How One Is Justified

Okay, so we're we've been working our way through Galatians and Today we're going to tackle two verses 15 and 16 and Laban rent read them to you just to sort of bring us up to speed Paul has written a letter to the Galatians and he's attacking the issue of why they are After having received the gospel of the glory of Christ, which is gracious, why are they sliding back to the law? And he's righteously angry at the false teachers that have come down to Antioch, where the Galatians, the big church at Galatia or the big church is.

And these Judah Judaizers were influencing the believers there, the Gentile believers. And so. Paul had laid the foundation of grace and he'd also talked to them why grace and law are not the same thing, that the church is based on grace alone. And these Jews came down and they were under a lost system because they were Jews, probably Christians, maybe, maybe not. But Paul in Verse 16 of chapter 1, he's astonished how quickly they moved away from the grace and back to law. Well, I don't think that's all that surprising, because we move away from grace really fast, back to tell me what to do and I'll do it.

And then in chapter 2, verses 1 through 10, Paul resolved the question at the Jerusalem Council regarding, should the Gentile Christians be bound by the law of circumcision? If you remember, he took Titus up with him, who was a Gentile, and they didn't require him to be circumcised, which showed that they assented to the fact that Jewish ritualism and legalism and legislature was not to be part of the church.

But then in verses 11 through 14 that we talked about last week, the issue became whether the Jewish Christians should be bound by the law. And what the Judaizers had done coming down to Antioch, they intimidated Peter and Barnabas, and they withdrew from eating with the Gentiles. And the issue had to do with the dietary restrictions that Judaism had put on the Jews.

So the point ends up being, well, the Gentiles should be free, of the mosaic system, so should the Jews that had become Christians. So now we're going to talk about today that the Apostle reasons from the Galatians to the Galatians, two issues. Were they justified by faith or were they justified by works? That's the question.

When Paul saw that Peter had withdrawn last week, had withdrawn from the Gentiles, he said to him, but when I saw they were not straight forward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in the presence of all, you being a Jew, live like the Gentiles, which he was eating with them and living like them, and not like a Jew, then by withdrawing, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like a Jew?

So Peter was doing a good job of being free from legalism, but when the influence came, peer pressure came, what did he do? He succumbed back. And as we talked about last week, this fear of peer pressure overcomes us all in various times in our Christian lives, where we want to be liked in our sphere of influence of people that we admire, and we sometimes will put more emphasis on that part of our lives and what the gospel tells us. So it isn't only that Peter was guilty. It's interesting the Lord uses this event. But when I questioned last week, I said, have any of you ever done that? Everybody looked down. I had you. I knew it. But this is a serious matter in Paul's mind because it has to do with the entire makeup of the church. And so now he begins to reason why it is a serious matter.

In the verse that Laban read, we who are Jews by nature and not sinners of the Gentiles, the we, who are the we here? He's talking about Jewish believers at Antioch in contrast with the Gentile believers. It's emphatic. He says, look, This is a sharp contrast here that we who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we came from Judaism and you Gentiles didn't. And he says, our viewpoint as a Jew back before we were saved, how did a Jew look at a Gentile? You think about that? It's like, how do I as a Christian look at a non-Christian? I have a mindset about that. And so, what was the mindset in those days?

Well, they called them sinners. Any Gentile was a sinner. It's often used in the New Testament from person's point of view that the speaker is from the point of view that which is he's holding at the time. If I'm here and you're there and we don't agree on something, well, I have a viewpoint about what you are doing and what you are. And if you were a Jew before salvation, you were looking at the Gentiles as though they were sinners. And you weren't.

I'm above others as a Jewish believer, as a Jew just by himself. So I found some stuff that Hal Malloy did years ago. Boy, I couldn't believe when I looked at it. 1995. The only guy that took seven years to get through Galatians and didn't make it. And it had to do with the Jewish mindset prior to faith in Christ.

How did they look at Gentiles? Sinners, like Gentiles. So what's the mark in their mind? What makes you a sinner? Their established mark was not God's mark for a sinner, but their idea of what Judaism was at the time in which they looked. Because as we talked about weeks ago, The Judaism that the apostles or the Judaizers were practicing at the time of the birth of the church was not exactly the same as was given to Moses on the mount. Over all of those centuries, they had kind of compromised things to fit what they thought. So generally, they were God's chosen people. As chosen, they believed that they were righteous just by being Jewish.

