Not a Rebuild
Galatians 2:15-18 · Mike Doyle · Mar 31, 2019
Galatians (2018-20), No. 16
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926191427905

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. So today we're still working through chapter 2 and we're working towards a conclusion, which will probably be next week and the week after. But Paul is trying to answer accusations made against him by the these fellows called Judaizers who had come down to Galatia and talking about the whole idea is how do you get justified? Do you do it by obedience to some sort of law system or is it by grace through faith only? And so up until this point, the facts of justification we talked about last week were known by these Christian Jews who were in Galatia.

They knew. And what did they know? What did they know was the facts about their justification? They knew a couple of things. That justification was to be declared righteous by God, which would give you a right standing before God. That's what it meant.

They also knew that human beings aren't justified by God by any kind of a works-motivated law system. They knew that. And it didn't matter whether it was mosaic or any kind of legal principle. They realized that the law couldn't produce enough good works for them to be righteous before a holy God.

They also realized that to be justified, it had to be solely by faith in the person of, from their perspective, the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and what he did on the cross. That was the only way. So Peter, Paul, Barnabas, all of those Jews that had become Christians in Antioch, knew that they were justified. And we talked a lot last week about Peter eating with the Gentiles and then he withdrew when the legal guys showed up from Jerusalem. And we'll expand on that today. But he knew, Peter knew, that the only way to be justified was by faith in Christ and His work.

And there was no other way. He knew that. And he also knew that All of these fellows knew this principle, that no flesh, no man, no member of the human race has ever been or ever could be justified on the basis of law-inspired works. It just isn't the principle that God justifies us or declares us righteous.

So, in the Old Testament, men would gain standing They thought, because God gave them a law, but the men and women that were saved in the Old Testament were always saved by faith. Now, this is kind of a universal principle, and I was thinking this week, where have I seen this? And this was, I don't know, it was probably 25 years ago. Denver was one of the only cities that got this Inca thing from Mexico City, and it was a big thing down at the Denver Museum. And Donna and I went to and it was really fascinating because the whole Inca nation believed in blood sacrifice to appease the God.

Well, they didn't get any text messages from those Jews in Jerusalem about that. How did they know? How did they know? They knew basic thing that God wasn't happy with them as humans and their crops weren't going to grow and things weren't going to be great unless they somehow appeased an angry God.

And that fits perfectly with Romans chapter 1, where man's without excuse. So they started this blood sacrifice thing, and they got really sophisticated. They thought, ah, the best sacrificial lamb would be a young virgin. God would certainly accept that. And we'll do this, and this, and this, and this, and the crops will grow. You know, we'll do this and this and this and this and we'll be righteous before God. No, it's built into every culture.

But because we are, as human beings, have this sin nature built in us, we can understand about being unrighteous, but we've got our own plan for righteousness. And it goes all the way back to when we talked about a couple of months ago, the way of Cain. Cain was a really religious guy.

The problem was that he wanted to do it his way and not God's way. And so he told God, well, if you won't accept my sacrifice, that's too bad. And God said, wait a minute, I have a blood sacrifice right here for you and he didn't do it. And so what happened? He was not accounted righteous because he didn't take God at his word about what God would accept. And so he killed his brother because he couldn't get to God.

So, over thousands of years, men have been trying to satisfy God about this standing before Him. And if there's anything that the Old Testament proves, up until Matthew, is that it's sort of like God gave every culture the opportunity to somehow be righteous. And none of it worked. Even the special nation created by God through Abraham, it didn't work with them even though he gave them the law and he gave them the rules.

And so God said, well, I think what I'm going to do is fix it myself. And what he did was he sent his son, who became a man, who was a representative man, and He died on a cross to pay the penalty for the insult of sin against them as God. And that was the issue between man and God, was man's sinfulness. And sinfulness, we don't appreciate it to the extent that God does, I don't think. But it's a big deal with God. And the reason you know it's a big deal with God is because he had to sacrifice his own son to fix it.

