Living by Faith - Galatians

The Israel of God

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 19-19

Genre: Talk

Track: 19

Dictation Name: Tape 10A

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness, come before His presence with singing, enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting and His truth endureth to all generations. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we give thanks unto Thee that Thy mercies are new every morning. We thank Thee that amidst all the turmoil of this world Thou art ever mindful of us, and Thy care never fails. Teach us to be still and to know that Thou art God, that Thou art on the throne, and Thy ways are altogether righteous and perfect. Lift up our hearts unto Thee in joy and in thanksgiving, and then send us forth into this world to do Thy work, to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Thee our God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

Our scripture is from Galatians 6:11-16, our subject: The Israel of God. Galatians 6:11-18.

“11 Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand.

12 As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ.

13 For neither they themselves who are circumcised keep the law; but desire to have you circumcised, that they may glory in your flesh.

14 But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

15 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.

16 And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.

17 From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

18 Brethren, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.”

Paul’s conclusion to Galatians is a series of plain-spoken summary statements. In verse 11: “Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand.” He tells them that he did not dictate this letter, he has written it himself. His reference to ‘how large a letter I have written’ can mean that his handwriting is large, or it can refer to the importance of what he says. His stress is in this conclusion on his importance, because in verse 17 he writes: “From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Here he makes his own importance very clear. He closes the door to any further discussion with anyone. ‘The case is closed,’ he says. ‘God’s further word will be judgement.’ Is his implication. He does not have to defend himself against him, he has done this in this letter out of a desire to turn them aside from error, but he makes clear that he bears the marks of his faithfulness, in his many beatings described in 2 Corinthians 11:23-28, his personal sufferings. Paul implies clearly that they, the Galatians and the Pharisees there, have had no such record of faithfulness. And so he says: ‘Don’t trouble me again.’

Then in verses 12 and 13 he turns to the Pharisees in the church. Paul sums up what he had said earlier in chapter 4:17 and in chapter 5:10-12. He says the motives of the Pharisees in the church are first to put on a good outward appearance, the surface, the forms of godliness, not the reality thereof are what they consider important. Second, these Pharisees in the church seek to avoid persecution by passing as a branch of Judaism; and third they seek to gain power in the church, to be leaders thereof, no matter what the price.

 Wilfred L. Knox some time ago summarized verses 11-18 in these words, and I quote: “His opponents wish to reserve for themselves the natural gratification of being able to claim as Jews to be superior to other Christians, as those who were Jews by birth claimed to be superior to proselytes. They have the further desire to avoid persecution as Christians. Yet they do not really keep the Law themselves; they only keep it in details, and they wish to make the Galatians do the same in order to gratify their own vanity. But the Christian has no ground for boasting but the Cross, through which he has been crucified to the world. It does not matter whether a man has been circumcised or not; all that matters is that through his death to the world he should have been created afresh and raised to a new supernatural state of life.”

Now, this is an excellent statement, but there is one problem with it: were the Pharisees in the church necessarily Jews? Very definitely from Acts 15:5 we know that many Pharisees were people who came into the church early after Pentecost. We know that they were also active in Gentile circles in Antioch as well as in Galatia, as Paul says in Galatians 2:11-12. However it would be a serious mistake to assume as many do, that they made no gentile converts, or that these converts did not become especially zealous Pharisees. In fact, to make such an assumption would be to render the whole of Galatians and other writings null and void, because Paul would be talking about something that was no problem at all. But the Pharisees were effective at converting people, both their fellow Jews and especially in converting Gentiles to their own brand of fanaticism; in fact our Lord makes such conversions one of the culminating offenses of the Pharisees.

We are told in Matthew 23:13-15 “13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

15 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.”

So our Lord says that their very zeal in making proselytes makes them all the more subject to God’s judgement. I like the statement too, by the way, where He speaks of their pretense at making a long prayer: “Therefore shall ye receive the greater damnation.” In other words, God gets weary of Pharisees claim to be such holy people, and they are going to receive the greater damnation for it.

However, Paul has set forth the difference between Phariseeism and Christianity very succinctly in verses 14-15: ‘But God forbid,’ he makes clear, ‘that I should boast, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.’

This and verses 12-13 tell us a great deal about Phariseeism, it was a form of elitism. First it was a self glorification whereby a man saw himself as important, because of what he had done, not in terms of what God had done in him. Second, a man’s status before God was made by the Pharisees to depend on externals; in this case circumcision. But as against this Paul says, a Christians glory and status depend entirely on his justification through Christ’s atonement. His glory is Christ, in Him he is a member of a new humanity. He has been crucified in Christ, that is he is now judicially dead to the old order, the old humanity, and separate from it. Not only is his justification the sovereign act of God’s grace, but his new life, his regeneration, is God’s work. He is a new creation.

The twentieth century New Testament paraphrase of verse 15 reads: “For neither is circumcision nor the omission of it anything, but a new nature is everything.” Phariseeism is self-election to the world’s elite. Regeneration means God through Christ releases new power in history through us.

