Bible Guys Classics: Galatians 3 & 4

Well today Paul is gonna lay down the law and

talk about Grace.

Boom.

There you go. So he's Chris, I'm Jeff, and we

are the Bible guys. Okay, Chris, So you and I

have been are our horns have been locked in battle

last week? Right?

That's such a weird statement when you said it, I

was like our horns or what.

Locked in battle? You know how, like too big bucks

or two bulls fighting and they locked their horns in battle.

Gotcha? Yes, because of fantasy football.

Fantasy football, that's right. And we are in a big

time fantasy football league. So today we had solicited to

our listeners two weeks ago.

To type in any type of question.

Yeah, mail bags right now, So mail bag segment and

just fun to get to know you questions from our listeners,

and we had one Kyle said, I know you guys

are big football fans or either of you on a

fantasy football league, and all I just want to say

is thanks for bringing that up, Kyle.

Right. So, in case you're wondering the reason why we're

talking like this is because Jeff and I actually played

last Sunday.

Our two teams.

Two teams went against each other and I beat him. Now,

what's so interesting is I'm the worst one in the league. Yea,

Jeff's one of the best in the league, right.

And maybe the best. I don't have the best record,

Bene probably the best manager of a fantasy.

Well, just to be clear, the stats, the projection, the

stats show that both of us are going to end

up in the same place projected, Yes, with the same record.

At the end. Maybe yes.

But however, for some reason, I've had some pretty bad

luck and I haven't been playing so well, so I

was the the worst. So anyway, I've been averaging like

maybe like eighty points a game, right, and you've been

averaging like one.

And thirty thirty points. Yeah, I should have just bulldozed you, which.

Isn't even close, I know. However, on Sunday you went ahead,

and so.

I scored one hundred and thirty five point seven points,

which I should have all of everybody who's playing fantasy football, right,

probably out of our listeners, I would have beaten ninety

nine percent of our listeners on their teams this last

week too. One hundred and thirty five point seven is

so far above the normal, and in our league didn't

come close to all our league averages one hundred and

twelve points. That's what our league averages, so one hundred

and thirty five point seven should have won. And then

you show up and your team plays out of their

minds this last week and you beat me one hundred

and thirty seven point two. You beat me by one

point four points.

Yes, that's it. It's just And by the way, that's

really the only victory that I really wanted.

It's the only victory you've had. But it's only when

that mattered, wasn't.

It was terrible. It's so strange my other league. I'm

gonna win the whole league.

Oh sure, nobody's seen it's right here. Yeah, yeah, it's

on the good appu. Our entire staff can see how

you're performing here.

By the way, I don't know why we use Yahoo.

It's written by a bunch of yahoos. Okay, okay, ESPN

app it is so intuitive, it is so awesome. I

don't know why anybody doesn't just use the ESPN Fantasy

Football app. But anyway, I've got the best team on

that league, and I'm probably gonna win the championship.

Wow, yeah, sure, But do you get a trophy in

that league and money and money yes. Wow. So what

we do is in our office we have a super

Bowl trophy, yes, that we give away, and then we

also give away a Super Bowl ring right for the winner,

and so you get to keep the ring. And then

the trophy floats around the office and has to be

prominently positioned in your office.

And what do you give to the person who's the word?

Still, So we have a trophy. It's a bibblehead outhouse.

So you just see the feet with the pants around

the ankles, and then the outhouse is a bibblehead.

Like that and it says I stink and finishing football.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, it is in my office.

It's in your office because you were last place last year, yes,

and you have a really good shot of being last

place this year.

Yes. Maybe I can just keep the christ just keep it.

Yeah, we may just turn it into the Zarbal Trophy.

That's so funny how I drafted poorly on both leagues

because remember last year I was number one pick. I

drafted Christian McCaffrey. Oh yeah, yeah, it was my first pick.

I was number one overall pick, and then he just

went down yeah right, And so I actually had like

three people go down, and so I just had some

really bad luck.

