Galatians 3.6-9
[Originally posted on my Rabbisaul blog June 16 2007]
I recall that when I first started writing sermons, I was given to lengthiness. I suppose I saw those sermons as short – my Dad used to preach anywhere from an hour (on the very short end) to 3-4 hours (!).
When I was pastoring in Montana, I was in a local church context where the people really weren’t accustomed to long sermons, and I suppose I was kind of already going in the direction of shorter ones, anyway. I suspect my average sermon clocked in somewhere around 22-25 minutes by the time I left.
I find I’m going back up a bit. I hope that doesn’t mean that I’m just becoming more wordy and difficult; the truth is that while I still retain a very high view of preaching, I now recognize that it does not carry the full weight of the liturgy. God speaks to His people throughout the service, and not just in the sermon.
Anyway, I’ve just completed my sermon draft for tomorrow. It’s up in the 3300 word range; most of my Montana sermon drafts were around 2300-2600. But I don’t feel bad…. I guess I feel safe, since I think my sermons are usually shorter than my fellow preachers in the rotation. :p
But the real issue is doing justice to the text. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by Galatians 3.6-9, since this is a chapter I’ve devoted extensive study to. I honestly didn’t really think it would be easy to come up with enough material for a sermon, but once again, I’ve not only come up with a rather long sermon, I haven’t managed to even go over every phrase directly.
So what’s so special about this passage?
At first, it looks fairly straightforward: Paul is telling the Galatians that justification is by faith; Abraham was justified by faith, as borne witness by Gen 15.6.
But a closer look uncovers rather a lot more. For starters, consider a couple of questions:
1. The immediate link in the text is between the Galatians’ experience of the Spirit and the counting of Abraham as righteous through faith. (This has led some people to pretty much equate the gift of the Spirit with justification.) What’s the nature of the link?
2. Genesis 15.6 occurs, not at the outset of Abraham’s walk with Yahweh, but several years in. But wait: Isn’t justification something that happens once, at the beginning?
It’s in answering these questions that a lot about Paul’s argument makes a lot more sense. In terms of how Gal 3.6-9 is often read, Paul could have cited anyone else from the list of “heroes of faith” in Heb 11; he just happened to settle on Abraham.
But the text itself leads us to think otherwise: the promise to Abraham was that all the nations (= Gentiles) would be blessed in him. The blessing envisioned therefore requires a relationship between Abraham and the Gentiles – a relationship involving not merely a pattern of example and imitation, but one of father and sons, of head and seed. (The faith articulated in Gen 15.6 is in response to God’s promise that He would make Abraham’s seed like the stars in number; the fact that God tells Abraham that nations will be blessed in him suggests that the multiplication of Israel does not exhaust this particular promise. The nations too must somehow become Abraham’s seed.)
Already in Gal 3.6-9, Paul is developing his argument regarding how Gentiles (who are not under Torah) have become sons of Abraham, and therefore are fulfilling the promises God made to him.
The Holy Spirit comes into play in this on at least a couple of levels. At the broadest level, the NT conceives of the Spirit as the sign of God’s acceptance, which is why e.g. Peter reasons from the outpouring of the Spirit upon the Gentiles that he is to baptize them.
But there is something more specific in the Galatians context. In 3.13-14, Paul ties “the blessing of Abraham” to the reception of “the promised Spirit,” coming as the fruit of the death of Christ – and specifically, that death as the bearing of the curse against apostasy from Torah. (This, I take it, is the point of 3.10: those under Torah were under – that is, subject to – a curse: they were bound by a curse-oath to uphold the law.)
Why does the curse against apostasy from Torah come into play in this context?
Remember that the promise was that Gentiles would be blessed in Abraham. Remember too that Israel was not simply a genetic or biological entity: those who were circumcised and took up Israel’s law thereby became Israelites – i.e. in reality they were no longer Gentiles at all. Which means that in order for the promise to be fulfilled, the Gentiles had to become incorporated into Abraham apart from circumcision and the law.
And that is the genius of Paul’s argument: in order to get the Gentiles into the seed as numerous as the stars (true to the intent of the original promise), he first “narrows” that seed, as it were, into Christ (3.16). What does this accomplish? Well, among other things, it means that the curse against apostasy, borne by Christ (3.13), has removed Abraham out from under Torah and thereby made it possible for Gentiles to be included in him without becoming circumcised and following Torah.
And that inclusion, of course, comes about in fact in 3.26-29, where those baptized into Christ (and remember, He is the promised Seed, the recipient of the promise, 3.16) thereby put Him on and become that One Man that He is (3.27-28). And since this is the case, they thereby become Abraham’s Seed and heirs according to the promise (3.29).
The other thing to observe is that the “problem” regarding the chronology of Genesis is one of our own making, imposed upon the text by a wrong assumption – namely, that justification (counting as righteous) is a one-time, punctiliar event. That assumption has led to all sorts of weird interpretations (e.g. that Gen 15.6 is a parenthetical remark, referring in fact to Abraham’s initial faith when first called) – but it is in truth by recognizing that the faith and the reckoning righteous in Gen 15.6 belong precisely in that context, that we also get the proper parallel to the Galatian situation.
Paul has just said that the Galatians began “in the Spirit,” but are now seeking to be completed in/by the flesh (3.3; cf 5.7, where he says that they were running well). He doesn’t need to hammer home that some one-time, initial justification was by faith; his problem is that they are falling back from the faith with which they began.
And that is precisely where Abraham comes in. Years after he was first called out of darkness and justified, Abraham was still believing God’s promises, and that faith was being reckoned to him as righteousness. That is the nature of pistis, and we can see how the same term can mean “faith” or “faithfulness” – not because faith and good works are somehow conflated, but because in the divine economy of things, faithfulness is simply persisting faith.
Genesis, of course, isn’t teaching progressive justification, as if one is 10% justified at the beginning, and then slowly works up to 100% justification. Nor is it teaching that Abraham was justified, lost that, and then needed to be justified again. Abraham was only called out of Ur once, and he became a friend of God – a just one, a covenant partner. But God continued to count him righteous by way of faith; that is the indisputable record of Gen 15.6.
And it is in view of that, that we can say that the notion that justifying faith is a nanosecond act once in the past, is utterly pernicious. It’s a notion that cuts the biblical fabric apart. Saving faith is persisting faith. And ironically, by transforming saving faith into a nanosecond act, we are encouraged to take our eyes from the Word of promise and put them on our action or experience in the past. And thus we end up with faith in faith, rather than faith in the faithful Word of the faithful God.