Redeemed from the Curse

Good morning. Before I get going, I was having lunch with a guy today, or this week, and this is not the first time that this has come up over the last two weeks. And it depends on who asks me as to how they ask me, and it's actually kind of funny. The old guard says, you guys find a preacher yet? Are we looking for a preacher? I don't think so. And I always say, no, we haven't found one yet, but we're looking.

But what was communicated to me at lunch I thought was kind of interesting. This person said, look, people, really like to have a single leader that they can focus in on. A person who is responsible and he's the identifying guy and we don't have that yet. So I was thinking about that and I went home and of course my wife, she's a lot more spiritual than I am, I told her about that and she said, well we already have that guy.

I said, who is it? She said, Christ. He's the pastor of this place. And Roger and I are just undershepherds. So as we go forward here, we're looking for someone who would fill the role, another role of undershepherd. The Lord Jesus Christ is the pastor of this church.

And I think you have to keep that in mind. And why is that important to us? Because he's the one that's to be focused in on. We're not to focus in on Roger or myself or anybody else. Christ is the focus of everything that we do. And so as we go about our business, looking for a man to join us or two, we're looking for a special man, especially in today's Christian environment. Someone who has a grasp of the word, has spiritual maturity, and understands grace, understands identification truths, positional truths, those kinds of things, and there are not many of those. So Roger and I pray about this every week, and what we pray about is that God would raise this person up, would bring him to us, and so that's what I would ask you to pray about. And oh, by the way, if you know somebody, you know, my phone's on all the time, call me.

So today we're in Galatians, today we're in Galatians 3.13 through 16.

We started, I ended up last week, as Jim read, I ended up last week talking about the law is not a faith and why it isn't. And it doesn't take faith to keep the law, it just takes energy. and your commitment and your willingness. Problem is the law never gave you the strength to keep it in the first place. So even if you have faith, I used to think one time, well, you know, the Jews are under the law. Do they trust God for them to keep the law? Well, that'd have been nice, except the law wouldn't do much for them. And it's not a matter of faith. It's a matter of obeying the commands. So the law is not of faith.

And the second part of that verse is the one who has done them shall live by them. Not live by faith, but live by the tenets of the law. So verse 13 says, and that's another change I made for today. is I decided I was gonna put the verses up rather than questions and we'll see how that goes. Feedback is always accepted. So let me know what you think.

Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law. Better get the right verse. This version says he's delivered us by the payment of ransom from the curse of the law by becoming a curse on behalf of us because it stands written, a curse is everyone who is suspended upon a tree. So this word redemption or redeemed is a really interesting word. There's actually three words in the New Testament that have to do with this word. Edgaradzo is the word used here.

And all it has to do was being bought out of slavery. I remember we went to Charleston, South Carolina one time. And in downtown they have these, where the old slave market was, and these platforms were, they had the slaves up there and they auctioned them off. And I thought, gee, that's just like us.

Before we're saved, we're up on these platforms, we're under this bondage of sin, but there's no auction going on. But there's a Redeemer around who wants to buy us, who wants to pay the price for us. And the idea here is a deliverance which involves a cost of some kind, and it involves effort and suffering, and it also involves the loss of one who affects the deliverance. There's gonna be loss on his part to deliver us. I needed to be ransomed, so did you, because we were stuck. We were prisoners. We were under the sentence of death.

So these words are interesting. One talks about just the fact that you buy a slave. The second word is that you buy them out of the marketplace. That's an addition to just buying them out of the slave market because what you've done is you've guaranteed that they don't ever go back.

So we have now a new master. You know, one of the things that when we studied grace, and I remember Chet McCauley saying on his tape about grace, that one of the tenants or one of the principles of living under grace is that I already have a master, so I won't let anything master me. no matter what it is. Well, who's the master? The master is the Lord Jesus Christ. And why is he a master?

Because he bought me. He owns me. I belong to him. So being bought out of this marketplace of slavery means that I went from one ownership to another ownership. It was not of this, oh, I'm free to do whatever I want. I now belong to somebody else. And we were created by God to be like that. The third word has to do with just the money or the ransom used to liberate a slave, or the payment of a ransom. So Christ has bought us out of the slavery to the curse. Let's talk about the curse. Notice our minds say, well, gee, I got bought out of the slave market, but I really got bought out of the curse.

