March 10, 2024: Message: The Free Gospel | Scripture: Galatians 4:21-31 | Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
Worship Songs: Come Ye Sinners | Jerusalem | It Was Finished Upon That Cross
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Introduction
If able, please stand with me as I read to you from Galatians 4:21-31. TWoL: 21 Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. 23 But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. 24 Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. 25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. 27 For it is written, “Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.” 28 Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. 29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. 30 But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” 31 So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.
I’ve said it to you before, but for those of you who don’t remember, the book of Galatians is about defending a specific Christian doctrine—the doctrine of justification. Now, this is a big word. Some of you may not know exactly what it means even if you’ve been in the church for a long time, but it has everything to do with how a person can stand before a holy God—a perfect God—a God who can have no sin even near his presence—how can a person stand before him, like a defendant before a judge, and be found innocent?
This is the question for all of us. It’s not just about how one might obtain eternal life, or how to be happy, or discovering your purpose in life. No, the real question is when we see God—because all of us will inevitably, one day see God—what will we say to him when he asks you, “why should I accept you? Why shouldn’t I cast you out of my sight?” And if the best we’ve got is that I tried to be a good person, that won’t be enough. Why? Well, that’s what our text is all about—why, “I’ve tried to be as good as possible or to do the best I could by my own strength”—why this simply is not enough.
But instead of trying to hold you in suspense, I’m just going to tell you what our passage says is enough, and that is God, himself. The only thing that is acceptable to God is God. The only thing that God won’t cast out of his sight are those whom God has made and sustained in his own likeness. And while that may be daunting to some of us, what I hope to communicate to you this morning is why it’s our greatest and happiest hope—that your salvation, your acceptance, your justification, your freedom before a holy God is something that only God and his word of promise can give you.
And my task is to show you how you might receive that Word—how you might know that God, himself, has made you acceptable to himself. Today, I want you to find freedom in God’s gospel promise, and I want you to find it not by relying more upon yourself, but by realizing that he accomplishes this despite yourself—despite the strength of your doubt, despite the insurmountable guilt of your curse, and despite the emptiness of your worth. God does this for you, and he does it, firstly,
1) Despite the Nature of Your Doubt
Just to remind you, the apostle Paul is writing here to the Galatians because a number of them, both Jew and Gentile, are being chastised as being incomplete children of God. See, there was this Jewish Christian sect, called Judaizers, preaching that to become a covenant member of Israel—one of the sons or daughters of Abraham, you would not only need to believe in the things the apostle Paul was saying about Jesus, but you’d also need to become like a Jew. You would have to be circumcised, for those who weren’t, observe their customs, rules, rituals, and festivals—you had to do things that Jews under Moses’ law were required to do. And it turns out, many of these Galatians were slowly being convinced to change—that perhaps this thing called “the gospel” wasn’t enough.
So, Paul is pleading with them in this letter not to fall into the Judaizers’ trap. Don’t submit yourself back under the laws of Moses. In fact, if you read through this book, he uses pretty much every argument under the sun to stop them from doing so. He argues for his own authority given to him by God, he’s tried to warn them, appeal to them with logic and theology, stir up their emotions, but here, he switches his tactic. Here, he plays the Judaizers’ game, and he says, “Fine, let’s consider this law that you want to put yourself under. Do you know what it says?”
And, instead of actually walking them through individual items in the law, since he’s already done that in previous chapters, he gives an analogy from Scripture. Now, it’s not an analogy like we tend to tell analogies today, where you can draw obscure conclusions from obscure facts. No, what Paul’s doing here is more like something called typology. But if you don’t know what that is, that’s okay. It’s sort of like an illustration, and the illustration he uses to explain how the law works comes from a story of a man that they know very well. He draws from the life of Abraham.
Now, Abraham wasn’t technically a Jew—he would become the father of the Jews. But before he became the father to Israel, he, himself, was a nobody, a pagan—someone from a land called Ur. But his life, especially the order of events around the conception and birth of his son, Isaac, looks very similar to the history of God’s plan of salvation in the world.
