Five Questions

Good morning. We have been working our way through the book of Galatians, and we have arrived at chapter 3. And basically, the handout that you have in those three verses are our five questions that Paul asks. And so, in essence, that's what we're going to do this morning. We're going to answer those five questions.

Paul answers them. So, so far we've learned that Paul has already vindicated and validated his authority as an apostle. He's done that in chapter 1. And he's established the fact that his gospel and the gospel he taught, through which men were saved, was the same gospel preached by the other apostles.

We've established that. And then he established, the last couple of weeks we were talking about the fact that He introduces the fact that we have been crucified with Christ, and the issue is, if we were crucified with Christ, crucifixion has, death has a way of separating us from certain things, and in this context he was talking about separating us from any kind of a lost system. where we might have to produce in order for God to find favor with us. And we've expanded on that a little bit, that we have been crucified not only from law, but from sin, our sin nature, from the world and the influence of the devil. So crucifixion is critical.

So now, he's going to pursue the argument from the Galatians' own experience. So, he already has shown that turning back to the law, they were setting aside the work of Christ. And they were belittling the glory of the person of the Son of God. So, the verses are, you foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This only thing I want to find out from you, did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being perfected in the flesh? So, question number one, by what delusion are you under by turning from a crucified Christ? What he's talking about, they're foolish in the sense that this expression is one not only of surprise, but kind of indignation. The situation in Galatia, let's talk about, remember in the first couple of weeks we were talking about Galatia and the mindset of the Galatians? Maybe it'd help us understand kind of what they were all about.

The native Galatians, the Gauls that went up there, were a spiritual pagan people. and they had temples and they were kind of Eastern in the sense, but they had evolved into some stagnation and ignorance and superstition was the big thing. Then on the other hand, they desired to be educated because they recognized that the culture from Greece and Rome was much more sophisticated and intellectual than what they had been experiencing. And it afforded them an opportunity to maybe make a switch out of this paganism. In addition to that, they were revolting against ignorance. They didn't, and the native enslavement to superstition, they wanted out of that. So, they were people who had shaken off the numbing and degrading influences of a native magic or superstition. And they were those who could judge for themselves the real values in life and lay claim to insight and wisdom about things. So what does Paul do? He accuses them of failing to use their insight and wisdom that they were so highly prized. And the appreciation of better things when he uses the work foolish, oh foolish Galatians.

It denotes not only stupidity that arises out of deadness and impotence of intellectual thinking, it also means the lacking of the power to perceive, to be unwise. It refers to one who doesn't reflect on things. The word speaks of failure to one's own power of perception. Paul says, look, you guys aren't using your heads. That's really what he's saying to him. You know better. The word used is with an ethical reference as a faculty of the moral judgment, thus the word indicates failure to use one's powers of perception, that failure being due to a moral defect.

It's always true, as it was in Galatians, the act of a Christian who embraces false doctrine. What's the cause of that? Usually it's sin. So the defection was a fickleness that they had. And maybe to say it in an expanded way, all Galatians who fail in the first characteristic of the Galatians, namely the ability to use your heads and to appreciate the finer values of life. That's what he's saying to them.

So the question is, what's the danger? Is there a danger involved? with being a non-thinking believer big time. Especially today in our contemporary Christianity, so much of Christianity is populated by feelings and emotions and not the doctrine of the word of truth. And so it's non-thinking. It's based on feeling. A non-thinking believer are characterized by superficial attitudes regarding the doctrine.

They don't engage with Paul's epistles. I have found that to be true in my whole Christian life, that the issue is always when you have a discussion with somebody, is how familiar are you with what Paul has been teaching? And are you engaged with what he's doing? Way more than the Old Testament and the Gospels and the other epistle writers, not to discount them at all, but Paul's the guy.

And we talked about that a few weeks back, that he meets the resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus, the glorified Christ. So his beginning is different than any other human being on the planet. And he knows from the very start that the church is a heavenly organism and that grace is the operating system. He knows that, and that's what he's trying to teach. But you have to engage with that doctrine. You just can't let it go by.

A non-believer doesn't discriminate the difference between the world's ideas and doctrine. Philosophy and doctrine have equal value in their mind. They spend as much time reading secular information and books and things as they do reading Paul's epistles, and they put the same weight to them. And without proper doctrine, you're totally open to false doctrine. and you lose the capacity to discriminate. And discrimination is really a measure of one's spiritual maturity. Every believer should be able to discriminate what's of the Lord Jesus and what isn't. Mostly because he's familiar or she's familiar with Paul's doctrine. Did I answer the question? I think you did. Second question. Who has bewitched or cast a spell over you? So now, not only is he saying you're deluded, but he's saying, who has tricked you or cast a spell over you?