Where you want to see that is go to John chapter 3 and look at that interchange between Nicodemus and the Lord Jesus. Nicodemus can't understand why Jesus says to him, unless a man is born again, he can't get into the kingdom. In Nicodemus' mind, the kingdom is everything. Kingdom is everything. And he thinks that because he's a Pharisee and because he's a Jew, he's already in. And the Lord says, no, you have to be born again.

He doesn't get it. And he's a man that's serious about his Judaism. He's not kidding around. He came to the Lord in the middle of the night, so again, peer pressure. And he asked him this question, you know, we know you're from God because you can do all these wonderful things. And Jesus just didn't respond to the praise at all. He hits him right away.

Unless a man be born again, he will never see the kingdom of God and Nicodemus doesn't really understand and Jesus comes back at him again and says, not only won't you see it, you won't ever get in. He doesn't understand. He says, well, do I have to go back into my mother's womb? And then he says, no, you have to be born spiritually, reborn spiritually. So Nicodemus is having a tough time because of his viewpoint.

So, who were the Jews by nature? How did one get to be a Jew? You were born a Jew, right? So, we who are not sinners like the Gentiles, well, how did one get to be a Gentile? He was born a Gentile. So, by nature, he's a sinner. We Jews aren't. That's his frame of reference. That's how he sees everything. The natural birth Gentiles are without a law system. And if you don't have a law system from a Jewish viewpoint, you're a sinner. You didn't hit the mark. You don't even know what the mark is. But we Jews do. We got it figured out.

God meant that they could not possibly be righteous because they didn't have a law. So these sinners that when you see in the New Testament the word for for sinners or that come Sunday, use the word publican. That's what they really mean, that they're not like us, that they're sinners because they're Gentiles. So it's a point of view in relation to persons guilty of specific violations of their law.

You can imagine the Jews today, and we have some Hasidic Jews in our neighborhood. I'm sure they'd look at us Gentiles and think, boy, these guys, they're working on Saturday? You can't introduce yourself to one of their wives and shake their hand because you're not their husband. It's against their law to touch their wife. Or a man won't shake hands with your wife. And all of these rules that they have, they must think, ah, these Gentiles are all sinners. But we're not. We've got it wired. So, to put it in their language, they have always viewed Gentiles as unclean and dogs. That's how they look at us.

So Paul's speaking to Peter and to the Galatians on the common ground of their former Judaism and in an ironical fashion he uses the language of Judaism. He's saying to them, look, I know how you look at them because I did, I'm a Jew. I'll give you an example. Now I've told you before about the rabbi that lived across the street from me that doesn't anymore, my buddy Rabbi Pomerantz.

What a neat guy he was. But he's a Hasidic Jew, which meant he wore the black suit and the fedora hat and had the macrame around his waist, which reminded him of the Ten Commandments all the time. But he was a terrific guy. And we used to have these great conversations. We'd stand out in the middle of the street and we'd talk. And he'd say to me, you know what we're doing, don't you? I'd say, no. He said, we're kibitzing. I said, oh, OK, I got it. But one day, and I've kind of told this story before, that he asked me to purchase leaven from his synagogue for the Passover.

Because they can't, a Jew cannot own any leaven, anything that has any leaven in it during the Passover season. And so they have to enter into these contracts to sell it. and sell it to a Gentile. That's where it goes. Because another Jew isn't going to buy it.

And he said, do you want to do that? And I said, well, if I can help you, I can. But it turns out he wanted me to buy the leaven for the whole congregation. And because it's an arm's length transaction, if I contracted to buy it and they didn't want to buy it back at the end of the Passover, I was stuck. So I said, no, I'm not going to do that. I fell off that melon truck, but it wasn't yesterday. At the end of that, I did end up buying one family's stuff. And then after the Passover, he came back and he said, OK, we want to buy it back.

And in that process, Roger talked a couple of weeks ago about the right hand shake. We shook just like that. He held a white handkerchief in his left hand and we shook. He said in the diamond markets in New York where the Hasidic Jews run it all, the handshake is everything. No written contracts. It's that handshake and that means everything to them. So he comes back over and it's time for him to buy the stuff back.

And in the conversation I was telling him about how I'd been studying about Abraham lately. And he said, oh, he got excited. He said, well, that's pretty neat. I said, you know what I've learned? I said that Abraham was declared righteous by God 14 years before he was circumcised.

That was the end of the conversation. It was over. You see the difference in viewpoint? Even though the Bible clearly states the time frame between Abraham being declared righteous by God and his viewpoint that circumcision was everything, he couldn't accept that. That's his viewpoint. So, like I said, that ended the conversation.