I have Christian McAffrey this year, and he's just not

scoring touchdowns. So for all the people who couldn't care

less about football, this segment is over. Now you can

tune back in, turn the volume back up.

Yeah, which, by the way is probably most but.

It's funny, So so we have more fun. You know,

we're Lions fan or well, we live in Lions Country

and the Lions play so poorly we have to have

some reason to pay it.

Well, but you are a Lions fan though I am alliance.

You corrected like you weren't.

Yes, I know, I said we, and then realize I

can't say we because you're not.

No, I am.

You are a fan, Yes, like a fan. You're a

Lions fan boy, Yes, okay.

I cheer for the Lions, and I root for them

over every team except for Cleveland when they play Cleveland. Yeah,

so I follow the Lions only, so you follow.

The two worst teams in the history of the NFL.

Because I live near the two worst cities of football

in the NFL. Yeah.

Okay, so now we are done. We're done talking about

football there. But anyways, we do that for fun. It

builds a lot of camaraderie with our staff. We got

like how many twenty four people playing? Yeah, and it's

a lot of fun. So okay, anyways, thanks Kyle for

ruining my day and asking that question. And just note

to self, no more questions from Kyle. There you go,

all right, you ruined it right there. So we're going

to continue on in Galatians, and this passage Paul is

going to really unpack the whole of his argument. So

we have referenced his argument, but he's only just been

complaining about the Judaizers, but he hasn't really gotten into

the theological argument as to why they're wrong and what

real grace is all about. This is where he begins

on packet. So we're going to read Galatians chapter three,

and he says, oh, foolish Galatians, who has cast an

evil spell on you? For the meaning of Jesus Christ's

death was made clear to you as if you had

seen a picture of his death on the cross. Let

me ask you this one question. Did you receive the

Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not.

You receive the spirit because you believe the message. You

heard about Christ. How foolish can you be after starting

your Christian lives in the spirit? Why are you now

trying to become perfect by your own human effort? Have

you experienced so much for nothing? Surely it was not

in vain, was it? I ask you again? Does God

give you the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you

because you obey the law? Of course not. It's because

you believe the message you heard about Christ in the

same way Abraham believed God and God counted him as

righteous because of his faith. The real children of Abraham, then,

are those who put their faith in God. What's more,

the scriptures looked forward to this time when God would

declare to the Gentiles to be righteous because of their faith.

God proclaimed this good news to Abraham long ago when

he said all nations will be blessed through you. So

all who put their faith in Christ share the same

blessing Abraham received because of his faith. But those who

depend on the law to make them right with God

are under his curse. For the scriptures say cursed is

everyone who does not observe and obey all the commands

that are written in God's Book of the Law. So

it is clear that No one can be made right

with God by trying to keep the law. For the

scriptures say it is through faith that a righteous person

has life. This way, this way of faith, is very

different from the way of law, which says it is

through obeying the law that a person has life. But

Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law.

When he was hung on the cross, he took upon

himself the curse of our wrongdoing. For it has written

the scriptures, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.

Though Christ Jesus God, through Christ Jesus God has blessed

the gentiles with the same blessing he promised to Abraham,

so that we who are believers might receive the promised

Holy Spirit through faith. Dear brothers and sisters, here's an

example from everyday life. Just as no one can set

aside or amend it an irrevocable agreement, so it is

in this case. God gave the promises to Abraham and

his child. And noticed that the scripture doesn't say to

his children, as if it meant any many descendants. Rather

it says to his child, and that of course means Christ.

This is what I am trying to say the agreement

God made with Abraham could not be canceled. Four hundred

and thirty years later, when God gave the law to Moses,

God would be breaking his promise, for if the inheritance

could be received by keeping the law, then it would

not be the result of accepting God's promise. But God

graciously gave it to Abraham as a promise. Why then

was the law given. It was given alongside the promise

to show people their sins, but the law was designed

to last only until the coming of the child who

was promised. God gave his law through angels to Moses,

who was the mediator between God and the people. Now,

a mediator is helpful if more than one party must

reach an agreement, but God, who is one, did not

use a mediator when he gave his promise to Abraham.

