Sermon: God’s Dysfunctional Family
Text: Gal 4:21-31
Occasion: Lent IV
Who: Mark Woolsey
Where: Arbor House
When: Sunday, Mar 26, 2006
Audio link: http://providencerec.com/Sound%20Files/Srmn060326WoolseyGal4;21-31LentIVGodsDysfunctionalFamily.mp3
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I. Intro
Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent, known as Laetare; it means, Rejoice.
The name comes from the first word of an introit that used on this day in other liturgical traditions:
"Rejoice ye with Jerusalem and be glad with her, all ye that love her. Rejoice for joy with her, all ye that mourn for her. I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord."
Now, this may seem a strange name for a day in Lent. It’s barely half over; four weeks have passed, three remain. The fasting routine gets old, fast. No one really knows how the introit with this theme came to be associated with this day, but there are some guesses. One is that when the church was young and Lent was shorter, this Sunday was not the middle of Lent, but the day before it started. It was sort of like a Mardi Gras, but on a Sunday. Later on, as the church developed the liturgical year, Lent was extended, but this day kept it’s joyful flavor. Whatever the reason, it is a good reminder to us that, as Fred Lindemann says in his book, "The Sermon and the Propers",
"Our Lenten observance is not to be a dull and heavy burden, but a willing offering. This will be the secret of influence, for a dull and joyless Church wins few victories. It is the joy of faith that conquers the world." (Vol II, p79)
Our Epistle Scripture today commands us to this same purpose:
"Rejoice , O barren,
You who do not bear!
Break forth and shout,
You who are not in labor!
For the desolate has many more children
Than she who has a husband" (Gal 4:27)
However, before we can understand this passage we have to comprehend another theme emphasized in the reading: God’s dysfunctional family.
II. God’s Dysfunctional Family
The airwaves and newprint these days are filled with sad stories of wife and child abuse and abandoment. My own wife was a victim of paternal neglect as her father was progressively consumed by alcohol. He was anything but a model father. We rightly abhor such behaviour and demand that those who do those things be justly punished. Yet in today’s Epistle passage we see not only an old man divorcing a troublesome wife and abandoning her and her son in the desert to die, but also God commending that very action! What kind of "family values" is this? I thought that learning Scripture was supposed to enoble us; yet to emulate this would be to debase ourselves. I could understand this if it was just a relating of a story of the shortcoming of a man, even a great man. When we see our heroes in "3D", as it were, we are drawn closer to them, and can even sympathize with their weakness. But God specifically commends this action with the command:
"Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman." (v30)
Maybe Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins are right; maybe the Bible is not only full of errors, but also immoral. How are we to understand this story? To do this, we need some context, and we need to know the goal of Scripture.
III. The Galatian’s Fundamental Error
A common mistake we make when we come to Scripture is to assume it is primarily a book of principles for a "happy life"; a "manufacturer’s handbook", if you will. It is not. In fact, even today’s passage tells us this. Paul says:
"... he who was born according to the flesh then persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit" (v29)
This is an ominous oracle that follows all of us who desire to follow after Christ. God’s promise to us here is not pleasure, but persecution; not happiness, but hardship. Ah, but at least we do desire to follow after Christ, right? Listen to Paul "commending" those who read God’s moral commands and seek to follow them, not just outwardly, but at significant cost to themselves:
"O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified?" (v3:1)
In I Corinthians, where we have a man living in fornicatious relationship with his step mother, a church who tacitly approves, divisions, wild excesses, etc, Paul starts out that letter with praise:
"I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Christ Jesus, that you were enriched in everything by Him in all utterance and all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that you come short in no gift..." (I Cor 1:4-7)
Yet when Paul opens the letter to the Galatians, a church that suffered none of the shortcomings of Corinth, and even which was sincerely seeking to obey God’s law, here’s how he opened the letter:
"I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ." (v1:6-7)
What in the world is Paul getting at? If the Scriptures are not primarily principles to perform, then what, pray tell, are their purpose? Quite simply, the whole message of Scripture, from Genesis to Maps ;-), can be summed up in one phrase, "Jesus Christ is King. Submit!". It’s not about you. It’s not about how you feel or what you want. Every verse in Scripture is like a facet of diamond that sparkles as it turns, revealing yet another aspect of the glory of the diamond. Every verse points away from us to Christ. When our Lord Himself met two disciples on the road to Emmaus, He preached from the Old Testament, where the phrase "Jesus Christ" does not even appear. Yet what did He say?
"O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! ... And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." (Luke 24:25-27)
Even the Old Testament points to Christ. What is it that the Galatians had done that was so damning, that even the letcherous Corintians had not succomed to? In reading the Scriptures, they had missed it’s very center. They had failed to focus on Christ and His Gospel. They thought they knew Him and His message, but had missed both. The truth that is implicit in all of Paul’s epistles, and is explicit in Romans and Galatians, was sullied and soiled. You can break all the commandments many times over and still find mercy in Paul. But pervert the Gospel, either by denying it or simply adding to it, and you will experience his ire falling upon you in all its fury. Conversely, to understand the Gospel is to have a key that unlocks the whole of Scripture. To understand the Gospel of Christ is to understand Christ Himself. To reject His Gospel is to reject Him. Christ and His Gospel are inseparable. It is this that our story of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Hagar, and Ishmael seeks to illuminate. It is this that makes all of Scripture come alive. In the book of Galatians we learn something very special about the Gospel. We’ve already seen that Christ is the center of the Scriptures, and that the Gospel is His message. We find in this book that at the center of the Gospel is a very curious word. It’s one that a lawyer of the time would use. In our culture lawyers are joked about, and with good reason. However, we are indebted to them for a word that cuts to the very heart of our rescue. If the Gospel is the key to the Scriptures, then this is the "key to the key". Archimedes is reported to have said something to the effect, "Give me a point and I shall move the world". This lawyer-word was the fulcrum point that moved the whole Western Church. Indeed, in a very real sense, history itself pivots on this word. Jesus’ whole ministry is summed up in this word. It is the subject of the book of Galatians. This one word is, "justification". And it is this wherein lies the error of the Galatians.
