What They Should Have Learned from Abraham

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Turn with me to Galatians chapter 3, and we’re going to finish up Galatians chapter 3 tonight and be halfway through the book. Rather than recapping for you, I’ll let you all recap. When Paul is writing in the book of Galatians, when he’s writing to the churches in Galatia, whose influence is he fighting against?

The word starts with a J. Did I hear somebody say jerks? I thought I did.

Not exactly. Not exactly the answer I was looking for, but that’s good. Judaizers.

Very good. He was fighting against the influence of the Judaizers. The Judaizers were teaching that what saves you?

Works. Okay, specifically the works of the what? The law.

So the Old Testament law, they had to keep the Passover. They had to be circumcised. They had to keep the Ten Commandments, all of these things.

And that’s what he’s fighting against. And it wasn’t the. . .

I want to make sure we understand the distinction here. He’s not fighting against the Jews. He’s fighting against the Judaizers.

Now, they both taught the same things, but the difference was that the Judaizers at least paid lip service to the idea that they believed Christ had been their Savior, had died for them. These were people within the churches. These were not Jews that had no connection to the churches.

These were supposed believers. These were church members of a Jewish background who said, yes, you need Christ to have died for you, but after that you follow the Old Testament law in order to be saved and to remain saved. And so it wasn’t just the Jews.

It was a whole subset within the churches that were causing trouble. And he’s arguing against them. And they’re coming at everything as though the source of all good things is not Jesus Christ. Again, they would pay lip service to the idea that Jesus is the Savior, Jesus is the Lord, but everything goes back to Moses and Abraham for them.

Not to Jesus Christ, but to Moses and to Abraham. In this passage that we’re going to look at starting in verse 6 and going through the end of the chapter, he devastates their position by going back to Abraham himself. I mean, Paul’s brilliant in this passage.

Of course, it helps that he was being inspired. I would like to think that if I was speaking and writing under direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, I’d probably be brilliant too. I don’t think Paul can claim all the credit for this argument.

But it’s a brilliant argument he uses here to go back and use what they claim to be their basis, their foundation, and to use it in order to point them to Jesus Christ. Galatians chapter 3, starting in verse 6. And the title of tonight’s message is what they should have learned from Abraham. What they should have learned from Abraham.

Galatians chapter 3 verse 6 said, Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted unto him for righteousness. If you’ll remember back to last week, he asked them the five or six questions dealing with whether or not they received justification by faith or by the law. Did they receive the Holy Spirit by faith or by the law?

Did God work in them by faith or by the law? And he comes to verse 6 and says, Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. He refers back to, I believe, Genesis chapter 12, where it says the same thing.

It’s an almost word-for-word quote from the book of Genesis. The fact that Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. This belief he’s talking about is apart from works.

It’s not as though Abraham’s belief plus his works justified him. Abraham’s covenant, the works that he did in order to enter the covenant, the circumcision, all of that, I didn’t realize until studying this out this week. That began in Genesis chapter 15.

Not that they measured things in chapters back then, but the book of Genesis is mainly chronological, and that tells me three chapters later, whether it was later that day, whether it was years later, the fact is Abraham was justified. His faith was accounted to him for righteousness before he was ever circumcised. And it even says in here something about, I believe, 430 years before the law was given, if I’m remembering correctly.

We’ll get to it in just a minute. But whether it was 430 years or not, the law was not even given in its written form until Moses, which was a great while later after Abraham. Before the written law, before the physical act of circumcision and the physical demonstration that he was part of God’s covenant people, before any kind of work was performed by Abraham, the Bible says in Genesis chapter 12, and then again here in Galatians chapter 3, that Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

What did he believe God about? If you look at all of the promises that God gave Abraham throughout his life, there was the promise of him being the father of many nations. There was the promise of all nations of the world being blessed from his seed.

If you look back to the promises that God gave him, as well as the promises that God gave his descendants throughout time, it all pointed to the fact that God was going to once and for all deal with their problem of sin. So when Abraham believed God, it wasn’t just that he believed God was going to give him a child. It wasn’t just that he believed God was going to give him many descendants.

It was that he believed God was going to, through that, take care of Abraham’s biggest problem, which was sin. And the question is sometimes asked, how did people get saved in the Old Testament before Jesus Christ died? Folks, they got saved the same way in the Old Testament as we get saved now.