Is there a conflict then, between God's law and God's promises?

Absolutely not. If the law could give us new life,

we could be made reare with God by obeying it.

But the scriptures declare that we are all prisoners of sin,

So we receive God's promise of freedom only by believing

in Jesus Christ. Before the way of faith in Christ

was available to us, we were placed under guard by

the law. We were kept in protective custody, so to speak,

until the Way of Faith was revealed. Let me put

it another way. The law was our guardian until Christ came.

It protected us until we could be made right with

God through faith. And now that the way of Faith

has come, we no longer need the law as our guardian,

for you are all children of God through faith in

Christ Jesus, and all who have been united with Christ

in baptism have put on Christ like putting on new clothes.

There is no longer jew or gentile, slave, or free

male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

And now that you belong to Christ, you are the

true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God's

promised to Abraham belongs to you. Think of it this way.

If a father dies and leaves an inheritance for his

young children, those children are not much better off than

slaves until they grow up. Even though they actually own

everything their father had, they have to obey their guardians

until they reach whatever age their fathers sat. And that's

the way it was with us. Before Christ came. We

were like children we were slaves to the basic spiritual

principles of this world. But when the right time came,

God sent his son, born of a woman subject to

the law. God sent him to buy freedom for us,

who are slaves to the law, so that he could

adopt us as his very own children. And because we

are his children, God has sent the spirit of his

son into our hearts, prompting us to call out Abbah, Father.

Now you are no longer a slave, but God's own child.

And since you are his child, God has made you

his heir. So really, what he's doing is he's tying

Jesus into being Abraham's son. Right and promise made to

Abraham is fulfilled in his son. And he's saying that

Moses law was the guardian until the Sun was grown

up enough to be able to inherit.

I like how Paul did the math for us and

said it was exactly four hundred and thirty years from Abrahad.

That was helpful, Otherwise we would have been like many.

It was a lot.

Well. To be honest with you, I say that tongue

in cheek, but actually it's it's it's a testament to

Paul's knowledge because Paul was a pharisee. Paul was a

person who was probably a you know, at least if

he wasn't in the Samehedrin, he was, you know, working

toward that. And so I've always believed this. But Paul

was the perfect qualified person. God chose the perfect person

because he was a Roman citizen and at the same

time he was a Jewish you know, person who was

also a pharisee, so he understood everything.

Yeah, so my profession, and let me say this, he

was perfectly positioned to argue against the Judaizers. Yes, he

was the perfect one that God could use.

Because he was over them at one time. He was

in a position of authority right underneath Caiaphas.

So these people are coming in acting all pompous and

know it all, trying to impose the law on these

new Christians. And Paul went, hey, wait a minute, right,

you know this much, I know this much about the law.

Let me explain it to you.

He's like, hey, you know who you're talking to. You

know who I am? Right, that's what he's saying. And

by the way, my college professor told me that it

was customary for in order for Paul to become a Pharisee.

They would take the five books of the Torah or

the pentitook, and they would actually.

Take this Exodus, Sleaviticus, numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Yes, and they would close them. Those are the laws

of Moses, the books of Moses. They would close the book,

and then they would pick anywhere on the book and

drive a nail through the book. And the final exam

was the person had to quote every single verse that

the nail had passed through by memory. In other words,

they had to know where on the page the verse was.

That's how much he knew it. Now, I don't know

if that's true, but I've heard that enough over the

years to believe that maybe you know, it was very customary, and.

It was true one of the tests.

It was one of the tests or the final example.

And so all that to say, when Paul's quoting four

hundred and thirty years, my guess is he didn't have

to look it up, right, And he also doesn't have

to look up anything that he's talking about. He knows

it backwards and forward, and he has the authority to

make this conclusion. So think about this for someone to

understand how all of the Old Testament law points toward Jesus.

