Grace Greater Than Our Sins

So, we're going to work our way through the last verses that I have, which is Galatians chapter 4, 1 through 7. And today we'll work verses 4, 5, 6, and 7. The idea being that God, through Paul, has spent all of this time demonstrating to the Galatians the difference between law and grace and living by faith or living by experience. So it's been very informative. And also, I don't know if you've noticed, but Paul is pretty repetitive about when he's making a point He goes at it three or four different ways so that when he's finished, there isn't a whole lot of doubt about what he means.

So the first slide repeats verse four, but when the fullness of time came, God sent forth this son born of a woman, born under the law. In these next verses, there's going to be two things I want you to notice. what God did in grace alone. The first thing he did is he sent forth his son. He did that. And the second thing is he sent forth his spirit, the spirit of his son, into us. He did those two things.

Now, in the Old Testament, Isaiah talked about this. He said that in chapter 7, therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son and he will call his name Emmanuel. So this is not a surprise. God is sending forth his son. And also in Isaiah 9 he says, for a child will be born to us, a son will be given us, and the government will rest on his shoulders and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. So God had this all set up. So when we start talking about the fullness of times, it's interesting to look at that. The of the times has to do with, there's a Greek construction there called an objective genitive. And I read it 15 times and still don't understand it. But it has to do with the noun receiving the action.

And so the word times here, It mainly refers to the time as conceived of as a succession of moments, like we would calculate time. You know, there's one minute, two minutes, three minutes, like that kind of thing, succession of moments. There's another Greek word that refers to times as a period of time ordained by God. That's not what this is. This is a succession of moments.

And so the word Paul uses here, we'd say, refers to a lapse of time from this time to that time. So I put in here that that moment came which completed the period of time designated by God that should elapse before the coming of the Son of God in incarnation, and then he would be sent forth from the Father. So, this moment of time is marked by some outstanding events in the history of the human race.

The first one was that God ordained the Messiah coming. Daniel was given the date of his coming, the exact date. Daniel said it was 483 years after the edict of the Medieval Persian government to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple and to rebuild Jerusalem, 483 years after that event. The second thing that was in place at this time was the Mosaic Law.

And it did its educational job showing the world that the most highly favored nation in the world, the Jews, was, despite all of God's blessing and his mercy, was totally depraved. You think, well, why is that a lesson? Well, it gave the Gentiles and the Gentile portion of the race a picture of its own total depravity. In other words, The special nation Israel was given this law and they didn't keep it and everybody knew it, including all the Gentiles that were watching them.

The Mosaic Law came in three sections, three parts. There was the Ten Commandments, there was the laws governing the social relationships with one another, and then there was the Levitical system of sacrifice. All was done away with as a legal system when Christ came and went to the cross. It was superseded by this wonderful thing called the Gospel of Grace. It replaced it, which centered in faith in a historic and actual Savior, the Son of God. And the fourth thing that was in place was kind of interesting.

The Roman Empire was in place. The Roman Empire contributed a lot to what God intended to do at the time of Christ. First of all, they maintained peace. That's the one thing the Roman Empire really was focused on. If you were under their rule and you raised a little problem, boy, they came in and put you down right now because they wanted everything under peace.

And so it was a fairly peaceful world in the Mediterranean basin. The second thing they did is they built roads. And roads contributed to the fact that missionaries could easily travel now. Up until that time, there weren't very many roads. But even today, if you go to Europe and go to Turkey and places like that, you see the Roman roads are still there. They're still there. And the third thing is that the Greek language was the language of the free world, just like English is now. And so the spreading of the gospel through the Greek language could take place.

All of this was there at the time that Christ shows up. So it's all set for the greatest event in history, and that was the inclusion into the human race the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the fact that he came as a human being, and that he was crucified and buried, and he had a bodily resurrection at that time. It was a perfect time.

So, if we look at this word sent forth in this verse, it demands a little bit, and we talked about this word last week, the ex apostello, It refers to one who sends another forward with a commission, with a specific job. Like we have all been made ambassadors of the reconciliation. We've been sent forward to do a job as Christians. And we've been given credentials to do it. We've been given the spirit to do it.