What was the curse? It's a legalistic passage that a Jew would certainly understand, and it's pronounced upon those who do not specifically obey the commands of God. The law promised a blessing if you obeyed it, but if you didn't obey it, it promised you a curse. And we were talking about this in Sunday school. A lot of the curse that we, and we mentioned it last Sunday here, is the withdrawal of the blessing.

The blessings were promised if you obeyed, but if you didn't obey, what happened? The blessing promised, number one, you didn't get that, and you got the consequences of not obeying. And if you got the blessings by obeying, it proved to be pretty barren because the law didn't make allowances for your frailty. It just said, do this or die. If you do this, I will bless you. If you don't, I will curse you. So a man under the law is a slave to the curse.

He's banished from all blessing, totally banished. He's banished from sharing or enjoying the very essence of God. You don't get to do that under a law system. You're banished from his holiness. You're banished from his righteousness and his goodness.

That's a curse. So from this hopeless state of condemnation in which the sinner, you and I, we were not only helpless to redeem ourselves, but we're helpless to satisfy the just demands that the law required. We couldn't meet them. We cannot find acceptance with God through a law system. You just can't find it. So Christ comes along as the redeemer, And he satisfies the just demands of the curse of the law. He satisfied them. And we broke the law. He satisfies the consequence. He paid the penalty in place of me and instead of me. He leaving a holy God free to bestow on us now his mercy on the basis that his justice has been satisfied.

Ever think about this? Well, why doesn't God just save everybody? because His justice demands it be satisfied for the offense committed against Him. So no matter how intensely He loves us, He can't exercise His grace towards us until the demand of His righteousness has been met. Therefore, Christ comes, meets that demand, and now He's free. free to extend his grace to us.

He just couldn't do it. Oh, I'm gonna sweep your sins under the carpet, and I'm gonna, no. God isn't like that. He is holy, righteous, and good, and there isn't any, oh, well, listen, never mind. He has to take care of every issue so that it's perfect, because he's a perfect God. In verse 10 here is a picture of being under the curse. For as many as are under the works of the law, are under the curse.

So if you're under the works of the law, and by law I mean not only the Mosaic Law, but I call it the right behind your right ear little black box law. You know, right back here you've got this little set of values that you adhere to and oh, I might never do this, but I'd always do this. That law is included too, because there's no way that you can keep up to that. If you ever think about Well, my standards are here, but every once in a while, I have to modify them. Or, well, I'm gonna forget that one, I'm gonna add a new one.

I remember a guy I really admired early on in my Christian life, and we were talking about marriage one day. He said, well, contemporary marriage is really interesting. He said, a man and a woman get together, and over time, they get to know each other, and they get to know what their rules are. So the man holds up his set of rules and the woman looks at him and says, I can do that, I can abide by that. And so she holds up her rules and he says, oh yeah, okay, I'm good with that.

So they get married and they're going along and all of a sudden, one morning, the guy wakes up and he looks over there and the top one's been erased and there's a new one on the bottom. And he's thinking, I didn't agree to that. And he looks over and same things happen to him. Top one's been erased, new one on the bottom. And over time, there's lots of erasures and lots of additions, you know, and lots of erasures. That's not grace, that's law. And so he said, no wonder a marriage can't work out. It has to live under grace because you're always changing the rules. So I thought that, well, that's pretty cool that you would observe that, you know?

So, and verse 13 tells us we've been redeemed from the curse of the law. We haven't been redeemed from the presence of the law, we've been redeemed from the curse. And we're redeemed from being under that curse. We were as sinners under that for sure. Christ came above us and between us and he solved that curse issue.

So this word, huper, which we talk a lot about, means that he did it in behalf of me. He did it as my substitute. Paul has already used this word in the epistle to the Galatians as a substitutionary character of Christ's death. He died so that I didn't have to, but he included me. in that death because I needed to be separated from the whole entire system. So this statement tells us how he did the redemption. He was in my place. He became something that he never was before. Christ was never a curse before, but he was for me and you. The us here, he became a curse for us.