So what did he do? He got it all done, he completed the entire work, and then he turned to man and he said, okay, you want to be righteous? All you have to do is believe that I fixed it. You believe in this person of my son, the Lord Jesus Christ, that he died on this cross to pay the penalty for your sins, I'm totally satisfied with what he did, and I rose him from the dead to show you that I'm satisfied. If you believe that, I will account you righteous. So what do most men do? They belong to Cain's group. I said, well, we've got our own way. We've got a denomination, we've got a religion, we've got a this, we've got a culture, we've got a whatever.

But, you know, why is it so hard for man not to accept God's way? And we talked about it in Sunday School in Romans chapter 8. The mind of the flesh is enmity against God. It will not function or obey Him because it can't. So this morning they were talking about the fact that Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of the world, but he did not pay the penalty or save the sin nature. He condemned it. And the reason he condemned it is really simple. It's because it won't change. It just will not change.

So Paul in these two verses we're going to look at this morning is going to try to disprove an incorrect conclusion that some of these Jews may have made regarding justification by faith. So, thank you, Laban, for reading the verses. Let's look at verse 17. Oops, it went backwards. You want to hold it upside down, it goes backwards. Verse 17 is on your handout, but I don't think it's on the overhead.

But if while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves are also, we also have been found to be sinners, is Christ then the minister of sin? And this is that great phrase that we've seen several other places, may it never be. In contemporary language, we would say, no way. That's an impossibility. So these Galatians had stood on really good ground referring to the fulfilled condition here.

Paul reminded these Jewish believers that they all stood before God by grace. They understood that they never found justification by the law. They understood that the law never did anything for them but condemn them. Had not Peter and Paul both believed in Jesus Christ that they might be justified by faith? Yeah, they had. And had not they both learned that by works that no flesh shall be justified?

Then, if that's the case, why deny all this and put a yoke upon the necks of the disciples that none of us was able to handle? And that was Peter's conclusion at the Council in Jerusalem. That's really the conclusion he came to. Why are we trying to put a yoke around these Gentile Christians that we couldn't live up to? So they agreed.

Yet Peter, when the pressure came, turned around and withdrew from the Gentiles, eating with them, showing that he had this freedom, but he went back and put himself back under a lost system. Why? because of peer pressure, and we talked a lot about that last week. How does this verse make them sinners again? Notice that the verse is interesting because it says, while seeking to be justified in Christ, We ourselves have been found to be sinners.

You remember last week when we were talking about a Jewish frame of reference? If you're an Orthodox Jew, how do you view Gentiles? They're the sinners and we're not. Because we're righteous because we're Jews. And they're dogs. I mean, they're terrible. But now, Paul says that one of the things that we have discovered here is that maybe we're sinners too. maybe in the view of the Jew that Gentiles are sinners. You know what? We've discovered we're in the same class as they are. We're sinners too.

And they were seeking, and in the process, they were seeking justification. And they were looking for how to get it. And when they discovered that it was by grace through faith in Christ, It was an admission on their part that there was no justification by works. By just being a seeker, you have to come to that. They became seekers and they weren't justified and they knew that because they were seeking to be justified.

I hope I can make this clear. Once that seeking starts in a heart, you begin to realize in and through your conscience begins to become awakened, wow, I'm a sinner. I've got a real problem here. I want to be righteous before God and it compelled these Jews to put themselves on the same plane as the Gentiles. I'm a sinner. The Jew who called the Gentile a sinner and seeking to be justified by faith was forced to admit that he was a sinner too. So he found that the law failed him because it wouldn't fix the sin problem that he had.

So I was thinking, we are in a society today of classifications of people. How many classifications of human beings are there on the earth today, from God's perspective? There's only two. Saved and lost. There's no distinction about all the ones that we try to make. But if you're lost and God looks at you, all the ethnic groups outside of Christ are lost. All of them. All self-identified gender people outside of Christ are lost. All cultural, national, traditional, racial, indigenous, tribal, outside of Christ, including the Irish, are lost.

Every human being that shows up on this planet shows up lost, separated from God. How do you know this? You know it from God's Word. I was looking at really intimidating verses in Romans chapter 3, verses 10, and I'm going to read them because they're really good.

It says, as it is written, there is none righteous, not even one. There is none that understands. There is none who seeks for God. All, all have turned aside. Together they have become useless. There is none who does good. There is not even one. And then it describes these not even ones.

