Law And Grace

One of the great things about being a follower of Jesus is that you quickly discover that you are a member of a vast international family that encircles the entire world. I am not a huge traveller, but it has been my privilege to worship with other believers in such faraway places as Australia, Britain, France, Haiti, India and Libya. While some of the customs in each of those places may have differed somewhat and while we may have stumbled at points during the service, what was far more evident was the deep bond that we shared through our common faith in Jesus Christ.

I remember too the day we welcomed the first of several dozen refugees from Burma into the congregation where I served in Minnesota. Our primary means of communication initially was through an interpreter. And so much of what they were experiencing was utterly strange to them (not least the weather!). Yet there was no question that when they were with us they were at home among their spiritual family.

I suspect too that there are some in the congregation here this morning who, when they first came to Canada, found a number of our customs—things that seem perfectly normal to us—strange and mystifying.

In many ways, entering the world of the New Testament and meeting with the believers there is much the same. Some translation is required—and I am not speaking just from Greek to English. I’m also thinking of the many customs that were observed in the Jewish and Roman worlds of the first century that require sometimes considerable explanation if we are to gain a proper understanding of the message of the Bible.

For example, when Jesus told his parable about the woman and her lost coin, we may not be aware that her loss would amount to more than a hundred dollars in our world of today. Or when Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink (which may seem like a perfectly normal thing for us to do on a hot day), he was breaking with nearly a thousand years of open hostility.

Well, welcome to the churches in Galatia in the middle of the first century—in the midst of a culture about as far removed as any in our world today. If we are to gain a proper understanding of the message the apostle Paul was seeking to get across to them, we will need to go behind his words to delve into the cultural background that underlies them. So let’s turn to Galatians 3:23-29 and see what we can learn from these verses and how we can apply it to our lives today.

The Pedagogue

When you read the opening verse of this morning’s passage, it appears that Paul has a very negative view of the Old Testament. “We were held captive under the law,” he says, “imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.” It sounds as though the people of Old Testament times had been languishing in some kind of dark dungeon for fifteen hundred years.

And there are lots of people today who share that point of view about the Old Testament. On more than one occasion I have heard someone say to me, “I don’t like reading the Old Testament. It’s all about sin and punishment. I much prefer to read Jesus’ words about love and peace in the New Testament.” I don’t like to remind them that Jesus spoke about hell and judgement in some of the most vivid and frightening terms in the Bible. Just think of the parable of the rich man who ended up in anguish in hell and pleaded for Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool his tongue (Luke 16:19-31) or Jesus’ warnings to be careful not to be thrown into hell “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44).

But I want to say that it was never Paul’s intention to be critical of the Old Testament. In fact, in the course of his thirteen letters Paul references the Torah forty-five times. He quotes from the prophets fifty-three times. And he draws from the psalms twenty-three times. Indeed, his reverence for the Old Testament scriptures comes out in the next verse of this morning’s passage. There he speaks of them as “our guardian until Christ came”.

Now the word our Bibles translates as “guardian” is has a very specific meaning. Elsewhere it is translated “guide” (1 Corinthians 4:15) and it refers to a servant whose duty was to conduct a boy to and from school, to teach him manners, and when necessary to inflict punishment. However, the guardian was not the child’s teacher. His role was simply to bring his charge to the teacher.

These guardians (the technical term was “pedagogues”) were often known for their harshness and strict discipline. Yet the fact is that many developed life-long relationships with their charges. Whatever the case, however, their duties came to an end when the boy reached the age of maturity.