It's been interesting for me to be around some of these Hasidic Jews because these guys believe in the first five books of the Bible and none of the other rest of the Old Testament. They're very interesting people and like my wife Donna says, they work harder at their laws so they can't just keep up their grass because they're too busy being Jews. They're terrible neighbors. Oops, went the wrong way here.

So, did the Jews have a problem with righteousness? Is Paul saying that the Jews are not sinners but the Gentiles are sinners? In Romans 3.23, very easy to refute that, Paul says, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Everybody.

In Ephesians 2.11, Paul says, therefore remember that formally he's talking to Gentiles.

In the flesh, you were called on circumcision by the so-called circumcision, Jews, which is performed in the flesh by human hands. Remember that you were at times separated from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. I don't know how you can say something that would be more condemning than that. But then he says, but now Christ Jesus you who were formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

So Paul says in Romans 9 when he's talking the book of Romans when you get to chapter 9 10 11 and answers the question if God has extended all of this grace to Gentiles how about all the promises he made to the Jews? How about those Jews? What is he going to do? Did he just say, I'm done with them and I won't pick them up again now? He set them aside and he'll go back, but listen to what he says to them.

It is not as though the word of God has failed, for they are not all Israel that are descendants from Israel, nor are they all children because they are Abraham's descendants. Well, there goes Nicodemus' thought process. But through Isaac, your descendants will be named. That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of promise as regards to descendants.

What is he saying to them? Just because you were born a Jew doesn't make you a Jew in God's sight. Or put it another way, it doesn't make you righteous. before God just because if you're the seed of Abraham physically doesn't mean that you are a child of God spiritually doesn't mean that they are righteous before God that's a big pill for for a Jewish person to swallow so they do have Jewish people today do have a problem with righteousness because it gets stuck under the law this legal system they have and they can't get free because they're hooked into it. I got to thinking about that and thinking, well, they're not the only ones that have this problem. People today have a mindset of spiritual wellness because of their religious traditions.

Well, I don't know whether you grew up in a denomination or not, but I grew up in Catholicism and so I have the freedom to pick on them. The Catholics, interesting. Look what they have. They have the Pope. They have a holy city. They have the Virgin Mary. They have all of those traditions. They even have rosary beads. They have infant baptism. They have all of those sacraments that they put on you. And plus they have these really cool things called Holy Days of Obligation. You have to go to church every Sunday or mass every Sunday and if you miss you commit one of those deadly sins called mortal sins and then there were another seven days during the year that you had to show up or you got the same consequence. So the question would be to another Catholic what if the scripture contradicts your belief in tradition?

What's the answer? Do you have an ultimate authority? Do I have an ultimate authority? Do all the denominations have an ultimate authority? They do. They do. And what's interesting is that the answer is the traditions of the church come first before the Word of God. Another personal example.

Of course, I grew up in Catholicism. My mom was a Catholic and she went to Mass every day of her life. And when I became a Christian, she thought I had just reconciled back to Catholicism. She didn't realize until later that it was a much different thing than she was thinking. So I went out to see her one time, and she had the priest waiting for me.

And he turned out to be a pretty decent guy. And so I said to him, I was just cocky enough, I said, I won't talk to you unless you have a Bible. So he scrounged around someplace and came up with a Bible. We talked for two or three hours. And what the deal was, when it all sort of boiled down into something, what's the ultimate authority?

His viewpoint, and my mom's viewpoint, was the Church of Rome. My viewpoint was the Bible. What's the problem with that? My mother even said to me, Well, we have things in the archives in Rome that haven't been released yet, and that's what the Pope works off of, and that's why we're right. I said, well, you haven't read Paul's epistles, have you? Because he says he's the final word, and it's all there. So it really does come down to what's your authority? What's my authority? What's Paul's authority? And what's Peter's authority? Who do you rely on? Who's the one that's got the right answer?

It's obviously the Word of God. In Galatians 2.15, as Jews, we are Jews by nature and not sinners of the Gentile origin. A Jew has a mindset Contemporary Christianity denominational people have a not mindset. The Word of God is the final word the final word so verse 16 Paul goes on and says nevertheless Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus even we as have believed in Christ Jesus so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, since by works of the law shall no flesh be justified." So, what's interesting about these verses is when you just sort of sit back and read them and not get drilled down, but just look at them, There are certain words that stand out to you.

