You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace (Galatians 5:4).
Paul was deeply concerned about the believers at Galatia. Some of the leaders have disturbed the church by preaching a “distorted” gospel (1:7). The believers have deserted Christ by embracing “a different gospel” (1:6). This distorted gospel has “bewitched” the Galatian believers (3:1) to such an extent that they “have been severed from Christ,” they have “fallen from grace” (5:4). What heresy had they embraced? They were “seeking to be justified by law” (5:4). In seeking to be made righteous by the law they were distorting the Gospel of Christ.
Human civilization needs law (see here). The purpose of law is to legislate morality, to enforce a code of social and civil conduct. Law is theological, anthropological, and sociological. Law has its foundation in God’s will. Biblical concepts of justice and righteousness are formed by the character of God and necessary for human flourishing (see here). Law is a gift of God’s prevenient grace.
We are all complicit in the sinfulness of humanity. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Genocide was a common form of warfare in the ancient world. In the OT it’s called herem. The Muslims practiced jihad. Christendom responded with crusade. During the height of the slave trade, Africans colluded with Europeans. As Europeans settled in the Americas some Natives colluded with them against their Native opponents. In the last century or so, we’ve witnessed the Armenian Genocide, the Chinese Boxer rebellion, the Bolshevik Revolution, two world wars, the Jewish Holocaust, the Sino-Japanese War, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Rwandan Genocide, and the legalized, systematic slaughter of unborn children in the name of reproductive rights. Slavery, war, sexual exploitation, and oppression are common among every culture and race.
Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! . . . Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 7:24-8:1).
Just laws cannot justify the history of human sinfulness. No act of social justice can remedy human history. How can we make reparations to the thousands of Africans who died on slave ships and were tossed overboard into the depths of the Seas? How can we remedy the holocaust? How can we set right the violence and rape of Chinese women under Japanese occupation? How can overturning Roe vs. Wade restore life to the millions of aborted babies? The names and faces of the brutalized are forgotten to history. But God remembers them. Only God can act to redeem human sinfulness.
Human violence and sinfulness is so grievous it cannot be made right by political action – the law. Christendom in Europe utterly failed to inaugurate the promised kingdom of God. In the USA, the Christian Nationalism of the right, and the Progressive Christianity of the left, are little more than attempts at constructing a form of post-modern Christendom. Both movements are guilty of Pelagianism – the ancient heresy that suggests that human salvation may be accomplished through human will. The Christian right and left have embraced a realized eschatology defined by their politics that suggests just laws can redeem society. Although the law can codify morality it cannot transform humanity. The present world order doesn’t simply need to be reformed, it needs to be redeemed.
To place our confidence in the law – in the politics of this age – is to fall from grace. Paul warns that if we place our confidence in the law, then Christ is of no benefit (Galatians 5:2). It is the failure of law – politics – that makes the cross of Christ necessary. Sin must be atoned. In the cross God has assumed human sinfulness – God takes upon God’s self the entire history of human violence. If social justice in this present age is God’s ultimate purpose, then resurrection and glorification are unnecessary. God’s purpose is an eschatological New Creation. This present age must die so that the power of sin is broken. Death breaks the power of sin; resurrection breaks the power of death (1 Corinthians 15:42). Human sinfulness and violence has so marred God’s good creation that the only remedy is death and resurrection – New Creation.
For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness (Galatians 5:5).
The Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov wrote, “The earth is sin’s graveyard, but it is also God’s garden.” We live in the graveyard of this present age, we hope for the garden of the age to come.
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