4.18.25 Galatians 3:10–13 (EHV)
10 In fact, those who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. For it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law.” 11 Clearly no one is declared righteous before God by the law, because “The righteous will live by faith.” 12 The law does not say “by faith.” Instead it says, “The one who does these things will live by them.” 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. As it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”
Cherish the Blessing of the Curse on the Cross
We are here to contemplate, mourn, and yet celebrate the curse that took place on the cross. What does it mean to be cursed? One of the definitions is to treat something lightly. It’s kind of like when you grab a Christmas present. You pick it up and test it for how heavy it is . . . . maybe shake it around a bit. Is this worth anything or not? If something is cursed, then it’s light, it is treated as nothing and meaningless.
But it’s more than that. In the Bible, a curse implies that there is a supernatural force behind it, bringing judgment on someone. We are introduced to the curse right after the Fall into sin. God cursed the snake by making it crawl on the ground and making it eat dust. He also cursed the ground by having it produce thorns and thistles, so that it wouldn’t so easily produce good fruit. It was naturally created to be fruitful and full of life. Not so much after the curse. The ground lost some of its life giving power.
Fast forward to Holy Week. Jesus comes across a fig tree that doesn’t bear fruit. He’s not happy with it, so He curses it. Not too long afterward, it withers quickly and dies, much quicker than normal. The disciples were astounded.
We live under a curse in this world right now, and you can see it in how nothing in this world really lasts. The houses that you buy, the promotions that you get, the body that you take so much care of, the teams that you cheer for . . . it gets emptied of its importance over time. I think of how we were so emotionally involved in the sports teams of our children, taking pictures, getting angry or rejoicing . . . in hindsight I was too emotional over it all. Think also about how obsessed we can be over body image. We fret over an inch here or there, a wrinkle or a loss of hair. We want to take care of ourselves and the body God gave us. But one way or another, your body will get old and wither away if you live long enough. You actually shorten and lose weight over time.
Madonna is an interesting case in point. She’s trying so hard to be relevant, but she’s doing it by trying to act as if she were still in her 20’s or 30’s. It would appear that she’s had plenty of botox. She still dances around on stage in sexually suggestive ways, twerking away. I’m not a fan of twerking no matter how old you are, but it’s all the more disturbing coming from a 69 year old woman. 69 year old women can still be attractive, but not when they’re trying to pretend they are 23. The more she tries, the worse it gets, and it’s sad to see her desperation. She just can’t see it, and people are making fun of her for it with good reason.
Like it or not, most of us lose relevance over time. You used to have power and influence at work, but once you retire your opinions don’t really matter so much. When you try to give advice, your grandchildren will probably just smile and wave. It has to be frustrating at times, but it’s part of the curse of living in a broken world.
I say all this to add some context to what Paul says in today’s text in the context of a curse. In fact, those who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. For it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law.” It seems kind of odd, if you think about it for a minute. Why does God curse people for at least TRYING to obey the law? They were working under an old and outdated system, and in the process they were convincing themselves that they didn’t really need a Messiah at all. In God’s mind they were just deluding themselves into thinking that He must be pleased and impressed with their efforts, as if they were doing the Lord’s work. In reality, they were empty to Him. They weren’t accomplishing anything.
Jesus really hammered on this with the Pharisees. In Matthew 23 He just goes off on them. You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. . . . You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. . . . You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. . . . You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You can sense a genuine anger that Jesus has for them. They were wasting their time. Jesus had to be blunt with them, because they had hardened themselves against any concept of needing mercy from a Messiah. They just wouldn’t listen.
I think about all of the things that people get so worked up over today. You see the climate protesters throwing paint on priceless works of art and chaining themselves to trees. You hear about the guy who murders a CEO of an insurance company in cold blood, and people celebrate what he did and treat him like a hero. A young man recently murdered both his parents, hoping that he could get money from their insurance and then go and murder President Trump. There’s a violent type of righteousness permeating our society, where people want to use power to try and force their morals on our society. What good does it do in the end? When it comes to repentance or faith in Jesus, none of that matters to them. No matter what you say, they just won’t listen. They are under a curse of anger and self righteousness.
But then you think about the attitude of what is called Christianity too, it’s similar to what the Pharisees had. Some of you might remember the political old moral majority back in the 1980’s, using morality as a type of standard with which to get into the club of the religious right. As much as they seemed to be standing for good morality, there was something off there too, a proud and bloviated type of pride pointing the finger at all the sinners out there. The fancy suits and the big hair and makeup of Jim and Tammy Sue Baker, the drama of the worship . . . the pride and hypocrisy was exposed in them too, as the Jimmy Swaggarts of the world fell one by one to be nothing more than spiritual grifters, under a curse of self righteousness, deceit and greed. Cursed on the left and cursed on the right.
And we can self righteously sit in the center of it all too, but we have to readily recognize that we deserve the curse too. We realize that but by the grace of God we could have been caught in a thousand other sins, and we’ve had sinful attitudes and actions too. Right, left, or center, we all fall short of the glory of God. We’re under a curse of self delusion, thinking we’re better than we are, but we’re also under a curse from God. There are no pats on the back for trying. There are no participation trophies at the gates of heaven. You’re either holy or not. You’re either cursed or blessed. That’s it.