I think it focuses more on on Judaism than it does just on average people because he's talking about being under the Mosaic law. The book of Galatians is written to the Galatian people who were being taken back under the law by the Judaizers. So I think he's talking and focusing on, when he says us, he's including himself as a Jew. It's not to say, however, that the Gentiles were not responsible by God under an all-inclusive principles of proper conduct and inheriting God's character like we see in Romans 1. So the Jews were under the curse, and being redeemed by Christ from the curse, the blessing of Abraham, which was justification by faith, which in the plan of God was to flow through Israel to the Gentiles, is now at liberty to flow out to the Gentiles. Originally God's plan was with Abraham because he put promises in Abraham that that was supposed to be for the Jewish nation, but also to flow out of the Jewish nation to the Gentiles.

So being made here, Christ being made a curse for us is that word, comes from that word ginomai, he became something that he wasn't before. He expressing the method by which Christ redeemed us from the curse. He just couldn't say, oh, I'm going to pronounce it. He became it and suffered the consequences of it. So what's interesting about this verse here, how does this verse, if you think about it, prove that Christ was a deity?

Does it? I think it does because Every person who has a sin nature is accursed by that nature. He's the only one who wasn't. He's the only one who wasn't accursed because he didn't have a sin nature. So he could pay the penalty. And I think it contributes to understanding his deity.

So, curse that everyone hangs on a tree. Now, when you read that verse, don't you think of Roman's crucifixion? No? It doesn't mean that. He's quoting from Deuteronomy 21, 23, verse, a man has committed a sin worthy of death and he's put to death and you hang him on a tree. His corpse shall not hang all night on the tree, but you shall surely bury him the same day. for he who is hanged is accursed of God so that you do not defile your land which the Lord your God gave you as an inheritance. What's interesting is we think that the Jews had this stoning thing where they got rid of sinners. But this statement introduces the fact that if you were stoned for a sin, then they took your body and they hung it up on a tree for the rest of the day. Why did they do that? because you were an example of what happens when you violate the law.

So there's no reference in this verse to Roman crucifixion. It wasn't known in the time of Moses. Moses wrote the Talmud, so it admits the word of God after a curse, since our Lord was in no sense a curse by God in his crucifixion. He was paying the price.

This curse was the Mosaic Law, and that's what he's talking about. Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. And the hanging on the tree was being hung up after you were stoned to death as an example of a cursedness, and you died by stoning. So, would you say that Jesus Christ's sin was worthy of death? Is that question an oxymoron? Did he have sin?

Well, if you look at 2 Corinthians 5.21, he said, he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us. that we might become the righteousness of God in him. What's interesting about this verse is that, like we said, he became something that he never was before. So when he has made sin, is he worthy of death?

Yes, he is. Yes, he is. He was sinless before then, but he was so identified with your sins and my sins and our sin nature that he had to take the cursing of the cross. We were identified with him in his death, which he paid in our penalty. We were likewise cast out with him and therefore we're no longer under a curse. He paid it. So his sin was worthy of death because it was our sin. and we were worthy of death.

So this whole idea of God identifying us with Christ and Christ with us and sin and all of that, if Christ became something he wasn't before, like you and I, we have been identified with his death so that when he died, from God's perspective, we died, positional truth. We were buried and we were resurrected. That's true of everybody in this room, everybody. Now, it's not one of those experiential things. It's what we call positional truth. Is it true? Yeah, only because God tells us it's true. So identification is a really important factor in understanding, especially Paul's epistles.

So translate this verse or expand the translation. It says, Christ delivered us by the payment of a ransom from the curse of the law by becoming a curse on behalf of us. because it stands written, accursed is everyone who is suspended on a tree. So you can see why this word suspended on a tree makes sense, that he's hung up there publicly to be accursed.

Okay, verse 14. in order that, in order that means, we're gonna get some more information here, that in Christ, the blessing of Abraham, I'm gonna read it off here, in order that to the Gentiles, the blessing of Abraham might come to, in Jesus Christ, in order that the promise of the Spirit, we, Jews and Gentiles, might receive through faith. So there's two purposes and two purpose clauses in this verse.