This act was so unnatural that it would seem as if they were bewitched. In other words, they were physically and practically denying the truth of the cross, the great central fact of the gospel. that had been proclaimed to them by the Apostle Paul. This word bewitched is interesting. It's derived from a superstition called the evil eye. And it can denote either fascination with evil or some malicious influence akin to it.

As I was studying this, I was thinking, Donna and I were in Hawaii one time and we were on the big island. And we were just sort of following our nose one day, driving a car, and we end up in a valley, way up on the north, I guess, northeast side of the Big Island. And it was all Hawaiian. We were the only two Hollies there.

And we got from them what they call the stinky eye. They'd look at you like, what are you doing here? There's something evil about you. You're not like us. That's what this evil eye thing is all about. And so having experienced the stinky eye, I get it from Courtney once in a while. The infatuation of the Galatians is attributed to a baneful effect on some mysterious power of evil.

That's why he could say, well, who's casting a spell over you? And you know what? The truth of the gospel is at stake here. This is the truth. And someone has cast a spell over you. And then he says, before whose eyes Jesus Christ has been set forth, crucified among you. Now this word set forth is a really interesting word.

It means Speaking of the act of posting a public announcement or a notice, now we don't do much of that today because of all of our ability with cell phones and internet and email and all that kind of thing. But back in the day, it meant, let's say that you had a son and you wanted to publicly declare, I'm not responsible for his deaths anymore. Well, you would put a placard up and you'd post it in places that would say, Mr. So-and-so is not responsible for my son's death anymore. It doesn't speak to the act of pointing to Christ being crucified. It's a public announcement declaring that he was.

He was crucified. So Paul preaching among the Gentiles That's what he preached, Jesus Christ and him crucified. If you look at Acts 13, 32 through 41, I'm just going to read one small verse there. He says, you who witness my clear portrayal of Jesus Christ crucified and its benefits for mankind. I've placarded it everywhere I've gone. The placard notice of crucifixion of the Lord Jesus should have been enough to keep the eyes of the Galatians from wandering to the enticement of the Judaizers.

Crucified. Crucified is in the perfect tense. For you guys that are Greek geeks, you know what I mean. Those of you who aren't means something that happened in the past that's a fact and it has abiding results into the future. Crucified is in the perfect tense. It happened in the past, has abiding effects for eternity. He's not talking about a figure of a dead Christ still hanging on a cross, which would be, as we know, a crucifix, but he's talking about a risen Christ, an ascended Christ, one who had been crucified, but who was alive, whose glorified body still bore the marks of the nails, and the scars of the crown of thorns, and who was the living Savior by virtue of his atoning work on the cross. So an expanded translation of verse one could be, Oh unreflecting Galatians, who bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was placarded publicly as the crucified one?

That's really what he's saying to them. Verse two, this only thing I want to find out from you. Did you receive the spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? So he, it's really interesting how he asked this question because did they, was there any inquiries from them about the ground on which they received this gift? This is our third question. Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law? Did you?

To ask was the Spirit received because of anything they had done, any work that they had done, which would be legal in a sense. Now, in our contemporary Christian society, the subtlety of this receiving the Spirit by works is there a lot, and sometimes you don't see it's there. I'll give you some examples.

Everybody knows what lordship salvation is. You must receive the Spirit by the works of the law, but then you've got to make Jesus the Lord of your life. What is that? That's something other than receiving the Spirit. other than, or you gotta come down front, or you gotta do, you know, 45 things or 12 things or whatever. You have to somehow demonstrate, oh, and you better go out and witness too. Did you receive the Spirit because of that?

No. Legalism is a really interesting thing when you get in and study it a little bit. It's a desire to help God improve upon our righteousness, or to give him a more adequate reason to see us as righteous. Now, none of you have ever done that. I know all of you pretty well. Legalism is a human effort to approach God. It seeks merit from God on the basis of my good. Legalism usually expresses itself with a code of do's and don'ts, things that we owe, we can't do that, we have taboos. Legalists try to, and then they try to force this do's and don'ts on you. I've experienced that a lot. Legalism opposes grace.

In the case of the believer, a legalist code are efforts to improve upon the work of Christ on the cross, upon what he provides for us to grow spiritually. In the case of an unbeliever, legalist code seeks God's approval apart from the work of Christ. There are other things you need to do.