Yet we come here today because we ARE blessed. The blessing doesn’t come from being on the right or left. The blessing comes through faith in Jesus, on what happened to Him over 2,000 years ago. Ironically enough, the blessing comes through a curse. Clearly no one is declared righteous before God by the law, because “The righteous will live by faith.” 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. As it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”
There’s two different types of curses being placed on Jesus at the cross. The crowd of humanity yelling “crucify him,” spitting at Him, and taunting Him to come down. They are doing all they can to declare He is nothing but an empty suit, another failed king. They are doing everything they can to strip Him of any dignity. And even His own disciples disown Him and act as if they had nothing to do with Him. It’s like Psalm 22 says, “I am a worm, and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people.” Or we might think of Isaiah 53, our Old Testament reading. He was despised and rejected by men, like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Yes, we wouldn’t even look at Him, like an Amish family that turns its back on the excommunicated member. He was cursed by humanity.
But the second kind of curse was so much worse, the One where God the Father Himself turned His back on the Son. Jesus cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Just recently, Rachel Morin, a mother of five was out for a jog in Maryland, she was brutally raped and murdered by strangulation, then left in a ditch by a man from El Salvador. People are extremely angry over what happened and want him to suffer and die for what he’s done. Imagine the anger you would feel if you were her mother or husband or children. Now look at Jesus. When Jesus went to the cross, He was treated as if HE did it. God blamed Him for all the rapes, all the murders, all the backstabbing, all the pornography, for all of our laziness and our outright rebellion. The Father viciously punished Him for it in a most emotional way. For a moment in time the Father turned His back on the Son, and in that moment Jesus suffered an eternity of hell as humanity’s substitute.
All this happened because God didn’t take our sins lightly. This was the deepest kind of curse. It wasn’t just that Jesus had to die. It was worse than that. There was hell to pay. Jesus knew how serious this curse would be. He sweat drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. What a heavy burden, to bear the sins of the world from every time and every place, and pay for them all in one place and at one time. Isaiah 53 describes it in such a heavy manner. You can feel the weight of it . .
we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
And what is the beauty of this death? It wasn’t for nothing. Think of the young man who was recently stabbed in the heart over an argument over where someone was supposed to be sitting. What a senseless murder! This was not a senseless crime of passion in the heat of the moment. It is full of power and meaning for eternity in the FOR US. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. Jesus hung there to make a payment to God for our sins, a payment of hell for the world that none of us could afford. Jesus made that beautiful statement to the world. “It is finished.” Paid in full. God has no wrath left over my sins. There are no remaining debts that I owe to God. It’s all been done.
Imagine how it feels for those who get an inheritance and finally get their house paid off after years of mortgage payment. Now they finally have extra money to spend on other things that they’ve wanted for years. They can be more generous with their finances. They don’t have to live their lives under the stress of paycheck to paycheck. Now place this under the realm of grace. I don’t have to live my life as if I owe God this or I owe that. Now I can live with a full bank account of righteousness and mercy. I can overflow with that mercy to other people who have sinned against me. My life isn’t lived with the thought process that I have to go to church, I have to give ten percent, I have to pray because I OWE God something. My debt has been paid, and I have plenty of God’s grace and forgiveness for all of my sins paid for by the blood of God. I can bask in that grace and live free in that grace. It never runs out. That means I can share His mercy with other people. I can be forgiving to others too. I don’t have to hold grudges. I don’t have to be greedy. I can be generous with everything I have, because God is so good! I can live a life of thanks, instead of fear. There couldn’t be anything more meaningful in life than this cross. We are blessed to bless others.
Since God treated this sin so seriously at the cross, then we can’t treat the cross in the same way. We don’t treat it lightly. We cling to the cross as if it were the most precious thing on earth, we hold onto it for dear life. When we take the Lord’s Supper, when we listen to the absolution, when we come to Bible study . . . we cherish the cross. Without it, we are damned. Think of Mary, after the resurrection. She sees Jesus standing there, and she clings on to Him. She doesn’t want to let Him go. She cherishes Him like none other. Yes, we treat this Word and sacrament as the most heavy and precious items on the earth, as the only porthole to heaven in Jesus. As the Psalmist says, “Earth has NOTHING I desire besides you.” (Psalm 73)
You know what will be really sad? Think of on Judgment Day . . . how many people there will be who didn’t cherish this cross . . . who treated it lightly . . . as nothing more than an ornament on a chain . . . what will happen to them? What will Jesus say to them? Depart from me, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. The ultimate curse, to be separated from God for eternity into darkness . . . to be treated as nothing . . . when they had no reason to be . . . when they had every opportunity and every reason to be saved free of charge in Jesus, who was cursed for them on the tree. That’s the last thing we want to do. So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross. What a blessing this curse is on the cross. In it we have free and full forgiveness and salvation and hope. It’s what makes this Friday so blessed, so beautiful, and so Good in its own dark way. Amen.