Each one starts with the word that, purpose number one, that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ. That's the first purpose, the blessing of Abraham. Maybe look at it this way, the sum total of favor or grace shown by God to Abraham would accrue to us.

God's righteousness and his life that he imputed to Abraham, that it might come on the Gentiles. God and his grace make his righteousness and his life available to every person who believes the gospel. As we talked about last time, we found out that Abraham knew a lot more about the gospel than we originally thought that he did. It makes his righteousness in life a moment-by-moment experience in the believer's life who are walking by faith.

And through Jesus Christ, it tells us that he is the only source of blessing there is. There's no other source. So how did you get the blessing? By faith. How do we live in this blessing? Same way, by faith. Who can live by faith? Only those that are believers. Nobody else lives by faith. Faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

Abraham, although if you study his life, he, as put it one way, gets off the rails a few times. Still, he was a man of faith, and he continued in faith, and he lived in faith. And towards the end of his life, he demonstrated that faith by the fact that God called him to sacrifice Isaac, and he never hesitated. He went right away.

Second purpose, that we, would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith, the promise of the Spirit, the fulfillment of the promise that was made to Abraham, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, of the abundant inexhaustible supply of the Holy Spirit himself.

The promise, a graciously gift bestowed by grace. Now, think about this statement. Can you think of a time in the Old Testament record of any promise of the Spirit, of the gift of the Spirit to Abraham or to anybody else? Permanence, the permanency of it. There was a promise made, but do you know of anybody that was permanently indwelt by the Holy Spirit? I couldn't think of one.

I looked at Joel 2.28, it said, and it will come about after this, that I will pour out my spirit on all mankind. That's in the future. And your sons and daughters will prophesy, and your old men will dream dreams, and your young men will see visions. Even on the male and female servants, I will pour out my spirit in those days. Those days are the millennial kingdom. I haven't gotten there yet.

Now, it doesn't mean that he didn't indwell believers in the Old Testament, and in some cases, non-believers, to accomplish a purpose he had. But this isn't an on-again, off-again thing. We would never go to God like David did and say, I beseech you, don't take your spirit from me. We would never say that.

Why wouldn't we? because the promise made to Abraham of the Spirit has been given to us by grace and is permanent. He's permanent. Wherever you go in your life, whatever you do, the Holy Spirit's with you. He's in you every second of every day, all the time. And you know, like it or not, you can't get rid of him because you belong to him.

Now, the law was a barrier that separated the Jews from the Gentiles. And the study I found this week is very interesting. This man says the law is done away in Christ. Is it? Is the law done away in Christ? For you and me maybe. Why? Because it's been fulfilled. How did the law get fulfilled in you? I was gonna pick somebody up and I don't wanna embarrass you. But how did the law get fulfilled in you? Did you break the law?

Are you sinners? Have you ever sinned in your life? If you did it one time, you're subject to the curse. So let's just take for granted each one of you committed at least one sin, okay? Now, what are the consequences of that sin? Death, right? You have to suffer the curse. One sin, that's all it took. I mean, you think about Adam. He took one bite out of one piece of fruit and look what happened. The entire creation fell. We would look at that and say, well, that ain't a big deal.

I've sinned worse than that. It is a big deal because Adam was given responsibility. So the question is, were we separated from the law? And how were we separated from the law? Whether it's mosaic or otherwise, here's the deal. When we sinned that sin, and Christ was headed to the cross, we all got rounded up, you know, like a herd of cattle. And we were taken to that cross in Christ, and the curse was laid on Christ, and it was also laid on you. When Christ died to the law, so did you, and so did I. We got completely away from it by it carrying out its purpose on us, which is a violation causes you to be under the curse. We were under the curse, but because of our identity with Christ, we are no longer under the curse. So we might be able to say, by his separation, the Gentiles are put on a common level with the Jews. I like it better to say, By his separation, the Jews were put on a common level with us as believers, separated from the law system.