The word apostle comes from this word. And if you notice that the front of the word is the word apo, A-P-O, or the preposition apo, which means from or off. It means that the person sent is to represent the ones that sent them. That's what an ambassador does. If you're an ambassador, you speak what you've been told to speak, you're not entitled to your own opinion. So it represents, you have to represent the sender.

Our Lord is called the Apostle and High Priest of our confession in Hebrews 3.1. He says, therefore, holy brethren, Partakers of the heavenly calling, that's you, consider Jesus the apostle and high priest of our confession, the Lord Jesus. But not only was our Lord sent off in the presence of the Father, but the other prefix, ex- signifies he was sent out from his presence. He didn't get a text message. He was sent personally out from the presence.

And you could say from heaven. I prefer to think that the Lord Jesus said, John said, that he came out from the bosom of the Father. That's a very significant place because it reveals to us that God loves us. So here comes the Lord Jesus Christ out from the bosom of the Father, specifically with credentials and given a message to deliver.

That's who he was and that's what this verse talks about. He became incarnate in the human race through the virgin birth. He was made of a woman. He was a human being, a hundred percent human being and a hundred percent God. But he came into the world as a human being.

If he walked around, unless somebody, you would never recognize who he is, that he was in fact deity in bodily form, I wonder sometimes, what did his brothers think? They're watching him operate and they're thinking, does this guy ever sin? What's the matter with him? If he hit his thumb with a nail or a hammer, what did he do? Maybe he never did that, I don't know. But his brothers must have thought, there's something weird about this guy. So, he's total humanity.

And not only did he come incarnate, but he was born and he lived his life prior to the cross under a legal system. He was actually under two systems. He was under the Mosaic law system because he was a Jew in Jerusalem. And he also was under the Roman law system. He was under both of those. And so in this context, you'll see that born under the law, the word the is not really there. The word just means law system. He's born under law. He lived under law. He died under the penalty of law. And why? Because we broke it. He didn't. We broke it. But he died under it to pay our penalty.

He's the subject of the Jewish legal economy just as any Jew would have been. Any Jew. In the fullness of time, God determined the time when things were to be ready. He sends off his son to us, born of a woman and born under the law. Why did he do that? So that we, so that he might redeem those that are under, again, law, not the law, not the mosaic law, but just under the law system. that we might receive the adoption of sons. Redeem is an interesting word. We've discussed it a lot in the past. It just means to buy out of the slave market.

And I had never thought about what that was like. And Don and I one time went to Charleston. You ever been to Charleston? They have still in downtown Charleston in the old section of town these big concrete platforms where they auctioned off slaves. And I can remember standing there thinking, gee, what would that have been like?

That you're there, and there's a man up there who's the auctioneer, and he's auctioning off human beings. Well, the Lord Jesus recognized that we were those human beings that were up on that auction block. And we were slaves. We were slaves to sin. And he came that he could redeem us out of there. He would pay the price, whatever it cost, to get us out of that bondage. And you know what the price was? The most expensive commodity ever in the human race. You know what it is? It's the blood of Christ. That's the most expensive commodity ever. They don't trade it. He gave it freely. So Paul was Paul conceived of the Gentiles as possessing a law, the law being of divine origin.

Why? Because he said that the law, really, you Gentiles, is written in your hearts. He quoted, I'll quote Romans 2, 14 and 15. He says, for when the Gentiles who do not have the law, the Mosaic law, do instinctively the things of the law, these not having a law are a law unto themselves. in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately excusing or else defending them. When you have a conscience, it does one of two things. It either accuses you or it excuses you. That's what it's there to do.

So the Gentiles, he's writing to the Galatians now, the Gentiles had this law system in place too. I can remember in school studying moral law and all these other things, and where did it come from, and why do humans live under a law system? We just naturally gravitate to a law system as human beings, and it's there.

1 Corinthians 9.20 says, For the Jews, to the Jews I became a Jew, so that I might win Jews. And to those who are under the law, separate people, as under the law, though not being myself under the law, so that I might win those who are under the law. Those are Gentiles. So Paul refers to the Jews first who are under the law and then the Gentiles who were under a legal system.