They happen to look forward to the sacrifice at Calvary as we look backward to it. And it all comes down to whether we’re looking backward or whether we’re looking forward to believing God that he either for them would or for us that he has dealt with our sin once and for all where we could not. Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

So already he’s drawing their attention back to Abraham, who they really sort of idolized. He said, okay, you want to talk about your descendants from Abraham? Because you think the fact that you are descended from Abraham makes you special, makes you more spiritual. Let’s talk about Abraham then, he says.

Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. What he’s saying here is that those who are of the faith, this faith that we have today that Paul possessed and preached back then, the faith that God could and would do something about the sin problem, was the same faith that Abraham had.

And what he’s telling them, what he’s telling the Galatians, is that it is those who have the same faith as Abraham who are his children in the faith. See, they were so concerned about the biological descent, they didn’t take the time to notice whether they carried on in his spiritual footsteps. Know ye therefore that they which are of faith the same are the children of Abraham.

And in context, it doesn’t just mean of faith as though any faith. We hear that all the time today. People of faith, communities of faith, whenever people in the world don’t want to single out a religion and risk offending anybody.

Oh, people of faith are going to fix America. Well, that’s not entirely true. When it says here of faith, Paul has made it very clear over the previous two chapters exactly what faith he’s talking about.

And it’s not just any old faith. People of faith. The same are the children of Abraham.

And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In these shall all nations be blessed. The Scriptures, he said, foresaw that God would justify the heathen through faith. The Scriptures foretold what God was going to do.

Because the Scriptures are not just an invention of man. They’re not just a bunch of old guys got together around a round table one day and decided what they were going to write down to keep everybody else in line. They foretold what was going to happen because they were breathed of God who knows and sees all of eternity as though it’s the snap of a finger.

The Scriptures are the Word of God, and they’re able to foretell things that men could not dream of. The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith. And that tells us that this idea of justification by faith is not a new concept to the New Testament.

It goes all the way back to Genesis. You read throughout the Old Testament, yes, they had things and rituals that they were supposed to do, but all of those things pointed them to the fact that God was going to deal with their sins. Foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith.

And it was even prophesied in the Old Testament that salvation was not just of the Jews. I think specifically to Isaiah, where it prophesied the Messiah saving the whole world. That God would justify the heathen through faith preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.

Even before the gospel, it was told unto Abraham that in thee all nations shall be blessed. They were blessed by the coming of Jesus Christ and the gospel with him. That promise that in thee shall all nations be blessed is a forerunner of the gospel.

It’s not the gospel in its entirety. Just the fact that a descendant of Abraham would be born is not a promise of the gospel, but every step was leading them closer and closer to God’s revelation of the full gospel, that Jesus Christ died for sinners. It’s a forerunner.

In thee shall all nations be blessed, so then they which be of faith. Again, the specific faith. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.

He’s talking about the importance of spiritual descent from Abraham. They had gotten so tied up, as I mentioned earlier, they’d gotten so tied up in whether or not they were his literal biological offspring, his literal descendants, that they had forgotten that it wasn’t his bloodline that justified him before God. It wasn’t his bloodline that made him righteous.

It was his faith. And all the while, they’re so worried about their blood descent from this righteous man that they forget about what made him righteous in the first place, what God accounted to him for righteousness. when they’d have been better off to be his spiritual heirs as opposed to biological. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.

And he’s making the case here that these Gentile believers, that you all have decided to ostracize and put aside as though they don’t matter, they’re not worthy of being part of the church, they’re not worthy of your time, these Gentile believers, because they are of the faith, they are descendants of Abraham as well. Only they got it right because they’re the spiritual descendants of Abraham. For as many, verse 10, for as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse.

Folks, I’m going to be honest with you. This was a hard passage for me to study. Not necessarily because there’s anything in it that’s so necessarily deep that we can’t understand it, but just because it encompasses so many points.

So many things are addressed in this passage. So many twists and turns in the argument that he makes. I really picture Paul writing this down and thinking, oh yeah, and another thing.

got to deal with this, got to deal with this, and it just comes across to me as a machine gun effect, just mowing down all the arguments all at once and getting all of them at once. For as many as are under the works of the law are under the curse, for it is written, cursed is everyone that continueth not in all the things which are written in the book of the law to do them. He says to the Judaizers, says to the Galatians, if you choose to be under the law, you’re cursed, because the Bible says, the Old Testament says, cursed is everyone that continues not in all He says, It’s evident.