What do I mean by that? Well, in Genesis 12, 15, and 17, Abraham receives something called a covenant promise—it’s the kind of promise that, if any party breaks or leaves parts of the covenant unfulfilled, death would come for the one who gave the promise. In this case, God gives the promise, and the specific promise that Paul is talking about here in Galatians was the promise for Abraham and his wife, Sarah, to conceive and bear a son—an heir to Abraham’s name and house—a house that would eventually become a kingdom.
The problem was that Abraham was eighty when he first received the promise, and Sarah was seventy—well past her years of childbearing age. And for twenty years, Sarah prayed that God might fulfill his promise to them, but a baby never came. So, in doubt and desperation, she says to Abraham in Genesis 16, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my servant, Hagar; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And being near the age of 100 now, feeling the weariness of his own bones, Abraham listens to Sarah, sleeps with Hagar, resulting in the birth of a baby boy named Ishmael.
Then, Genesis 17 happens. God reaffirms his promise that a Son is coming who will be born from Sarah’s womb, and do you remember what Sarah does in Genesis 18? She laughs! She’s worn out. Her husband is a century old. Such a thing, she confesses, is impossible for man. But what we learn over-and-over again in the Bible is that what is impossible and unexpected for man isn’t only possible for God, but usually turns out to be the very means by which God fulfills his word. Three chapters later, in Genesis 21, Isaac is born not out of the will and plan of people but entirely because of the grace and intervention of God.
Now, what are we to make of Paul’s reference to Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar? I believe they’re given to us, in part, so that we might see the order of events. The promise is given first. The doubt and attempt to satisfy God’s promise by their own human planning comes second. We see this in the conception and birth of Ishmael through Hagar. The voice of God comes, thirdly, to remind them that despite their doubting and despite their human planning, he will still provide his own answer. Then, when we least expect it, and in the most incredible, non-human way, God gives redemption. He saves Abraham’s line—not because of obedience—not because of their law-keeping—but because of his incredible mercy and grace.
Does this not sound similar to Scripture’s broader story? Like Adam, God brings Abraham up out of nothing and gives him a promise. Like Israel, whose reception of the law is a constant reminder of their own doubt and attempts to save themselves, Abraham and Sarah doubt the Lord, and they receive Ishmael as a constant reminder of that doubt. But even in their doubting and intention to save themselves, what does God do? He gives his voice to them again to remind them that his answer is coming—this is Genesis 17 for Abraham and the prophets to Israel! And at the right time, when things looked most bleak, God sends the Son—not because of obedience—not because of our law-keeping—but because of his incredible mercy and grace.
Why then, asks Paul, would you want to enslave yourself once again to the law? Why would you want to earn your salvation when the only thing that happens to people who try to earn God’s favour is greater hardship and a greater reminder that in all our trying, we only fail? Brothers and sisters, the gospel starts here—that for all our attempts to earn our salvation—to justify and make ourselves righteous—we can’t do it. It is only by the grace of God that one is saved. It is only in living by the promise and not by human cunning or planning that one receives redemption. Our cunning brings regret. But his word brings everlasting life. Find freedom, then, from a life of regret and works grounded in doubt and place your trust in God’s gospel promise.
2) Despite the Nature of Your Curse
Now, what of all these references to slave and free, Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac? All these references tend to be what confuses people in this passage, but all Paul is doing is comparing the two women, Hagar and Sarah, and their two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, with the law and the gospel. In the first sense, Hagar and Ishmael correspond to Mount Sinai and the Jews of Paul’s day in Jerusalem—those who were still living under the Law—those who based their righteousness and their ability to stand before God upon what they did.
These, Paul says, are slaves—Hagar was Sarah’s bondservant from Egypt, and the only thing Hagar could give birth to was more slaves. This was her legal problem. No matter how much Sarah wanted to call these her children, they would always be born under orders—under the shadow of Abraham and Sarah’s attempt to prove on their own that God wasn’t a liar. It was their shortcut—their solution. They had become their own redemption, but it was insufficient because the child really belonged to the slave woman and not the free.
