraham had.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.

Not blessed is the man who kept the law well enough.

Old Testament believers were saved exactly the way New Testament believers are saved by faith in the promised descendant of Abraham and not by our performance of the law.

But if the law was never meant to secure our standing before God, why did God give it at all?

The answer has to do with the human heart.

Left to ourselves, we sinful human beings are not neutral toward grace.

We're opposed to the idea of needing it.

By nature, the human heart's not an empty vessel eagerly awaiting the gospel.

It's something more like a wall of diamond, hard, self-satisfied, thoroughly convinced of its own adequacy, with no appetite whatsoever for a righteousness that has to be given rather than earned.

Remember the lawyer in this morning's gospel, the one who stood up to test Jesus and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life?

Notice the irony hidden in that question.

What must I do to inherit eternal life?

Well, to inherit something is simply to be named in the will.

Just as the promise to Abraham had already named his offspring centuries before the law came.

But this lawyer wanted to turn a gift into a wage.

And this is for the lawyers out there.

He apparently confused what he learned in contracts class with what he was taught in wills and estates.

But Luke tells us exactly what's motivating this lawyer.

He was desiring to justify himself.

He didn't want to receive eternal life as an inheritance.

He wanted to be able to say he earned it.

Desiring to justify himself.

That's the diamond wall of the human heart in a phrase.

And self-justification is not a symptom of just a few particularly proud people.

It is the default position of every fallen heart, including yours and mine.

And diamond does not yield to a feather touch.

It has to be broken by something harder than itself.

And that's what the law is for.

The scripture imprisoned everything under sin, Paul writes, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

God brings in the heavy machinery of his law, not to punish for his own sake, but to crack open a heart that would otherwise never go looking for a savior it does not think it needs.

See, the gospel's a wedding feast.

But you must be hungry before a feast means anything to you.

And it's the law that starves us of every other food we thought would satisfy us.

The gospel's a hospital.

But you have to know you're sick before a doctor can do you any good.

And it's the law that first shows us our disease.

Jesus said, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.

I've not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

In our opening hymn, we saying, Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Well, before Christ can shine on us, something first has to wake us up.

And this is not a one-and-done arrangement.

Finished at our conversion and safely behind us.

No, the the the old sinful flesh does not retire on the day that we get baptized.

That diamond wall keeps reforming.

Even in the most mature Christians, a fresh layer of self-satisfaction here, a new excuse there, a sudden conviction that we have this Christian life more or less handled.

Thank you very much.

And so the law still has daily work to do in us, daily cracking what keeps hardening, daily driving us back out of ourselves into Christ.

The Christian life is not a single exodus completed at the font, but the daily ongoing business of dying under the law to the old self and rising in the gospel to the new, over and over, until we die, and the old Adam and each of us is buried for good.

Martin Luther once said, It's not possible that he who does not first want to hear the law and let the letter put him to death should hear the gospel and let the grace of the spirit make him alive.

For grace is given to none but those who thirst for it.

Life only helps the dead.

Grace, only the sinners, the spirit, only the letter.

And no one may have one without the other.

So when the law does its work in you this week, when it shows you sins you would rather not see, when it drives you to cry out with Paul, oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death, don't reject the diagnosis.

Don't reach for an excuse or a comparison to someone worse than you or a quick argument in your defense.

Let the hammer land.

And that feeling of unworthiness, it's not a sign that something's gone wrong.

It's the law doing exactly what God sent it to do.

Clearing space for Christ to fill.

Sweeping the heart clean of its idols so that Christ might replace them.

And then don't let your unworthiness keep you from laying hold of Jesus Christ, who has kept in full the ancient promise to Abraham.

Receiving in your place the due penalty for all your sins, winning for you an eternal inheritance, no asterisk, no hidden conditions, given to you as pure gift.

It is the Father's will that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.

The executor and heir of his will says so.

Don't contest the will.

You're its beneficiary.

Amen.

Please stand.

And the peace that passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting.

Amen.