Pray more, study more, give more. Legalism often results from a confusion in the mind of the believer over the means of spirituality. You know, we all want to be more spiritual, don't we? In many churches, the system of works, spirituality is what is taught. You follow a system of do's and don'ts and you'll be spiritual. You mimic the talk and the mannerisms and the dress of the super spiritual ones in your congregation and you'll be spiritual. The story I love to tell is the Borgward story. Now you don't know what a Borgward is unless you're a car nut. A Borgward is a German car, a little one. I don't think they make them anymore.

But when I was first a believer, I went to a big church in Aurora. And I didn't know anything about Christians. I'm watching, and what do they do, and how do they act, and what do they, I mean, what do Christians look like, you know? Do they wear certain clothes? What do they do? Well, the pastor in this church, he had a hobby, and he bought these cars and reconditioned them, borg wards, right? That was his hobby.

So you, when I first went there, there was his borg ward parked in the parking lot. In a few weeks, there was another one. And then there was a third one. All the elders bought borg wards. That was a symbol of spirituality in that church, a borg ward. I thought, this can't be right. This can't be right.

All churches, like all businesses, like all environments, have what I call shop talk. We talk a certain way. We have things that we respond to. I was going to pick on Luke, but I see he's gone. When he was little, in Sunday school downstairs, every question we asked, he had the same answer. You know what the answer was? Jesus. Because he figured he couldn't go wrong with that answer. Or maybe it's to crucify yourself. That's a tricky one. Or self-sacrifice or ascetic practices. One is spiritual if he practices extreme self-denial. like in Islam or Hindu or even in the Roman Catholic Church. Witnessing is often used as a basis of works spirituality. If you witness to a certain number of people each day, you'll become super spiritual.

Legalism can only be properly understood if you are acquainted with and have some understanding of Paul's doctrine of grace, of justification. Spirituality by grace is the resource grace provides to the believer. So one would say, well, does a person who lives by grace have a value system? Does he function based on do's and don'ts? Very interesting. A person who lives under grace won't be loose, careless. He operates not under statues, but he operates under principles of grace. A man under grace performs because he is already spiritual. Let's go through a couple of things of these principles. There's an interesting thing in Paul's epistles, and I would call it the perfect principle or law of liberty. Paul was free from any legal system, any statute of any kind. He didn't have to obey to get anything.

You and I, as children of God, are free. We've been delivered from every form of law as a rule of life, as an obligation to make myself acceptable to God. I've also been delivered from the ideals and the conventionalities of the world. We call that political correctness today. He's freeing himself as though he has already passed out of this world into heaven. He has been brought into the priceless liberty of grace. Well, that sounds like I get to do whatever I want, right? But then there's another principle, and I would call it the principle of expediency.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 6.12 says, all things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. Why not? I already have a master, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In 1 Corinthians 10.23, he says again, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, not all things edify. The principle of personal liberty is subject to the law or the principle of expediency. I as a believer am to be involved in the process of edification. If what I do, will I sacrifice my freedom to edify you? Yeah. Yeah. I am free to do whatever, but I am free under this modified by I want to edify. I want my whole life to edify.

The third principle that I find is what I would call the principle of love. The law or principle of personal liberty will be qualified by the principle of love, 1 Corinthians 8, 9. But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. Verse 14, Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, I'll never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.

I'm free to do whatever, but if I recognize that my behavior is going to have a problem for you, I'm done. Why? Because Christ died for you, just like He died for me. He loves you, just like He loves me. And you're more important than my liberty. I will sacrifice it for my love to you so that you can see it. Whatever. I don't want you to stumble. I don't want you in any way to not be abiding in Christ. Question four.

Did you receive the Spirit by the hearing of faith? What Paul means here is that your initial entrance of the Holy Spirit into your hearts when you put or they put their trust in Jesus Christ. The words by the hearing of faith means hearing can refer to one of two things. The act of just hearing the message or to the message that has been heard. Understand the difference? I'll say that again. It can refer to the act of hearing a message or it can refer to the message itself.

I think the message itself agrees more with this context since Paul is contrasting his message of grace with the preaching of the Judaizers. The hearing of faith. Of faith defines and describes the message. It's a message that announces faith as the means whereby one receives salvation. That's how you get it.

And oh, by the way, faith is a totally unmeritorious act. You can't go to God and say, now look, you owe me because I believed. He says back to you, all the value in your act is in what you believe, not the fact that you did. But you don't get it unless you trust me and believe me.