Every Gentile is under some sort of legal system. If you don't have your own code written by the legislature and where you live, you still have this little box behind your ear that tells you, you ought to be doing this and you shouldn't be doing that. That's legalism. The Lord Jesus came to specifically deliver us from any claims that any kind of law had on us. Any claim.

And he died under that. And the cool thing about dying under the law system is that if you just think about the logic of it, if I am convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death, and after 45 years of appeals, I'm going to the gallows and I fall down and have a heart attack. They don't pick me up and stick me in the gallows. Why? Because I'm dead. We're dead to the law system in Christ. We died to it.

We don't have to mess with it anymore. When Christ was raised from the dead, we totally were left, we left the legal system in him behind and we were resurrected into grace. That's now the operating system. And he did it in order that he might not only deliver us from law, but also raise believers with himself into a realm where law does not operate.

I know how scary that sounds, because those of you who are old like me remember the Burma shave signs, right? Remember the Burma, you'd be driving down a two-lane highway and there would be like six or seven signs, and they were always kind of telling you what to do. And next to that was a speed limit sign. I have to know how fast I'm going.

Well, grace doesn't have any signs. It doesn't have any restrictions. How can grace possibly cause me to function in a godly manner? We don't realize that God's blessings are so powerful that they will naturally cause the life of Christ in us to respond in the way that God would have us respond without making it legal, without legislation. We just can't help in our hearts but respond. That's how grace works.

So moving on to this word adoption, if you spend a lot of time in contemporary literature and try to figure out what this word adoption means, it's kind of different than what Paul meant by adoption. The Greek word is two words put together, wio and thesia. Wios is a son come of age, old enough. to be an adult son, and theos means a placing or a setting of a person or a thing in a place. So if you put them together, what he's talking about is he's placing us because we're adult sons. God's children are begotten and born of God. You didn't join the fraternity, you're born of God, and you're called born ones of God. Another word is tekna, which means born ones. So we're directly related to God.

We're partakers of the divine nature in 2 Peter 1.4.

But the word huyas in this case, a child come of age, he's no longer underage like we talked about last week. He's not a servant anymore. He's not a slave. He's come of age. put those words together, God's recognized you and me as in the position of an adult son and placed there by Him, our Father, to do what? That we might receive, begin to receive. It will be consummated fully at the coming of Christ when our bodies, redeemed and fashioned anew, shall be conformed to Christ's glorious body. Therefore, of being immature children, and we talked a lot about that last week, immature, we became adult sons under grace. By the way, the only place that an adult son operates is under grace.

Based on the verses that we've talked about over the last two or three weeks, if you're under any type of legal system, whether it's your own personal set of rules or some denominational rules, Paul specifically says to you, you're a young child. You are not ready for grace. You cannot operate. As a matter of fact, you are under the curse of the law. The only place an adult son can operate is under grace. That's the only place.

We have received the adoption of sons. It means in order that we might receive the adult son placing. We all have that. We could say in order that we might be placed as an adult son, everybody in this room is an adult son. Therefore, we have presented to us the status of a person under grace as compared to one who's under law.

Those under law are not adults and they haven't been placed that way. Those under grace are. The latter, those under law, are a minority. They're, for lack of a way to put it, they're a teenager. Those under grace are a majority. They're adults. You're treated like a minor under law, you're treated like an adult under grace.

So, in order that he might deliver those under the law out, in order that he might place us, or we might receive the placing as adult sons. Because you are sons, fact, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. This is the second grace statement. He sent His Son, and now He has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts. Because we already are adult sons, God has given us a spirit of adult sonship. If you feel like a minor under the law system, you can bet that that didn't come from the Holy Spirit.

No Jew ever called God Father. At best, they would call Him Jehovah, and they were afraid to do that. No Jew would ever Think about that kind of intimacy with God. They were fearful, even prevented generally by use of the Jews of God's memorial name Jehovah for that nation. They called Him Adonai, Lord. He was always Lord. He was always the big God in the white tower in the temple behind the curtain. And boy, you didn't want to make Him mad.