Their throat is an open grave, and their tongues they keep deceiving. By their tongues, with their tongues they keep deceiving. The poison of asp is under their lips. Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their paths and the path of peace they have not known. And here's the real kicker. There's no fear of God before their eyes.

Quite condemning verses, right? Turn on the news tonight and it describes what this is going on in the world. This is who we deal with every day. Who are the saved? We know about these lost people. Who are the saved ones? Colossians talks about the fact that we have put on, those that are saved, they've put on the new man who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the one who created him. The saved man is like God, positionally.

And he says this, a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, There's no distinction as to whether you're circumcised or not, or baptized or not, or if you're a barbarian, or if you're a Scythian, or a slave, or a free man, but Christ is all and in all.

As new creatures in Christ, we don't have any of those distinctions. The new man isn't Greek or Gentile. He's not Jewish. He's not concerned about the race he came from. He's not concerned about what religious environment he's in in terms of denomination separation.

A barbarian was one that the Greeks would call a barbarian because he couldn't speak the Greek language. So you were therefore a barbarian. And a Scythian was somebody who was a cultural savage. He just didn't have the same culture. The Greeks thought, you know, gee, what is it about every culture? They think they're better than the one next door.

Slave or free are social positions. None of that matters in Christ. None of it. Christ is a new creation. And in him, all distinctions from the first creation go away. I'm not saying that you don't live with these distinctions every day. Some of you are Republicans, some of you are Democrats, some of you don't care. Some of you are, you know, I'm not going to go into distinctions, but it's amazing how we spend so much time being different. Or we have this and they don't have that. From God's perspective, there's only two kinds of people. You're either saved or you're lost. It's real simple. I like how God is simple that way.

What were these false charges that the Judaizers made against Paul as believers? Paul, in these two verses, repudiates the assumption that the Judaizers had charged that Christ was the promoter and encourager of sin, because that's what they were doing, in that he caused the Jews to abandon the law as a justifying agency. You understand what they're saying? You're under God's law.

If you leave it, to be justified by faith, you become a sinner, just like those Gentiles. That was what they were selling. And in doing so, you put yourself on the common plane with a Gentile, called a dog or a sinner. So the Judaizers argued that in view of the fact that the violation of law is sin, therefore abandonment of the law in an effort to be justified in Christ is also a sin. Therefore, Christ is a promoter of sin. Don't you love the logic?

That's what they were selling. And to the Galatians' discredit, they were buying it. So, but if while seeking to be justified by means of Christ we ourselves are also found to be sinners, is Christ then a minister of sin? Paul's simple answer is, no way. Can't happen.

He says that in Christ is the instrumental case in times by means of Christ. We were justified by means of Christ. But here is a better use of this term, by means of Christ. We use this term all the time. We use the term in Christ. In Christ. By means of Christ is good, but really in Christ says it all. Since Christ is the sphere within which His justification is procured and applied. Christ is our righteousness.

You get that? There's a big part of Christianity, I think, that says, well, what Christ does is He takes some of His righteousness and He imputes it to you. And so now I can say, well, that's not how it works. He takes you through the cross and puts you in Christ, identifies you with Him, And whatever righteousness Christ has before the Father, you have, because you're in Him. That's different. That's different.

So, this in no way or perish the thought is, we've studied this other verse a lot, Romans 6.1, where Paul says, what shall we say then, shall we habitually continue an attitude of dependence upon and yieldness to the cordiality of the sinful nature. So we keep doing that.

For what reason? So that grace can abound. Because he had just previously said in the first couple of verses, where sin abounded, grace superabounded over that. So the logic, he anticipates the question and he says, so we continue to do that so grace can abound. Same phrase. He says, May such a thing never occur. May it never happen. It's impossible. Now, verse 18. This is a really interesting verse, and it looked complicated to me at first blush, but I think it helps understand the argument that Paul is using. For if I build, what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor.