Folks, we don’t need a seminary degree to look in our own hearts and to look at those around us and know that men are sinners. I don’t know about you, but I look in my own life and I can see it. It’s evident that I’m a sinner.

All you have to do is turn on the news and see the general direction our world is going. It’s evident there’s a sin nature running rampant in our streets. And it’s not limited to those that the world would call bad.

Even those that the world would look at us and say we’re good moral people. Folks, we’ve got a sin nature too. That we all fall short of God’s standards, that we all fall short of being able to keep the law, he says, is evident.

That no man shall be justified by the law in the sight of God. It is evident. For the just shall live by faith, he said.

The just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith, but the man that doeth them shall live in them. And that was a difficult verse for me, verse 12.

Because here he’s been talking this whole time and saying you can’t find justification, You can’t find righteousness, you can’t find life in the law. And then he says, the law is not of faith, but the man that doeth them shall live in them. And what he’s talking about here, I believe, with the law is that if you were going to follow the law, you’d have to continue where the law leads.

You’d have to follow the law completely or suffer the consequences that the law mandates. Because I don’t believe he’s suddenly changing his mind here or getting confused about what he’s been talking about and saying, okay, if you can live according to the law, you’ll be all right. Paul would have to have a very short attention span to go from devastating their idea of justification by the law and then say, but if you can continue in them.

No, he’s just said nobody’s justified by the law. He says, Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law. That curse that we were under, every man was under, is under today without Christ. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law being made a curse for us.

For it is written, cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree. So when he died, folks, it’s not, well, let’s just stop here. It’s not giving us an alternate theory of how Christ died.

I was troubled as a little kid in church. We would sing old hymns about him being hung on a tree or Calvary’s tree and all that. And I remember asking my dad at one point, Dad, I thought Jesus died on the cross.

Why are we singing about him being on a tree? And my dad said, what was the cross made out of? I said, wood.

I said, where do you get wood from? And I wanted to say the store, but I thought that’s not in the time. I said, from trees, exactly.

It’s just kind of a poetic way of saying it. He was crucified and hung up there on that wood, and cursed is everyone that hangs on a tree. Jesus Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us.

He took our sin, He took our inability to keep the law, He took the curse we were under and took it on Himself, so much so that the Bible said He became a curse. He took our very sin on Himself, and the Bible says He was made sin for us. He who knew no sin was made sin for us.

And that sin was crucified. It was nailed to the cross. It was hanged on the tree.

That the blessing of Abraham, verse 14, might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. It says the result, or the end game of His taking the sin upon Himself and being crucified on the cross was so that even the Gentiles could receive all these promised things by faith. That they could receive the blessing of Abraham.

that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith, that Christ wiped the slate clean so that by faith we could be justified and we could be heirs to the promises of God. And folks, I don’t know about you, but I’m thankful that he did. I’m thankful that God extended the opportunity to the Gentiles to share in the promises of Abraham.

Because if it wasn’t for that fact, there would probably be almost none of us here today. And when I say here today, I mean sitting in this church, knowing that we’re bought with a price, we’re saved by Christ’s blood, and knowing that we’re assured a place in heaven one day. If salvation had been only made available to the Jews and by the works of the law, most of us would not be where we are today and headed where we’re headed.

The blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. Brethren, I speak after the manner of men. And that doesn’t mean that he suddenly suspended divine inspiration, and now he’s making up scripture as he goes along.

He’s talking about using a human analogy here. Brethren, I speak after the manner of men, though it be but a man’s covenant, yet if it be confirmed, no man disannuleth or addeth thereto. What he says is, folks, you know the legal system.

Once the contract, once the covenant is made, and everybody has signed where they need to sign and dotted the I’s and initialed and everything, it’s a done deal. And you can’t just break it and get off scot-free. You can’t add to it. It’s there.

It’s done. And he’s speaking of human contracts that we make, covenants. Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made, he saith.

He saith not, and to seeds as of many, but as of one, and to thy seed which is Christ. He talks about Christ being the promise made to Abraham, being the promised seed. And what he’s talking about with this, with the covenant, and says even I speak as a man and talking about the covenant being made and not disannulled and not added to, was that if even man’s covenants have that force, The implication there is how much greater are God’s covenant that he will keep and he will not break because he’s a God who keeps his promises.