So our English translation printing Jehovah as Lord in capitals, that's why it's printed in capitals, to get this idea of Lord. But we are adult sons. He sent forth the spirit of his sons, crying, Abba Father, now. It's the reason, this gives us the reason for God's act of sending the Holy Spirit, because we're adults. And he takes up permanent residence in our hearts. He's telling these Galatians, look, as adult sons, the first and objective step, which the preceding context has spoken of, that you're brought about there to realize from the position of minors under the law, and he placed you in a position of adult sons. He wants them to understand that.

Instead of looking to God as a judge, they could now look upon him as their father. as their father, with whom they have the privilege of living as sons. The fact of their possession of the indwelling spirit was enough to demonstrate to the Galatians that they were no longer under a lost system.

You know, the prayer when the disciples said, teach us to pray, and the Lord Jesus said, our father, father must have scared them to death. Father? We don't call God Father. Why didn't the Lord Jesus say, Our Jehovah? He didn't say that. He said Father.

So, as strong as the Roman law concerning adoption of those not born into the family It's instructive to kind of know what was going on with this Roman sense of adoption. It was a legal process which a chosen heir became entitled to not only all of the property of the father, but the father assumed all the debts. You assumed as a child that if the father had debts, you got those debts too. And it was civil. the burdens as well as the rights of the adopter. That's what you got. It made him because, as it were, the other self.

If I adopted my son and it was a legal transaction and it was a ceremony, then my son could act on my behalf in any matter whatsoever. I'm not sure we have quite the concept of the force of this, in Roman practice, but it does serve to impress upon us the assurance that the adopted Son of God becomes in peculiar and intimate sense one with the Heavenly Father. I was struck by, we were studying Ephesians on the Tuesday men's study, and when we were in chapter 3, that God foreordained us to be holy and blameless before Him in love. That struck me with this too, because he has decided, and he foreordained it, which means it's in concrete, it can't be changed, that you and I would be blameless and holy, and where would we be?

Before Him in love. Father, Son. Father, Son. He decided to do that. And this is all part of what Paul is trying to persuade these Galatians of who they are. There's an awful lot of unnecessary and unfruitful questioning as to what the witness of the Spirit does. It's plain both in this passage in 4.6, Because you are sons, He sent forth His Son in our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.

Romans 8.15 and 16 says, For you have not received the spirit of slavery, leading to fear again. You don't have that. But you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by which you cry out, Abba Father.

The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are the sons of God. That's how we know. He tells us. That is the witness of the Spirit in producing of the consciousness of being a born one of God. He persuades you about that. Before that, you had no idea. And if you were under a legal system, you had really no persuasion. We belong to his family.

We're a member of his family in Christ. Or put it another way, we are a legitimate, organic offspring of the God of the universe, you and me. And so for us today who are in Christ, there should be the consciousness of not merely are we born ones, but we're adult sons. In the sense of the very relationship of the Father with Christ himself has as a son.

In Matthew 11.27, The Lord Jesus said, all things have been handed over to me by my Father.

And no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son. And here's the cool part. And anyone whom the Son wills to reveal Him. So we have the Spirit of Christ in us and Christ in us. And He wills that we know the Father as our Father.

It's beautiful. The recognition. I saw the other day on the web a young infant, I don't know, maybe seven or eight months old. They did something with her ears and she first time recognized the voice. of her parents and the glow that was on, seven months old, the glow that was on her face.

Imagine what it's like for you and I to come to the realization, I really am a son of God. I really do belong to this family. He really is my father. The witness of the Spirit is designed specifically to carry that process off, to enable that relationship. It's foolish, how foolish it would be and how sad if a child should fall into the delusion that he must have certain feelings if it is to believe that he's a child of the parents.

Do you think God relies on how you feel about what he's done? Not at all. He did it because he loved us. He would love to have us respond that way, but he doesn't rely on our feelings. There's an unconscious certainty of the relationship and the beauty of it being a son. There are indeed certain assessments divinely given us by which to assure us, assure ourselves about who we are. Most of these probably can be read in the first epistle to John where he talks a lot about fellowship with the father and with his son Jesus Christ. He talks a lot about that. He says in chapter 2, verse 13, I have written to you, little children, because you know the Father. You know Him.