Coming in the millennial kingdom, this law will be written on their hearts. They'll do it, and they won't have to teach it. They'll just do it. So, in order that to the Gentiles, the blessing of Abraham might come in Jesus Christ, in order that the promises of the Spirit might receive through faith. By believing in the person and work of Christ, one of the great results of that is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. God made a provision for justification to be given on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and also by the gift of the Spirit to both Jew and Gentile. And he did this, as we'll find out next week, decades, years, before the Mosaic Law came into place. And that's a really important point.

The law, therefore, can't make the promise void because it's a covenant that was done by God prior to giving the law. Brethren, what I have to say in this accordance with the common human practice, even though it be a man's covenant, when it has finally been ratified, no man annuls it or adds stipulations to it. What we're talking about here, you know what a covenant is?

It's a contract. And I was a realtor for 40 years, so I know about contracts. And contracts are really interesting. Usually, there's an agreement between party A and party B. And in the middle is the contract. Party A agrees to this. Party B says, if you do this, then I will do this. When you go get a job, you actually enter into an employment contract. Your boss says, if you'll do this, and you say, okay, I'll do it, I'll pay you. That's the deal. So contracts. And so what Paul's doing here is he's taking the spiritual events that he's talking about and trying to reduce it down to where even somebody like me could understand it. And when he started talking about contracts, I understood what he said.

A contract, once agreed upon, can't be modified. If you know anything about the language of the contract, there's a paragraph at the bottom that says, you can't modify this thing verbally. It's got to be in writing, signed by both parties. Whenever someone would say, well, I'm under contract and this and that and the other thing, what can I do? And my answer was always the same. Read the contract. You gotta do what it says because you agreed to it.

So Paul applies this to God's covenant with Abraham. He says that the law can't be modified since the law was given centuries later. And here's the point. God gave this promise to Abraham that we've been talking about the last two or three weeks. And even though a law comes in later, it can't change the original content of the original contract between God and Abraham, and that all nations in the world would be blessed through him.

So he addresses them as brethren here and says, you'll understand what I'm about to say when he says, I speak after the manner of men. The idea is I speak in the human viewpoint here and I speak as men do concerning their own affairs. This is how you do things. Contracts between men have been in place since the beginning, since the very beginning. And he doesn't apologize for this illustration that he's using, but he's desirous of accommodating them and teaching them in just an ordinary way, here's what's going on.

So the word covenant means to place between two. So if I made a contract with Nick, Nick's on this side, I'm on this side, there's something between us, the contract. He's agreed to it and I've agreed to it. It refers to an act of one of two individuals placing between them something which obligates them to do something. Now there are unilateral contracts and bilateral contracts.

Unilateral contract is what the Abrahamic covenant is. God said, I'm gonna do this. And you don't have to do anything. If Abraham would have not believed God, he would not have been accounted righteous, but God was still gonna do what he promised to Abraham, one-sided.

A bilateral contract is, I'm gonna do this if you'll do that, right? So somebody comes to you and says, use my example, I will buy your house. And he says, fine, if you'll pay the price. Okay, I'll pay the price. We have, both of us have an obligation now. So this is not to be understood as though this is a will or anything like that. This is an agreement in the sense that we enter into it one-on-one. I'm gonna do this if you do that, okay? So God has entered into an agreement with Abraham in which he promises to justify him on the basis of faith in the atoning work which he himself would offer. Abraham said, yeah, okay.

He was accounted righteous, but God was gonna do that anyway. God was gonna send Christ anyway. God was gonna have the whole thing of redemption in place. And even if Abraham didn't believe it, it still is a contract. The agreement is made by God. God also gave the law centuries later. and the God who made a covenant with Abraham would not invalidate that covenant made later because the specifications were different.

Let me give you an example. When we talk about a confirmed contract, it gets ratified. In other words, it becomes public knowledge. You cannot change a contract unless both of you agree. You see that? Unless both of you agree, you can't change a contract. So human relations and agreements solemnly ratified can't be changed unless, okay, I agree, and I'll give you a practical example.