And what he promised was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Verse 17, in this I say that the covenant that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law which was 430 years after, that’s where I got that 430 earlier, 430 years after Abraham came the law of Moses, that the covenant that was confirmed before of God in Christ, The law which was 430 years after cannot disannul that it should make the promise of none effect. And what he’s saying here is that the law, while it served a purpose, could not change the fact that God made a promise to deal with sin, and the law was not him changing his mind and changing his promise on that fact. If human contracts stand up the way they do, or the way they were supposed to, how much more sure is it when God makes a promise?

God’s promise to Abraham was to deal with the problem of sin, And he did not just happen to change his mind 430 years later and say, well, here, now you can deal with it on your own. Just be good little people. That it should make the promise of none effect.

Because if God later on gave us away and said, here, now do your best and try hard to deal with your sin by being good enough, that would annul the promise that he’d given that he would deal with sin. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise. But God gave it to Abraham by promise.

All of these things were promised. Wherefore then serveth the law? He asked the question, the rhetorical question here, what, if God didn’t give it as an alternate means to salvation, then what was the purpose he gave the law for?

And folks, these are questions that if they were so hung up on Abraham and so hung up on Moses, they should have been asking themselves all along. What was the purpose of the law? It was added, he says, because of transgressions, until the seed should come to whom the promise was made, and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator.

Now a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid.

For if there had been a law given, which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law. So what he says in this part of the passage is, what’s the purpose of the law? He said, the law was given because of the transgressions of men.

Because of our wickedness, the law was given. And he says, so was the law made to change, to amend the promises of God? And he says, God forbid to look at the law and say it’s an alternate means of salvation, contrary to what God has already promised, is to misunderstand the purpose of the law and to put it in a place it was never meant to occupy.

He said, if there was a law that could have made men righteous, then righteousness would have been produced by the law. But the Scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. He said, if righteousness could be produced by the law, a law would have been given that could produce righteousness.

He said, but the Scriptures have concluded all under sin. Not just because we break the law, folks, we’re born sinners. It’s in our nature.

We’re already in the hole as soon as we’re born, unable to dig ourselves out. That the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up under the faith, which should afterwards be revealed.

Wherefore, the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be made justified by faith. And from what I’ve read in my studies this last week, The word he uses here, I forget what the word was they used in Greek, but schoolmaster may not be the best, at least in our minds today in the 21st century, for conveying this concept because we think of it as like a school principle. This schoolmaster, again according to what I’ve read, was something in their ancient Greek and Roman culture, someone that would essentially tutor them and train them, somebody that would work for the parents to teach the children and prepare them for life.

We’re not just talking academic subjects, but would basically be over them like a tutor and a nanny and a disciplinarian all at the same time to prepare them for what came next. But once they reached a certain point in their life and they had learned everything they needed to from this, we’ll call it a schoolmaster for lack of a better word, once they had learned everything that they needed to learn from this schoolmaster, they were no longer under that schoolmaster’s authority. That’s what he says of the law.

The law, folks, the law is like our training wheels to help us understand our sinful condition and to bring us to Christ. And once we’ve learned that from the law, speaking to us now, speaking to them then, once we’ve learned from the law the fact that we are sinners and in need of a Savior, once this unattainable standard is held up before us that we cannot hope to live up to, and we realize that we fall far short of it and that we need a Savior and we can’t save ourselves, the law has accomplished its work and the training wheels come off. Just like with their schoolmaster in those days We’re not under the confines of it anymore. And folks, I don’t mean to tell you God’s moral law is not for us to follow today.

We still should follow God’s moral law because it’s a good idea, because it’s good for us, because it honors Him. But in terms of trying to justify ourselves before God, trying to make ourselves acceptable unto Him, it doesn’t work because that’s not what it was there for. Wherefore, the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ that we might be justified by faith.

The purpose of the law was to point the way to Jesus Christ. But after that faith has come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God. He’s speaking now to the churches of Galatia, to the Jews and to the Gentiles.

Ye are all the children of God by faith in Jesus Christ. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither bond nor free. There is neither male nor female.

For ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then ye are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise. I share with you just very briefly, we’ve got a few minutes left, a few things from this passage that they should have learned from Abraham.

If we can boil this passage and what we’ve talked about tonight down into a few simple concepts that we can take from this, these apply to our lives as well. First is that belief is the basis of justification. It’s not works as they thought, and it’s not bloodline as they thought.

And today we have so many people in our world have been talking about this for the whole series now. We’ve got so many people around us in our world, even church-going people who think, if I can just be good enough for God, maybe He’ll accept me. If my good outweighs my bad, I’ll go to heaven.