In 3.2, He says, Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet manifest what we shall be. But we know, we're certain of this thing, that if He shall be manifested, we shall be just like Him. For we shall see Him even as He is. In 324 he says, Hereby we know that he abides in us by the Spirit which has been given to us. So if you ever wonder what the Holy Spirit's doing, that's what he's doing.

And notice this word, crying. Crying. It means a loud and earnest cry, a public announcement maybe. In John 737, now on the last day of the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.

It emphasizes the earnestness and the intensity of the Holy Spirit's expression in your heart and mind. The word itself doesn't convey the idea of joy, but the intensity of the Spirit's expression in this case, must include a joyous note. It has to. The word crying in Greek text associated with the word spirit so that it is the spirit who is doing the crying out. He's the one that's doing it. It's like I'm losing my hearing slowly but surely. And Donna says to me once, well, did you hear me? I think sometimes as a believer, the Spirit of God says, did you hear me? I'm crying out to you, your son. Did you hear it?

This word Abba, this is one of Courtney's favorite words. It really means Papa, Pater in the Greek equivalent to the Aramaic word Abba. The Aramaic language was the language that was spoken by the Jews in Palestine in the first century. So that's why Paul uses the word. It translates, the readers would understand who uses both of these words so that those who didn't understand Aramaic in Galatia would understand exactly what Father Abba meant. It's possible to use the name that Abba was derived from the Lord Jesus himself.

I have a story about that. I lived across the street from a Jewish rabbi, a young guy, and he was constantly inviting me over to help him with things because he'd never lived in a home before. He always lived in an apartment. He didn't even know how to start the mower. So, but one day I was, his wife had asked me to come over and, I don't know what it was, do something.

So we're in the backyard and they had five kids running all over the place. And one of them came up to her and said, no mom. And her response was, go talk to Abba about that. I thought, oh, that's cool. Those kids understood who Abba was. It was their daddy. Mark 14, 36, he was saying, Abba Father, all the things are possible for you.

Remove this cup from me, yet not what I will, but what you will. When the Lord Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane, he is referring to the Father as Abba Father. Romans 8, 15, we've received the Spirit. I've already read that. Because we are sons, God has sent forth his spirit in our hearts, crying, Abba Father, persuading us.

Therefore, you're no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. In the fact that Galatians the fact of the Galatians' possession of the Spirit, Paul finds proof that they are adult sons of God because they possess the Holy Spirit. So the emphasis is still upon the fact of their position. Position is really important. I hope you've seen over the last several weeks why position is so important to us because it is the very substance of where our faith is to be planted.

As sons, it gives them freedom from bondage of the law, and he says to them, you're no longer slaves, not anymore. It's also implied that the word no longer, that at no time, that at one time they were slaves, they were under a law system, they were under bondage. But he changes this word from, notice it went from sons to a singular son, a son. That's significant because it brings the matter of sonship closer to home for each individual reader, each person. I am a son. As a son, Paul says, as a son you're an heir.

The purpose of the Apostle in gaining and bringing up the conception of heirship and inheritance is that he wants to remind the Galatians that their position as heirs of God is due not to any personal merit, any good works they've done, it was totally by the grace of God that they were in error.

So the Galatians are reminded that's not through putting yourself under a law system like the Judaizers wanted them. But in maintaining freedom from it, they were able to obtain the blessings of Abraham. which blessings the Judaizers had presented to them. If you want those blessings, you have to get under the law system. Well, it was totally the other way around. So Paul appeals to them to maintain and retain the status of adult sons under grace, which they already had. They already possessed it. And rather than go to a position of a minor or a slave by putting yourself under the law. so that no longer are you slaves, but a son.

And since a son, you are an heir through God." That's close. Father, how we thank you for what you've done for the Galatians and for us as sons. We are so thankful. We recognize that when you have called us to live by faith under grace, and in that sense, we can look at your Father and our Father, Abba, Abba Father. And we pray in the Lord's precious name, Amen.