Paul, when writing to the believers at Ephesus, could say to them, in whom also you trusted after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, in whom also after you believed you were sealed by the Holy Spirit." The only answer the Galatians could give to this question was that they received the Spirit by faith. They didn't have another option. It wasn't by any obedience of any statute or law, but through faith in hearing Paul's message of grace. This is a really forcible appeal to the experience of the Galatians, because they knew that. Expanded translation.

This only am I desiring to learn from you. By means of law works did you receive the Spirit, or by means of the message which proclaimed faith? It's one of those questions where if you're a Galatian, you only have one answer. You only have one. when someone asks you that question, you should only have one answer, because that's how we got saved.

Verse three, are you so foolish, having begun in the spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? And this is really key, because now he's gone from salvation to spiritual growth. He's gone from Salvation by grace, how is this Christian life you're living and spiritual growth in your life being done? He's already spoken about your initial entrance by the Holy Spirit into the hearts of believers when they put their trust in the Lord. But having begun in the Spirit, are you now being perfected in the flesh? This is a big deal for most of Christians today. there's a thousand ways that perfection by the flesh is being implemented all over Christianity. In this case he's speaking of the sanctifying work of the Spirit in the lives of the saints and right here is critical about Paul's epistles.

Paul is the one guy that absolutely understands perfectly that spiritual growth is by grace through faith alone. It's not by anything other than that. Perfectly. And why? Because he meets Christ after everything has taken place and he's glorified. There's nothing. He realizes from the very first day that the Lord Jesus Christ has completed the work of salvation for everybody. It's a completed work. In this verse, though, he's speaking of the sanctifying work of the Spirit, or the setting apart work.

Maybe ask it a different way. Are you, to such a degree, irrational? Having begun your Christian life in dependence upon the indwelling Spirit, are you now being brought onto the state of spiritual maturity by means of self-effort? Is that what you're doing? By the use of the word now, Paul indicates that an answer to this question about to be asked would end the argument. It would be decisive. Paul has said, I will convince you of your error by this one argument.

Made perfect. A lot of classes that we teach, we deal with this word perfect or made perfect. It means to bring something to the place where it is complete. Anything that you have created, whether you're handy with your hands or you can write or whatever, you have an idea of what perfection is for that one thing. And when you finally get all the pieces put together, you look at it and you say, it's perfect.

It is doing what it's designed to do. Well, God has a design. and the design is that we be conformed to the image of Christ. The problem that we have, how am I going to get there? How am I going to be completed into the image of Christ? The word perfect here is a noun, it speaks of a spiritual mature Christian, one who is well-rounded, well-balanced, living the Christian life and he's mature. How do I get there? Same way I started, by faith through grace. By grace through faith.

The word flesh here refers to all that a person is as a product of the natural generation apart from morally transferring power of the Holy Spirit. Everything that we were in Adam can be summed up in this word flesh. It speaks of the unsaved man, body, soul, and spirit, controlled totally by his depraved nature. And together with all his human accomplishments, his positions, his capacities, his philosophy, that's all this man of the flesh. He used all those assets to be conformed to the image of Christ.

I don't think so. A couple of scriptures. John 3, 6. The Lord Jesus said, that which is born of the flesh, essence verb, it is flesh. It doesn't become or act like flesh. That's what it is. And that which is born of the Spirit, guess what? It is Spirit. Essence verb. Philippians 3, 3 and 4. For we are the true circumcision who worship in the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and we don't put any confidence in the flesh at all. A bunch of verses in Romans 6, 19, 7, 5, etc. But 2 Corinthians 1, 17.

Therefore, I was not vacillating when I intended to do this. Was I? Of what I propose, do I propose according to the flesh so that with me here will be yes and yes and no and no at the same time? In other words, am I always going to be solid? My yes is yes and my no is no. There's no mixing. There's no little of this and a little of that. The Judaizers were preaching a message of law obedience to the Galatians. Caused the Galatians to abandon their position of grace and put themselves in the sphere of law.

This system that they were being taught was legal and it was based on Old Testament economy. So why does Paul here refer to the Spirit? Well, one of the reasons is because in the Mosaic economy, the Spirit, the indwelling Spirit, was never set apart for the believer as that believer was to trust for that work. He was the one that was on the spot, not the Spirit. The Galatians were turning away from the teaching reality of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in life of the believer under the stewardship of grace.