Contracts have, you know, a real estate contract, the last one I wrote, I think it was 15 pages long, and it covers everything, including your firstborn, right? But it also covers that we will close this transaction on a certain date. and sometimes a certain time.

But things get messed up and you get close to the closing date and the buyer calls up the seller and says, look, I can't make that date. Will you extend a week? So they create this thing called an amend and extend the contract. They change the closing date. Both people sign it. If I wanna extend the contract to Nick, and I say, Nick, I'm gonna give you an amendment to the contract to extend the date, and he said, no, no, no, you gotta close on the date we agreed to.

Guess what I've done? I've broken the contract. He doesn't have to live up to his end of it because I've broken it. You see that? So what Paul is saying here, no man disannuls a contract to render it without place or standing to abrogate it or annul it. Man doesn't, does that.

Men enter into contracts and if they break them, there's no contract, or there's consequences that are written into the contract. What were the consequences of written into the contract that God made with Adam? Don't eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and if you do, you will surely die. He broke the contract, guess what? He died. That's what happened. So, You can't annul a contract, especially one between God and us.

You can't impose new conditions, which are diametrically opposed to the spirit and the purpose of the original contract. That's what the Judaizers were trying to do. They were trying to bring in a new element into the deal, so to speak. And their new element was, well, we want to add circumcision. No, the original contract didn't have circumcision in it. You can't add it.

That's the logic that Paul is using, okay? The character of this new condition annulled the whole contract between God and Abraham. So works added to faith would annul an entire gift since any dependence on works means that it's necessarily, to do that, you have to abandon faith. You see that? Change in the deal. It means that any sinner who claims to be saved on the basis of works plus faith, guess what? He's still lost because he didn't abide by the deal.

So it's a terrible tragedy today in our Christian society because there's so much legalism around. It changes the contract between God and us. The contract is by grace through faith. So, brethren, what I have to say is in accordance with the common human practice, even though it be a man's covenant, when it has finally been ratified, no man amends it, annuls it, or adds any stipulations to it.

Now to Abraham, were made the promises, and to his seed. He doesn't say, and to seeds, or the seeds, as in respect to many, lots of seeds, but in respect to the one seed, to your seed, who is Christ. Now, this is a verse that I spent a lot of time last week saying that Abraham knew about Jesus Christ, knew him personally, knew what the deal was gonna be, and knew that he was gonna come and become a man and die for the sins of the world. He knew the seed was Christ. The promises were made to Abraham and his seed. The question is always, well, who's the seed? Christ, nobody else. So when Christ is seen as the seed of Abraham here, all those who are saved by him are included in the contract. That's why the word seed is singular, because it's only one.

And what it means is, is by one progeny or one offspring, I'm gonna do all this, Christ himself. So Abraham personally and to all those who by faith in Christ are brought into salvation, where the promise is made. So everyone in this room is in Christ. The promise was made to you too. You're promised. You're promised salvation because you're in Christ.

Now to sum up, the fact that the promises were made to Abraham and to all believers all down through the ages who follow Abraham in this act of faith indicate a couple of things. that the faith way of salvation existed before the law was given. And it continued through all time, and all the time that the law was in force. And still is in effect today, after the nullification of the law at the cross. God's promises are still in effect. even though you and I were separated from the law at the cross. So the entrance of the law didn't affect the promises whatsoever. So if you ever talk to somebody who wants to add something to the promise of righteousness by faith, it's a violation of the original agreement between God and Abraham and God and you and God and Christ.

And you can't, even from a man's standpoint, it would make the deal null and void. So what are the Judaizers trying to get the Galatians to do? They're trying to get them to negate the contract is what they're trying to do. They would all be lost if that happened.

So now to Abraham. were made the promises and to his seed, who is Christ? The Lord Jesus Christ. So let's close. Let's pray. Our dear Father, how thankful we are that you are a God that we can trust in the sense that whatever you say is true. We can rely upon you because of who you are. And when you make a covenant or a transaction with man and a promise, you never ever go back on it. And we are so thankful for that. And even if we go back on it, you have done it in such a way that by placing us in your son, we enjoy the benefits of his veracity. And we thank you, Father, we pray in your son's precious name, amen.