It makes the law that which you knew before Jesus.

You knew the law. All of a sudden Jesus comes along,

and that law now comes to life's right. It comes

to life. It has a brand new meaning, which is

pretty cool.

Well, Jesus said, it didn't come to destroy the law

came to fulfill it.

Right.

So the Judaizers, they had come in and they had

built this argument. They genuinely believed that there was the

promise of Abraham that through Abraham's son would come salvation.

But then they believed that when the Law Moses came

that God changed the process, and so that then now

the Law of Moses is the new way to God.

And as if God changed his mind, And what Paul

is saying here is God didn't change his mind. Your

opinion of the purpose of the law is wrong. So

the promise has always been that through Christ, all of humanity.

This is why God had said, the whole world will

be blessed because of you. Through Christ, through the son

of Abraham, all of humanity will have opportunity for forgiveness

of sins, right relationship with God through faith. All the Jews,

the gentiles everybody. But then they said, well, once Moses'

law came in, God excluded everybody else. God made all

these rules, and this is how you get to God.

And he said, no, the law was just supposed to

be like the guardian. It was like the nanny for us.

It pointed out the fact that we needed a savior.

That's what the law did. He mentions it here that

it showed us that we were dead in our sins.

In the Book of Romans, he mentions that the whole

purpose behind the law was to point out to us

that we needed a savior. But the promise was not

the law. The law was just the nanny that was

letting us know we did wrong. Instead, the promise was

fulfilled in Jesus, and that was the point. The Abrahamic

promise and the fulfillment of it in Jesus was the point.

And the law was a tool to say, boy, you

really need Jesus. And it's just a great argument.

It's so easy to understand why people get confused, because

even if you don't know anything about the Bible, you

understand that it's filled with rules and commandments. Sure, you know,

God is pleased when we obey and God is not

pleased whether we disobey or well or wilfully sin. But

it actually says that, you know, like people always revere

the Ten Commandments, and they when they believe that you

have to be good to go to heaven, they say, well,

I've tried to obey the Ten Commandments my whole life.

And people seem to view the Ten Commandments as I

on eight out of the tent, right, or they don't

know it, right, they think that they've kept them, but

or most of the time they think it's percentages. Right,

they think it's a passing grade. But you know where you're.

Gonna have to sixty nine. Right, if I get a

sixty seven and I failed, But if I got a seventy,

I'm in right.

You know, well, it's your good has to outweigh your bad.

That's what most people believe. But you think about it.

The Ten Commandments were given to us to show us

how pitiful we are. The Bible actually says that the

law was given to us to reveal our sin. Right,

So people think that the Ten Commandments are the highest bar,

but think about it. When God give us the Ten Commandments,

he actually set the bar extremely low to show that

we can't even meet that bar. He's like, hmm, try

not to kill anybody today. Yeah, try not to sleep

with any wife that isn't yours. And so so.

He says, the law takes stuff that's not yours.

Don't take stuff that's not yours. He sets the bar

so unbelievably low. And then what happens is humanity is

slithered underneath the bar. And so we say all the

ten Commandments are revered as the highest bar. No, these

are the basic fundamentals of human living and decency, and

we've managed to slither under them. The law was given

to reveal our sin, to show us our sin. You

know what. It reminds me of my father in law

came up when we bought our house and he's like,

you need new grass. So he rents this big like

machine and he's like, oh, just like like scrapes all

of our grass off, all of it, and he's like,

you need to, you know, repurpose all this, and he

kind of landscape our whole thing. It was really weird.

He brought a dirt and all these kind of things,

and I was like, okay, and he's doing his thing.