Peter, when he came down to Antioch, he'd given up the Jewish law system by means of justification, and he was living like a Gentile. He was eating BLTs, you know. But now, in refusing to eat with the Gentiles, He was going back to legal ordinances, the very thing that he said he had given up. If then he was right in giving up the law as a means of justification, was he right about that? Yep. He's clearly wrong in turning back, isn't he? So Paul sustains this statement in no way through these verses.

When he says, I'm going to build again or rebuild, He's saying that I'm going to render or declare active again that which I had already made a decision that isn't active. I don't buy this this law system anymore. But if I go back to it, I'm trying to rebuild it. I'm trying to I'm going to try to declare that the law is valid again. Well. If that happens, this great word destroy means that you deprive the force to abolish the first thing. It was abolished, I went here, now I'm going back. So which is it, Peter? You can't have it both ways.

Paul is really referring to Paul's action when he declared the Levitical legislation regarding eating of foods. null and void by eating with the Gentiles, then declaring it valid again by his act of withdrawing from fellowship with the Gentiles. But it's interesting how Paul, as a gracious man, he tactfully puts himself in this picture and doesn't blame it all on Paul. He just talks about Jews in general and himself. So he's supposing kind of a hypothetical case, but he is referring to what Peter did.

His argument is to the effect that instead of committing sin by abandoning the law of grace, one becomes a transgressor by returning to the law which has previously been abandoned. Now, notice he doesn't use the word sinner twice. He uses the word sinner the first time and transgressor the second time. I thought that was kind of interesting because The word seems to have been chosen rather than a term used for just discussion as a sinner to get rid of the ambiguity of the latter word to be used.

Now let's delve into that a little bit. The word for transgressor means one who disregards the ethical spirit of the law. In other words, the Word of God says be a doer and not just a talker. Well, I'm going to be a doer, which means that if I violate that, I'm a transgressor, where a sinner is one who disregards the letter of the law. Do you see the difference? There's a difference in attitude. I can disregard the letter of the law and not care much about it one way or the other, but as a transgressor, I had an ethical hold and a spiritual hold on the law, and I have violated that. So I'm a transgressor. So Peter, by withdrawing from fellowship with the Gentiles, was obeying the letter of the law, right? From fellowship with the Gentiles.

But he had set aside, that had been set aside by God, but he was ignoring its significance, namely that of a temporary measure for the time in the Old Testament dispensation, which was abolished at the cross. He knew that. But he went back to it anyway.

He became a transgressor. He became a transgressor declaring by his conduct that the law was null and void at one point, and now declares valid again that which he had destroyed, or he wasn't admitting to anymore. So he's admitting his guilt in the destruction in the first place. So this word, to exhibit one's conduct or to make or to prove In expanding the translation I want to put it this word for if the things I tear down which he walked away from the law These again, I build up so I go back to the law. I exhibit myself as being a transgressor Let's look at some practical aspects of that when JD was talking about a baptism he went to yesterday in Sunday school and of course a lot of my legal references have to do with the denomination I grew up in Catholicism and I'm going to construct something for you, and maybe this will help explain. The first thing that we're taught in Catholicism is that man is wicked.

He's got a stain on his soul, and he needs to turn away from this wickedness. The next thing that happens is that they present to you that you have to go to church on Sunday, and you have to act like a Christian. and you have to go to communion, and you have to go to confession on Saturday, and you need to get priestly absolution. You've got to go do that. And so you've got to take care of your sins on Saturday so that you can be righteous on Sunday. The problem is that it leaves a whole lot of room to act treacherously the rest of the week.

And that was the hypocrisy that just hit me when I was this 15-year span between walking away from the Catholic Church and meeting Christ, the hypocrisy of the thing just drove me crazy. Besides being a virtual denial, and this is the key thing, it denies the effectiveness of the work of Christ. Here's how. When I realize it's a very serious matter, I begin to discover, especially if you read a verse that says Christ paid it all. I'll give you another example.

Sometimes when we do the Lord's Table once a month around here, and we'll talk sometimes about 1 Corinthians 11-28, but a man must examine himself, and in so doing, he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. Lots of people think, oh, I've got to get cleaned up. I've got to confess, I've got to get this filthiness off of me so I can take the Lord's table. I'm going to turn from my wickedness to God. I'm going to do that Sunday morning sitting right here. I'm going to renew my vows. I promise I'm going to be good. I'm endeavoring to amend my ways. And even in the third and fourth century, they called communion A tremendous sacrifice. Why do you think, from a Catholic standpoint, they still have Christ up on the cross? Because the work's not done. The work's not done.