They were starting to depend on self-effort in an attempt to obey an outright legalistic system of works. Thus these Christians had begun their Christian lives in dependence upon the Holy Spirit. That's how they started. Now we're depending upon self-effort to continue in them the work of sanctification which the Spirit had begun. That's what they were doing.

We are taught that in contemporary Christianity. You walk into a Christian bookstore today and 95% of the books in there are this, here's what you need to do to be sanctified. Works. Works. So the present tense of the verb here indicates that the Galatians had already begun this attempt. They'd already started on the road to working it out themselves.

In effect, Paul says to them, you're pretty foolish to think that you can bring yourself to a state of spiritual maturity in your Christian lives. That is the work of the Spirit, and only He can do that for you. At Sunday school this morning, we talked a lot about that. It was really a great class. So expanding the translation, are you so unreflecting Having begun by means of the Spirit, are you now being brought to maturity by the flesh? So we've talked a lot about grace this morning, but we haven't specifically talked about aspects of it. It is the single word, and it's the express sum total of all that enters into the Christian life. We live under grace.

Really cool verse, Romans 6, 14. will not have dominion over you anymore. Why not? Because I figured out the right stuff to do? No. Because I'm under grace and not under law anymore. It's interesting that grace was given for the specific purpose that sin wouldn't have dominion over us anymore. Not your effort. Grace. It is through grace that a hell-deserving sinner gets saved. It is through grace that we are preserved. and like Christ are presented in glory. It is under grace that each one of us now lives. Being under grace, we're dead to sin. We're dead to a lost system. We're delivered from the law as a rule of life, how I function. We're dead to the laws and obligation to establish any kind of merit before God. We're dead to reliance upon the energy of the flesh. We are under the governing principle of grace.

It provides for explicit and complete rule of conduct for the believer. Oh, and you know what else it is? It's superhuman. To live this Christian life takes superhuman effort. Well, you don't have it. I don't have it. It's the Spirit of God living the life of Christ through you by His power. You live a superhuman life.

Lewis Perry Chaffer said one time that God has called us to live a life that's totally impossible for us to live, yet He expects us to do it. Well, how does He expect us to do it? By dependence on the Spirit to live His life through us. It's designed specifically for people who are members of the new creation. We all are. I was going to talk about one other thing that sort of happened to me this week in terms of things you have to do to be more spiritual. I had a call from somebody who said, do you know anything about fire tunnels? I never heard the term. I said, what's a fire tunnel? He said, well, go look it up.

So I look it up, and I think it started in this church in California with a guy named Johnson, Bill Johnson. Here's what it is. You want to be more spiritual? Everybody, get up out of your seat, come up here, we're going to form two lines, right? And I'm going to walk down the middle of the line, and as I go down, you're going to put hands on me, you're going to clap for me, you're going to sing for me, and by the time I get to the door, I'm going to be more spiritual. That's the fire tunnel.

Or the other subtle one that you hear today is referred to as spiritual formation. What spiritual formation is, is transcendental meditation with spiritual holy water sprinkled on it. And basically what spiritual formation is, get alone by yourself, empty your mind, and start to ask a spirit to come and possess you. Does the Spirit have a name?

I don't know that. But notice how easy it is to sell. If I say to you, do you want to be more spiritual? If you haven't been tracking your life through Paul's epistles, your answer is automatically, oh yeah, I really do. You have no idea of what positional truth is. You don't have any idea who you are in Christ. In all the possessions that you already have, I've got to do something spiritual so that I can be more spiritual.

It's such a false hope. And it's based on legalism. It's based on any effort on your part to increase your spirituality. Now as we go through Galatians, obviously there's going to be a lot of discussion about how the life is lived. That's for you, Ralph. If we have a clear understanding of grace, and we'll close with this, the result will be an ability to discriminate between transforming accomplishments of divine power through grace on this hand, and a corresponding consistent manner of life which grows out of salvation on the other hand.

The Lord didn't leave us, a guy said one time, well, you know, lots of Christians think that being saved is like God wound you up and let you go, and from now on it's up to you. No, it's not. Our job is to believe what we learn in Paul's epistles, in the epistles in general, and in the New Testament. and to trust Him about who we are, where we are, and what we have. So let's close.

Father, how we thank You. We thank You for Your provision for us to walk in the Spirit, to live a life that's pleasing to You, that's edifying to other believers. And we do recognize that it's by our dependence upon Your Spirit in order for that to be accomplished. And we pray in Your Son's precious name, Amen.