The word of God is a delicious spring of wisdom, truth, and love! That the Lord God Almighty would be so compassionate, so loving as to reveal His very character and His unfathomable sovereignty in the words and pages of a book is remarkable. More than remarkable! Words, with all their variety and depth of meaning, fall short to praise Him as He should be praised, I’m afraid.
You may wonder what could be so earth-shattering to bring about such a sudden gushing of conviction. It’s nothing, really, Rather, it’s that I’m nothing. Or, better yet, it’s that God has shown me that I need to humble myself to be nothing. I’m too prone to believe myself as something, and yet even more prone to exert myself to be the most something something that ever was. I’ve bought into the lie that this life is about “bettering” myself. “My life is not what it should be… I need to become better…”
It sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Fairly “un-Christian”, wouldn’t you say? Ah ha. There lies the problem. Christians are always thinking about how they can “better” themselves. I won’t condemn all Christians—I’ll just speak for myself. When I am feeling spiritually dry, my first thought is, “Oh, I haven’t been reading the word. Perhaps if I just read the word more, I will be content in my faith again.” When my earthly relationships seem to be faltering, I immediately think, “I don’t have enough love. I need to become more loving. Then my relationships will be better.”
Hold on a second, what’s wrong with those two things? What could possibly be said against reading the word of God and being more loving? Aren’t those good things in themselves? Then how could these good things—and the pursuit of them—ever lead to anything bad?
Thus our minds rationalize our behaviour, and thus we are deceived. I see this deception needs to be explained further. I will leave that to God’s word.
“…a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So, we, too have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by Christ and not by observing , because by observing the law, no one will be justified.” (Gal 2:16)
I would venture to say that being justified is the ultimate form of “betterment”. To be declared righteous, to have your sins removed—what could be better than this? So, according to this snippet of Scripture, by observing the law (keeping up practices that seem to be required of all Christians), no one is the better for it.
Okay. Hold on a second. Doing good things, being righteous in deed and creed, does nothing to help my plight? Goodness, what else can God possibly expect?
Let’s just heighten the tension a little more, shall we?
“… if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (Gal 2:21).
The only thing worse than knowing I can’t behave myself out of condemnation is the realization that by doing so, I, in effect, say that Christ’s death on the cross was useless.
It looks pretty hopeless, doesn’t it? I must confess that I have not been entirely fair. I’ve skipped some of the key parts of the passage that explain the solution. (As an aside, isn’t that annoying when people do that? Give only half the truth of the verse, or purposely ignore the parts that shed the proper light on the situation? Be constantly in the word, and you will not be so easily taken in!) What is this solution you ask? GRACE! FAITH! It is by FAITH in Christ that we are justified! Doing good or proper things doesn’t make us any better. It just shows that we feel guilty about something or other. It is by Christ we are justified—by His gruesome death on a condemning cross for the sake of restoring relationship between man and God.
When we put our faith in Christ’s finished work on the cross—finished because He not only died, but defeated death and rose again—God looks at us and does not see all of the sins which condemn us to hell. He sees—and accepts—Jesus Christ’s righteousness as our own. And that’s what grace is—undeserved favour, being accepted as a child of God when our sin has made us nothing more than an undeserving stranger.
“…a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified. If, while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a lawbreaker. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (Gal 2:16-21, NIV, emphasis mine)
Living by faith does not mean we throw the law by the wayside. On the contrary, putting our faith in Christ for our justification will enable us to joyfully observe the law and NOT depend upon it for salvation! Faith—the accepting and believing in God’s grace—frees us from slavery to the law for “justification”.
Paul (the writer of Galatians) attests that those living by faith in Christ will still fall into sin. This does not nullify the salvation we have received. It only proves how much tighter we must cling to Christ's sacrifice, how we cannot be justified in ourselves but in Christ’s death on the cross of shame. We still need to repent of that sin—do not think that by sinning more, we are simply helping God’s grace abound more (see Romans 6)!
I think the verse that sums everything up in this passage is “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (v 20). In order to truly have faith in Christ above our own attempts at “being good”, we need to actually die to ourselves. We need to daily put our faith in Christ’s finished work on the cross, and thereby Christ will live in us. The life we have on this earth will be one of faith, and not one of works.
This may be a lot to take in, a lot to understand. I don’t expect anyone to grasp it without the Holy Spirit revealing it. He has opened this tiny little section of Scripture to me this morning, and I praise Him for it! THIS revelation is what inspired my previous explosion of adoration for God, for His word. What a timely lesson to learn.
“My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” (Proverbs 3:11-12, ESV)
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