IV. Definition
If justification is so important as all this, it will be essential to define it well. Justification is the declaration that a judge makes at the end of a trial when he says, "Not guilty". The witnesses have been called, their testimony evaluated, the defendant’s behaviour measured against the law, and the pronouncement is made. Note that nothing in the nature of the accused is changed. What he was before, he remains. If he was left-handed, he remains that way; if he had bad breath, it emanates from him still; etc. What has changed is how the state views this man. Before, he was accused of a crime. Now, he is free. In fact, he can never be charged with this crime again. Many laws may have been broken by others, but in the eyes of the state, they were not breached by this person. This is directly analogous to our position before God. At the end of history, at the "Great White Thone" described in Revelation, God will judge all of us according to our deeds. That’s what Rev 20:11-15 says. Those written in the Book of Life will enter the new heaven and new earth, while the rest will be cast into the lake of fire. The problem is, that’s rather late to find out what’s going to happen to us. According to Paul, this declaration of guilt or innocence is brought forward from the end of time to right now. It’s the same judgement, but instead of waiting until the end of time, God, who exists outside of time, makes known to us now what His decision is. For all those justified, that decision is "not guilty". The problem the Galatians had was not so much that they misunderstood what justification means, but that they misunderstood why and how God applies it today. This is what raised the Apostle Paul’s fury to it’s peak. At it’s most fundamental level, this is where we Protestants part company with Roman Catholics. And, I might add most unhappily, many Protestants today make the same mistake. If the Apostle Paul were alive today, I believe he would damn many of us, Roman Catholic and Protestant Evangelical alike, in the same way he indicts the Galatians for their error.
V. Our Error
Protestants today see themselves as the bastian of orthodoxy when it comes to this doctrine. We love to bash a Roman Catholic for denying this essential truth. And we are right when we make this accusation. Roman Catholicism officially denied the essence of the Gospel as described here by St Paul in their Council of Trent in the the 16th century. Yet we, conservative, Evangelical, Bible-believing, God-fearing, family-values-voting, evolution-bashing believers do the same thing today. When the preacher proclaims to you that you can do nothing to save yourself, and then turns around and makes an "altar call", he has taken away with the left hand what he gave with the right. He has fallen into the trap of the Galatians. When a street evangelist buttonholes his next victim and scares the hell out of him - which is not necessarily a bad thing - but them proceeds to lead him in a "sinner’s prayer", he has made the mistake of the Galatians. When you, alone on your bed at night, with no noise to drown out the voice of your conscience, are confronted with your failures again, and you re-dedicate your life to God and receive peace that your sins are now forgiven - at least for the next couple of days - when you do this, you, too, have erred with Galatia.
As a matter of fact, were Martin Luther, that great preacher of justification by faith alone, to come back today, he would find no solace in most Evangelical churches today. While in form they differ dramatically from the Roman church, in essence, the Evangelical church’s message is the same which vexed that great reformer. Justification is through faith alone, but it is by grace alone.
VI. Faith Alone
When we say that justification is through faith alone, we mean that this is how God applies it to us. He does not do it by measuring our good works against our bad. If he did, our fate would be universally dismal. Listen to St Paul:
"We, ..., knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified." (2:15-16)
We Protestants proclaim this loudly- and rightly - vis-a-vis Rome. However, what we fail to realize, is that this is not WHY God justifies us. He does it thru faith alone, but not by - that is, because of - faith alone. You see, God gives us even this faith to believe. Eph 2:8-9 tells us that even the faith to believe is from God. Well, if God is not sitting up in heaven, bestowing justification upon those who "decide" to believe, then on what basis does He do it? He does it based upon His promise to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses:
"I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy" (Ex 33:19)
It’s not what we do, or even what we decide to believe that draws God’s attention. Besides, we could not do anything, anyway. Before regeneration, we were dead:
"But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ" (Eph 2:4-5)
God regenerates us, then we can have faith in Him. It is on the basis of His promise, not our performance, that He declares us, "not guilty". That’s why, in Heb 11:1 that faith is called "the evidence on things not seen". Faith is what God gives us for evidence, not what we offer to God in exchange for His favor. That’s the message of the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar today. God told Abraham to cast out the bondwoman and child, those who for us represents our own attempts to please God through obedience, in favor of the woman and child of promise. It was God’s promise, not Abraham’s works that brought Isaac into the world. Abraham and Sarah were in their 90s! Just so it is for us today. God takes us, as good as dead, brings us to life. This is our only hope - justification through faith alone, by grace alone.
VII. The Meal
So how does our Gospel passage tie into this today? Jesus simply provides the people a meal. Yet what a meal. Food is multiplied many times, and all are filled. This is what He did them, and this is what He still does today. Come to this table. He supplies the faith and grace to consume Him. Come to this great eschatalogical feast that is brought forward to today and hear the verdict that has already been made on your behalf: "Not guilty."
This is the word of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Soli Deo Gloria!