The law here is used in the Bible does not always refer to the Mosaic system to be part of it. We can see regards the Jewish system that the law, the Decalogue, was the law that they were hooked into. The entire governing code of Israel as recorded in Exodus is the law. The rule of life yet to be applied to the Jews is coming in the messianic kingdom and it will be called kingdom law. And that rule of conduct prescribed by men in lots of scriptures as you can see.

That any recognized principle of action is a law sometimes equivalent to power. Here's the thing. We are born and raised in a society, in every society on the planet, is law-based, isn't it? I think about it this way. Right behind your left ear, there's this little black box, and in that box are your rules. And you think, if I do this, I'm cool. If I follow these dictates, I'm going to be fine. And those things get modified over time. Until you come to the understanding of what grace really is, you hang on to those rules. They can be denominational, they can be civil, they can be political, they can be all kinds of different things. Well, I won't. It's like Peter said, well, I can't go out and eat with those Gentiles anymore because those Jews are watching.

So, the whole will of God regarding every detail of the individual believer's life is what we would call the rule of life for a believer, and it's all under grace. I think the problem is that we like to be told what to do, and the we in that is our old flesh.

We were talking about that in Sunday school. The flesh wants to know what to do so that it can be pleasing to God. But God has come to us with a grace system, and the grace system doesn't give you laws, it gives you principles. And my ability to respond to the grace, I have to recognize that the grace is a motivator. That I don't need to be told what to do if I come to the realization, my goodness, I love God.

Well, why do I do that? Because He first loved me. You see how that works? He didn't have to tell me. I just know that God loves me and I couldn't help but respond. And then from that principle, I begin to find out what is pleasing to Him. And I want to do it because I love Him. Because He first loved me. And then He says in His Word, guess what? I'm going to reward you for obeying Me because you love Me. Because I first loved you. Why did I do all of that? Because He first loved me. That's grace.

He didn't tell me what to do. I just got so interested in Him, and you get so interested in Him, that you want to find out what is pleasing to God, what is pleasing to the Lord Jesus Christ, and that's where I want to be and what I want to do. And not only that, He supplies me with the Spirit of God to do it. Because like Lewis Perry Chaffer says, God has called us to live a life that is totally impossible for us to live, but He expects us to do it. You think, really? Enter the Holy Spirit. That's how it gets done. But from my reference, it's because I love God, because He first loved me.

Bear in mind that when the Apostle Paul dwells on the law, he does not confine his remarks to just Jewish law, as I said before. He kind of reasons abstractly about law as a principle itself. He says and means not merely that you cannot justify by the works of the Mosaic law, but there isn't any law of any kind that can justify a man. If there was a law that could justify it, it must be something that God had revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. But Paul goes further and says, by works of the law you can't be justified. It's not only the law itself, but it's the works of the law that can't justify you. The law principle is opposed to justification, instead of being a means of it, because it forces you to look at yourself. He takes up the fact now that the works of the law, that no flesh can be justified.

And he says, nevertheless, we know. We believers who are Jewish, we factually know. We know this principle because we got saved on this principle. So the Jewish believers, what did they know about righteousness? That any man is justified or judicially declared righteous by God, not by any works. They knew that. That would mean his object would be a law system. If his justification or righteousness was by works of the law, he'd have to focus on the law. But when you are made righteous, you're declared righteous by God, you get to get your mind off of the law and get it on God himself. Any man is justified by his faith whose object is Jesus Christ.

The great freedom that we believers enjoy is the fact that we don't have to look at me and we can look at the Lord Jesus. Notice the law requires this looking to myself. And I'm always checking my progress if I'm under a lost system. But if I understand the grace that I live under in Christ, I'm free to concentrate on His glory and I don't have to check. I can just trust Him.

The freedom in that is just amazing. You know, we were talking about arrest this morning. There's arrest there that law never would give you. So what does divine law look like as a purely legalistic system? It consists of statutes, rules to do. If a person obeys the law, he's told you will get divine approval. If you disobey it, you'll be subject to divine condemnation. The divine approval is a matter of debt which God will owe you because you've obeyed.

This is a salvation which the person merits and which is given on the basis of works and not grace. So we've got to be careful to note the Bible nowhere teaches this concept all the way back to Adam. This concept is not taught. So far as the lost sinner is concerned, and with reference to salvation, you can't earn it. This concept had its origin, I think it was back in December when we started, we talked about Cain and Abel and the way of Cain.

He was the first guy that was a religious guy and his whole mindset was, I'm going to earn I'm going to do it." And God said, no, no, no. If you do it my way, I'll just give you the righteousness. He said, no, no. You take what I'm here to offer or nothing. The Lord said, okay. God accepted Abel's sacrifice.