If you read in this verse, by one offering, He has perfected forever those who are sanctified. That verse destroys an entire denominational system. Because am I supposed to walk around deciding how evil I am or wrapped up in my sins? No, I'm not. I have been sanctified. I have been set apart by Christ to Himself. I am to be maintained in that position by the Holy Spirit all the time. I'm not to ever be separated. And positionally, I can never be separated. I can lose my fellowship, but I can't lose my standing. All believers share that. We all do. Whether we go to church or not, whether we belong to a denomination or not, whether we argue about doctrine or not, that's something we all need to understand.

That by one sacrifice, He has perfected forever those He has set apart. Do you think that God wants you to spend any time messing around with your sins? He wants us to spend all of our time beholding His glory. And what's cool about that is that to the degree that I'm beholding His glory, who am I not paying attention to? Me. My sin. And that's what He's after.

But these denominations have a system in place to keep you focused on your sin and not Him. That's how they get in the way. That's how they get in the way. So, why is this such a serious issue? Last question. What makes this such a serious issue? This will tend to show how really serious this issue is.

There's no deliverance when your mindset is what I've described in the denomination. You don't ever get delivered from the power of sin. You don't ever maintain your position as a believer. And Christian worship is impossible. You can't worship God under those circumstances if you're always looking at your own sinfulness. If this were the case, Christ becomes a minister of sin. You see that?

That's why it's so critical. because I'm supposed to be left by him under the bondage of my own sin instead of being delivered from it. And that's why Paul says, For I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor. Where's the focus in this verse? The focus is on Paul and his behavior. Peter and his behavior. That is, in going to Christ, I give up the law completely. I gave it up. And after all that, I go back to the law, I've made myself a transgressor. Again, where's the focus? It's on me.

It's plain that if I'm right now, then I was entirely wrong then. If I'm right now to give up the law for grace, and then I go back to the law, which one was I right in and which one was I wrong in? If I'm right now, then the grace was the wrong one before.

Who was it that made me give up this law thing? And we talked last week about legalism from a mosaic standpoint, but I refer to the little black box behind you right here, all your own personal rules. I'm going to do this and I'm going to avoid that. I gave all of that up because Christ persuaded me I should.

If I go back to that, then the gospel of Christ means that the people who have done that have become transgressors and they're not justified. You lose it. I don't think the Galatians ever thought about this principle before and that's why Paul is so careful to write it to them.

The Holy Spirit brings to light in Paul's mind and in our minds so that he can bear upon them so that they can be involved with the grace and with Christ rather than this legal issue. The effect of enforcing a law on a believer is to make Christ the minister of sin instead of being the deliverer from sin. Christ cannot lead a man to do anything wrong. He's not the minister of sin.

It's evident that if we turn back to the law as a means of justification, we're rebuilding again the thing which we walked away from. Paul uses the word destroyed, which makes us transgressors. We're back where we were, even worse. If God, in His grace and His mercy, brings us out from under the law, it's a transgression to return to any form of legalism. While on the other hand, if God does not deliver us, it's a transgression to leave it. Here's the problem that I think of so many people in Christianity don't think about today and I'll close with this.

There's so many denominations that talk about you're saved by grace, you're indwelt by the Holy Spirit to keep the law. You ever heard that before? You are saved by grace and you're indwelt by the Holy Spirit to keep the divine law. Most of Reformed covenant theology, that's the basis. Do you think that these verses contradict that? I think they do. I think they do.

We are not saved by grace through faith so that we can continue to walk in the flesh. We're saved by grace through faith so that we can walk in the Spirit. And we can rest and trust God. So, let's close. Dear Father, how we thank you for your grace. I always thank you that you have a clear focus on the person and work of your son, the Lord Jesus, not only for the obtaining of righteousness, but also a walk that's worthy of you. And we pray in his precious name. Amen.