And we’re told in Genesis that Sarah actually comes to hate Hagar. Why? Because every time Sarah looked at her servant, she’d see what she couldn’t give Abraham, and what God seemed to have failed to fulfill himself. It was always going to be an empty solution—an ineffective redemption.
What’s worse is that every time Sarah looked at Hagar, it wasn’t only a reminder of what she couldn’t have, and what God hadn’t given her, but it was also something like a ticking time bomb because the second Abraham died, if Sarah was still alive, Ishmael would inherit, and he could, at that very moment, decide to give everything to his mother and cast Sarah out. See, in effect, what Abraham and Sarah had done by impregnating Hagar and giving Abraham an heir through someone other than Sarah was that they had cursed themselves.
They had taken things into their own hands. They had followed the natural processes of how the world tried to deal with its problems, and by it, they had devised for themselves the very basis for their destruction. And Paul says this is exactly what the covenant under Moses—the covenant of the law—is like. This is what the Judaizers preaching to you to go back and observe the law are trying to give you!
They’re trying to curse you. They’re looking to destroy and enslave you because that’s what the law does. All you’re doing, all your rule keeping—all that your personal righteousness and justification brings you is death. Why? Because that’s what the law is. The law is there simply to show you that you can’t keep it. The law is there to remind you of what you can’t obtain on your own. The law is there as a shadow so that as you give it your attention, it’s just waiting for the day when it can cast you out, leaving you with nothing. The law is there to point out our sin—our reliance upon ourselves instead of upon God.
Sarah and Isaac, on the other hand, are compared to the gospel of Zion. They belong to the Jerusalem that is above. The City of God. The Holy Habitation of Our Creator. The Kingdom of the King. Sarah could not conceive, and yet God causes her to conceive at the age of 90. Isaac wasn’t planned by human wisdom. His conception and birth were anything but normal. Why? Because it was free. Because it was foretold by God’s promise, assured by God’s power, and fulfilled by God’s faithfulness. Church, when God makes a promise, even when we curse ourselves, his promise for us will always hold fast.
And Paul is telling us that seeking our salvation in ourselves—finding our righteousness in our works—crediting ourselves as legally justified before a holy God apart from God—this is an insane thing to try and do. But the truth about all of this is that sin is insane. Sin is a curse. Sin makes us try and rectify ourselves—to make us legally righteous in our own eyes, thinking that if we do enough good on our own, then God must see us as good too, right—that it doesn’t matter if we’ve done a lot of bad things, so long as we outwork our bad with good deeds?
But the law tells us otherwise. The law says the more “good” you try and do—the more you attempt to justify yourself—the more you reject and rebel against God’s help—the less and less free you become.
Perhaps, says one commentator, this is why our text is so hard for us to understand. It’s not the number of word pictures that Paul gives us that confuses us. “It’s because our default position is sin. The nature of our curse is that we know nothing but a salvation—a justification—by works. It’s our greatest insanity. We simply cannot shake this desire to be righteous by our own actions.
In fact, it even affects how we read the Bible. On the one hand, we think Hagar and Ishmael—these are the bad guys. Sarah and Isaac, they’re good. There must be something about Sarah and Isaac that makes them better than the slaves,” right? But Paul and Genesis never say that. If anything, Hagar is the one to be pitied. Ishmael is the one who is cast off when he had no control who gave birth to him.
Sarah, on the other hand, bullies Hagar and Ishmael. She treats them like objects to be despised and discarded despite the fact that she caused this mess. And yet, for some reason, we want to commend Sarah. We want to make her, Abraham, and Isaac the heroes. We want them to be redeemable. We want us to be redeemable—there’s got to be something in me that’s worth saving.
There’s got to be something in Sarah that’s worth saving. But the truth of our text is this: all of them—Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Hagar, Ishmael—all of them were wicked. All of them stood under the curse of their sin. All of the Galatians stood under the curse of their sin. All of us stand under the curse of our sin—under the curse of trying to do things our way to prove ourselves before God—under the curse of trying to obtain our righteousness according to the law.
3) Despite the Nature of Your Worth
But the joy of the gospel is this: despite the nature of your doubt, despite the nature of your self-inflicted curse, and despite the nature of your own counterfeit worth, the promise precedes the law, and better yet, the promise assures the redemption where the law assures condemnation. God’s promise and work come before your promises and your works. God’s righteousness replaces and atones for your unrighteousness.