He did not accept Cain. So what did Cain do? He got angry and he killed his brother. He killed his brother because he couldn't get to God. What's interesting about that is that he's the first one the first religious man that said to God, I'm going to do it my way.

And God won't accept that because it's from the flesh. He won't accept it. So if one could keep the law and be declared righteous, would that be enough to gain acceptance with God? Let's say, I was going to pick somebody out, but I won't do that. Let's say you could keep the law. I'll pick on Courtney. Let's say Courtney could keep the law perfectly, and he did it. And he shows up one day and he's got them all. He's got it all covered. What's he have? What did he accomplish? He's righteous, isn't he? Isn't he? Kept the law.

Here's the problem. He's self-righteous. He's not God-righteous. And your self-righteousness and my self-righteousness doesn't get us anywhere. It gets us condemned. We have to have God's righteousness in order to have a standing in front of Him. So in nature it has to be by God's grace.

It can't be any other way. He says the word by or through indicates the channel through which one secures salvation. It is expressed through faith in Jesus Christ. So it refers to the acceptance of that which accredits itself as true. Jesus is the Savior.

And a corresponding trust in the person concerning whom the facts are presented. Personal belief. We've done a class here on the four aspects of biblical faith. This is personal faith. This is my faith. It's not the faith of the doctrine that we all know. It's not the essence of faith. It's not the principle of faith, it's my personal and your personal faith is the principle on which we are saved.

Does that mean that faith is a work? Can I go to God and say, okay, I did my part, now you've got to save me? If you look at Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, Paul says, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. Salvation is the gift. So my faith isn't the gift. Salvation is the gift. I get it by believing. My faith is a non-meritorious act because all of the value in that statement is in what God did and His salvation. I don't have any value in faith, but faith is the thing that appropriates it to me. It's the thing that I use under grace freely to appropriate God's incredible salvation to me.

It's not a result of works so that nobody can boast. So salvation, righteousness is a free gift. So what was the goal of those who were Jewish by believing in Jesus Christ? They wanted to be justified by faith and their object was Jesus Christ. And we know they knew that you could not be justified by their works, whose object is a lost system. That's a big hurdle for a Jew to overcome, but not any bigger than the view that we have about how God grates on the curve and I'm going to do enough that when I get there he's going to balance out and I'll be okay.

What is that? It's a lost system. There's no grace in that deal. You know, well God will be merciful to me. I got 7 out of 10. It's all men. No, that's not how it works. So we all have this legal mindset because we all have a sin nature and we live in a fallen world. Salvation is totally free by grace of God and if we believe Him, we get it all for free. So, justified. What does it mean? It's the act of God, God's act, in justifying a believing sinner, and it consists of taking away all of our guilt and all of the penalty associated with it. And because Christ bore both your guilt and your penalty on the cross, He took care of it.

Being placed into Christ by the Holy Spirit, 2 Corinthians 5.21, He made Him, the Lord Jesus, who knew no sin, sin as a principle on behalf of us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ. Now, there are people that say, well, what God has done is imputed his righteousness to you.

No, he didn't do that. He took you and me and through that cross of Christ, he put us into Christ. My entire identity and your entire identity before God this morning is the Lord Jesus Christ. Does he have a righteousness himself before God? Answer, yes he does. So do you. Same righteousness. Why? Because you're in him. You're in him. He isn't passing it out so that you got it in your pocket in a pocket card or a credit card. You have the very righteousness of God in Christ. We have exactly the same standing before the Father that the Lord Jesus Christ enjoys right now. That's a gift that, again, is hard to get your arms around because it's so gracious.

But it's because you believed. It's because these Jews believed, and we stand not only guiltless and uncondemned, but that is for all time and all eternity. It never stops. The positive side of that is that we get to be in the presence of a holy God for eternity. In other words, we get to hang with him. And he gets to hang with us, because we're just like him.

So, if you were to translate this last verse, you would say, And knowing that a man is not justified by law's works, but only through faith in Christ Jesus, we also, we Jews, placed our trust in Christ, in Christ Jesus, for what reason? In order that we might be justified by faith. in Christ and not by law works because we recognize and affirm that by the law works there shall no flesh be justified.

Let's pray. Dear Father, how we thank you. We would ask that we would be able to settle down and recognize the incredible grace that you've applied to us and supplied to us in your son, and it's all by faith. We only have one obligation before you, and that's to believe you and trust you and rest. We thank you. We pray in your son's precious name. Amen.