Folks, that is not what the Bible teaches. Belief is the basis for justification, not works. Belief is the basis for justification, not bloodline.

You say, why does that matter? Why do we care about that today? None of you think, well, I’m descended from so and so.

People think that way still. well, my granddaddy was so-and-so. There are people who think, yeah, I’m a Christian.

My parents were Christian, so I must be one. Folks, it doesn’t work that way. Studying ancestry about a year ago, I’ve done it off and on for years and years.

And there was a name I had, but I happened to run across a story that I never knew about before, about a year ago. My great-grandfather’s great-grandfather was a man named Isaac Sullins, who died in 1870 and before that was a circuit-riding preacher for the Wesleyan Church in Missouri. And I kind of need to know that because I’d always joked about how I came from a long line of drunks and ne’er-do-wells, and it was nice to have somebody in the family tree that, you know, even the ones we look up to are people that went to war and wiped out countries.

Anyway, it was nice to have, you know, a man of God in the family tree somebody could look to as an example. And I read an obituary that was written about him in 1870. You’d be surprised what you can find on Ancestry.

com. That’s not a commercial forum, though. I’m just telling you.

Read the obituary that was written about him by another leader in the Wesleyan church at that time about how faithful he was to minister, about how faithful he was to go out to the highways and hedges and all these unknown places out there in southeast Missouri and the mountains and in the swamps along the river and whatever else, And he would preach the gospel and he gave his whole life, dedicated his life to proclaiming the gospel. And I thought it’s so cool to have somebody like that back in the family tree that we can look at. Folks, but he spent his whole life preaching the gospel that Jesus Christ died for sinners.

And it talks about that. And that we are justified by faith in Christ because of what he did for us on the cross and by nothing else. That’s what he spent his whole life preaching.

Can you imagine what he would think now, what, eight, nine generations later, if I were to say, well, my great, great, great, great grandfather was a preacher and he did all these wonderful things. I’m a Christian too. I’m descended from him.

Maybe not that many generations back, but there are people that think that way. His being a Methodist preacher may explain my kind of pathological aversion to Calvinism, but it doesn’t make me righteous before God, does it? No.

Their descent from Abraham didn’t make them righteous before God. My descent from another preacher doesn’t make me righteous before God. The fact that I’m a preacher does not improve my children’s standing before God.

It’s not an inherited thing. And that was the irony. They were so focused on Abraham and their descent from him, they forget that it was his faith that was accounted to him for righteousness.

If Abraham could have spoken to them himself, he would have told them, you’ve got it all wrong. If I today believed I was justified because I was descended from that great man of God, if he could come back and tell me, he’d say, you’ve got it all wrong. And folks, there are people in our world today, there are people that we come into contact with on a daily basis who think my daddy was a preacher, grandpa was a deacon, my mom taught Sunday school, my parents, grandparents, whoever, were Christians.

I’m all right with God. Folks, belief in Christ is the basis for justification. Not works, not bloodline, belief.

What it boils down to in this passage. Second of all, the purpose of the law is to show our need for salvation. He says a few things in this passage about the law.

He calls it a curse. It’s not something we want to be under permanently. He says that it was given because of transgressions.

It was given in the sense of restraining us and pointing us in the right direction to go. That doesn’t mean we earn our salvation from it. And he says it was given as a schoolmaster to point us to Christ, to train us up to help us see our need for Christ, and so that when that faith came, we take the training wheels off and we don’t have to look back.

The purpose of the law is to show us our need for salvation. See, we were sinners before the law came. The law was to show us how bad we really were because how far short we fell of that standard.

The purpose of the law is not to justify or to make us righteous. It’s to show us our need for salvation. And third of all, adoption comes as a result of faith.

See, it didn’t matter really in eternity whether somebody was descended from Abraham, whether somebody was descended from Moses. It didn’t matter whether somebody is descended today from a preacher or a deacon. Folks, adoption into God’s family comes as a result of faith.

Nobody, contrary to what the proponents of infant baptism tell us today, nobody is automatically born into the family of God. We are adopted into the family of God by faith. You cannot read the end of Galatians chapter 3 and come to a different conclusion where he talks about as a result of faith for a year of the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.

He talks about now there’s neither Jew nor Greek, there’s neither bond nor free. He’s gotten rid of these distinctions. There are no distinctions in our standing before God.

We’re all one in Christ Jesus. And if we belong to Christ, verse 29, then we’re Abraham’s children and heirs according t