How? By sending his own Son of promise to become the satisfaction of our doubt, the target of our curse, and the payment for our worthlessness. We were barren, like the people of Galatia once were. We could not bear any righteous work, no matter how hard we tried. But because Jesus, himself, takes on our insane burden, because he fulfills the entirety of the law on our behalf, and because he dies upon that cross, he has set us free.
He has set us free from trying to obtain the promises on our own. He has set us free from cursing ourselves under the law. He has brought us worth in our freedom from the bondage of sin to the love of God—to love him as we were meant to love him, and to be loved by him as he has always intended to love us.
Do you see, now, why this is our greatest and only hope—that God might do for us what only God can do? Because by it, he not only proves his love for us, but sets us free from trying to earn a love that he’s had for us from the very beginning. Even before we enslaved ourselves to the insanity of law-keeping, God had already planned, purposed, and accomplished our salvation in Jesus, and to go back and try and add something to this gospel—to say we have to earn our righteousness, rather than to simply be righteous through Christ, it’s to confess that we don’t understand what he accomplished for us on that cross in the first place. Christ sets us free through his death and resurrection so that we might never be enslaved to work for our own salvation again.
Now, some of you may be saying, “well, why are Christians called to be holy, then, in Scripture? Why are we called to obedience in our salvation? Why do you, Pastor Stephen, keep trying to challenge us and grow us in our theology, our biblical literacy, and our doctrinal purity? Are you trying to force us back into slavery and earn our salvation?” Absolutely not! We pursue righteousness, holiness, theological accuracy, biblical literacy, and doctrinal purity BECAUSE Christ has set us free—because our growth in these things helps us to know him better—to see him closer—to love him deeper.
But we can’t know him, see him, or love him unless he draws us to himself first, unless he shows us the freedom of his gospel over the impossible cost of keeping his law. And to go back to that question that I started with, when we get to heaven, and God, or whoever is manning the front gate, looks at us and asks us, “why should I accept you? Why shouldn’t I cast you out of my sight?” If our answer starts in any way with the word “I,” then we prove our enslavement: “Because I believed,” “Because I did this,” or “Because I did that.”
But, brothers and sisters, I heard this once from another preacher, “the only right answer is in the third person: ‘Because He…!’ Just think about the thief on the cross! Do you ever wonder how that conversation went as he approached heaven’s gates?
He walks up to Abraham or David who’s standing there, and they’re looking at him quizzically, and they say to him, ‘well, you’ve never been to Bible Study, you’ve never offered up a holy prayer, you’ve never been baptized, you don’t have a clue about church membership, and yet, you made it! How did you make it? What are you doing here?
And the thief probably looked up at them, just as confused, and said something like, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, what do you mean, ‘I don’t know’?’ ‘I don’t know’ ‘Well, do you … have you… hang on, let me get my supervisor.’ And Michael, God’s angel walks up and asks, ‘hi sir, do you know and can you tell me what the doctrine of justification by faith is?’ ‘Nope, never heard of it.’ ‘Well, what’s your favourite verse in the Bible?’ ‘What’s the Bible?’ Question after question—plea after plea of ignorance.
So, Michael, after all his questions, looks at him stunned, frustrated a little, and goes, ‘okay, fella, on what basis, then, are you here?’ And the thief says, ‘the man on the middle cross said I can come.’”
That’s it, church. Obedience is good. Holiness is good. Theology is good. But the thing that gets you in the door isn’t what you’ve done but what’s been done for you—what HE, our Lord, our Saviour, Jesus, our Christ has done for you. He died on that cross so that the doubt, the curse, and the worthlessness of your sin might be satisfied in his perfect faith, his heavenly blessing, and his infinite love, which he gives to you, without cost, as a gift of faith. Find freedom in the promise of God’s gospel. Don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery. Repent of your sin. Trust in your Saviour. For Christ has set us free from the bondage of the law so that we might have an everlasting hope and happiness with him.
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