So then we spread we went get you know, seed

and then hay and everything else, and most of our

lawn was like redone. And what happened was in the spring,

what happened was the grass was growing fine, but there

was all these weeds. And listen when I tell you this, Okay,

like my entire lawn it's decently big. Every three inches

in every direction was this grassy weed. And it was

just everywhere. It was just it was there was millions

of it. It seemed like. So I'm thinking, okay, I

get to go into a professional. I picked a weed.

I went in because the because the hay was batter Yeah, yeah,

that's right. So I went in and I said to them,

I need a weed killer to just kill this weed,

but not this grass. And the guy says, well, that's

impossible because actually that's a form of weed. But it's

a form of grass. It's a grassy weed. He said,

So you no matter what you get to kill, you're

going to kill your grass. He said. You only have

two choices. He says, Hey, you can go ahead and

wipe it all out and start all over again, or

be you can actually wait until the weeds because the

weeds grow faster. You can wait until the weeds grow

super tall, and then pick them all out by hand,

the four million weeds that are in your lawn. Thanks right, thanks.

So here's the deal. I went in trying to buy

weed killer to kill the sin in the lawn. Instead

I came out with fertilizer helping him to make it grow,

for them to become more prominent. So well, who would

have ever thought that I went into for a weed

killer thinking it was going to destroy them, and then

only to come out with fertilizer to pronounce them. That's

what the law is, and.

So it exaggerated the weeds.

Then exaggerated it made the weeds tall.

And made it more evident that you needed to pull

those out.

So I fed. I fed my weeds food. And it

turns out that, like my whole lot, was an embarrassment

to the You know, I wanted to put a sign

that says, I'm not negligent, I'm just waiting for them

to grow because it looks so bad. And I got

on my hands and knees, and I kid you not,

for like three days solid, I was on my hands

and knees picking every single weed by hand. Wow. And

I did the entire lawn, and so I have pictures

of it at home, just how ridiculous it was. And

so it is a perfect picture of the law. Isn't

weed killer? The law is we'd fertilizer.

Oh right.

It pronounces our sins. Yes, that's what it's supposed to do.

That's the whole point. And that's what he's trying to

say here. That's what he also impacts in the Book

of Romans. Same thing that it just points out the

need for a savior. So it's important. Paul says, Abraham

was saved by faith. Right, and I really love the

Transformation study Bible. This Warren Wereersby's study Bible. He says

Abraham was saved by faith. Paul began by quoting Moses

to show that God's righteousness was placed to Abraham's account

only because he believed God's promise. The word counted in

Galatians three six is also used in Genesis fifteen. In

Romans four and some translations reads, it's imputed means that

God puts it on his record. The Greek word means

to assigned a one's account. When the sinner trusts Christ,

God's righteousness is assigned to the sinner's account. So what

he was saying is so the fertilizer shows look at

this debt you owe. It just expands it. It makes

it bigger. The numbers are bigger, the problem is greater.

And then he says, the only way that Abraham was saved,

the only way is the only way you can be saved.

It's not by trying to pay off that debt or

to pull all those weeds. Instead, it's letting God's goodness

be accredited to your account. And that's that's Paul's entire argument,

which is consistent with everything we read in Galatians. It's

what's consistent in everything we read in the Book of

Romans and throughout all the rest of Paul's teaching. And

what Paul is saying is I know this for a

fact because I tried to live your way and I

was better at it than you. Right the Judaizers, and

he said, it's not possible to have forgiveness of sins

and right standing with God by works. Now Jesus said,

if you love me, keep my commandments. It's not so

we can get into heaven. But because he saved us,

now we're inspired to do the right thing and to

honor God. And you know the book of Deuteronomy ends

with you know, this whole book of the Law ends

with So now I put before you the choice between

life and death. Oh that you would choose life. God says,

your life will be better when you live a good,

clean life. But it's your choice. You can never get

to heaven that way. So instead we honor God because

of what he did, not in order to get saved,

or not in order to go to heaven, but because

we are saved, then we choose to do the right thing.

Well, that sounds like a really great place to end.

And we will see you next time on the Bible.

Guys,