Now in verse 16 we have a benediction before the closing one: “And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.” Williams renders this I think more clearly when he translates: “Now peace and mercy be on all who walk by this rule, that is on the true Israel of God.” To bless someone who works against Christ’s kingdom is a sin. There is a common saying today, ‘prayer changes things.’ That is not true. Our prayer changes nothing, it is God who changes things. Paul no doubt prayed for the conversion of these Pharisees, but he did not cease thereby to counteract their perversions of the faith. Paul in Romans 12:17-21 and elsewhere commands us to be Godly and charitable towards all men; but even as he tells us: “If Thine enemy hunger feed him,” he does not obscure the fact that an enemy is an enemy, and this is where the church today goes so badly astray. Because somebody is not yet dead and might be converted, you are supposed to be nice to him no matter what, and to treat him as a possible convert, or an actual convert, even though he is not one yet. And this has no warrant. You treat an enemy as an enemy. This does not mean that you deny him anything that is his due under God’s law, nor that you cease if you feel so moved to pray for him; but you recognize an enemy is an enemy. It is not Biblical, it is sentimental religion that obscures the distinctions, and will not face up to what people are.

Very, very important in this verse is the reference to the Israel of God. The old Israel had been cut off from the root, Jesus Christ, and the new Israel grafted in according to Paul in Romans 11:13-24, and according to our Lord in John 15:1-6. This is a point that over the centuries the church has seen clearly; for example Luther said and I quote: “When Paul addeth: “And upon the Israel of God,” he toucheth the false apostles and Jews, who gloried and bragged that they were the people of God, that they had the law and the promises. So, it is as if he said: They are the Israel of God, which with faithful Abraham, believe the promises of God offered in Christ, whether they be Jews or Gentiles, and not they which are begotten of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, after the flesh.”

Paul thus invokes God’s blessing on the spiritual Israel in opposition to the physical Israel, and this is important. The word in verse 16: “as many as walk according to this rule,” ‘rule’ is ‘kanon’ our word canon. In other words, there was a canon for the Christian life, a rule for the Christian life, in scripture. The Canon of salvation is Jesus Christ, and He alone, and the canon, the rule of our walk, is every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, it is God’s law.

Verse 17 as we have seen, is Paul’s statement: ‘Don’t criticize me again. I have only answered your criticisms in order to correct you from your errors, but I declare that you have no right to pass judgement on me.’ Have they suffered as he has? Have they been faithful as he has? They are ready to disown Christ and become pretended Jews by means of circumcision; they are faithless to Christ, and they are also faithless to the law the profess to uphold, yet they boast of faithfulness. Paul dismisses his critics, their lives evidence no faithfulness to Jesus Christ.

Then he concludes with a short benediction. In the original the word ‘brethern’ comes after ‘spirit’. “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit brethren, amen.” In other words, the benediction is limited in the original to those who are in Christ, and who stand with Him. ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren, those who are faithful. There is no grace to those of you who are unfaithful.’ And so, Paul concludes with a line of separation in his benediction. The foolish Galatians are separated from those who are his brethren in the faith.

It is a sad fact that Paul’s plain statement again and again to the fact that the church is the true Israel of God has been bypassed, especially in the past century, and we have all the nonsense of dispensationalism and premillenialism, with the exaltation of physical Israel, so that all God’s prophecies are seen as fulfilled in a nation in the Middle East. Now this turns scripture upside down. It says it is not Paul who should have been blessed, but those who were good Pharisees. It says that the blessings of God don’t fall upon those who are faithful, but upon those who have the right bloodline.

Now if that is true, then scripture is a mass of contradiction, and these passages supposedly justifying idolizing physical Israel and seeing prophecy fulfilled in it, represent a departure from everything in the Old and New Testament that teaches us about grace, that teaches us about who is blessed by God. Is it any wonder that the church today is impotent? Is it any wonder that numerically the church in this country and most countries could command the nations, and cannot even command itself?

We have turned the moral order upside down when we say an unbelieving Israel is to be blessed by God. Why not also an unbelieving China? An unbelieving Soviet Union? An unbelieving Uganda, or any other place? Why not? It is the same destruction of God’s moral order to affirm that, but this is what the church has done, and the church wonders why it is impotent. But it has an appeal, and the churches that proclaim that kind of gospel are full, week in and week out. Why not? Because they have erased the statement that the wages of sin are death. They have erased consequence, causality in God’s creation. There are other factors which will govern some hidden mystery in God’s mind and plan. That is why such thinking is such an abomination, and that is why the perversion of the teaching of Galatians and of Romans and of so much else is reprehensible.

It is tragic that it is Paul’s letters precisely that have been used by these people to create this silly edifice. It is Paul who most indicts them who is most used. Paul who says ‘this Israel has been cut off, and it hurts me grievously because I am an Israelite’ is made the one who vindicates it, by all kinds of fanciful interpretation. But there is a judgement on all such thinking, and that judgement is growing all around us. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, Thy word is truth, and we thank Thee for the faithfulness of Thy servants of old like Paul, who against fearful opposition, physical punishment, and much grief, held fast to Thy whole council, proclaimed Thy truth in the face of enemies, and their own people whom they loved and who would not believe. Make us strong our Father as we face our time and our problems, that we may be more than conquerors through Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Otto Scott] I asked a political advisor why one of our leading evangelists constantly talks about the people of Israel as ‘chosen’ and he said that he had asked that evangelist the same question, and the evangelist said: “You have your theology and I have mine.”

[Rushdoony] Well, what is important is that we have the Bible’s theology, and the sad fact is that so many like that are unwilling to see how their position has again and again been shown to be false. Consider the popularity of Hal Lindsey; he has so many times been proven to be false. That is the test of a prophet. He has predicted the rapture for ’75 and ’77, and has now predicted it I believe for ’87, but already some of the things that were to precede that rapture in ’87 have been proven to be false. And yet his books sell in the millions. The desire to be deceived is tremendous, the will to a lie is very prevalent.

Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Otto Scott] Well, it is easier to go along than it is to confront.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Otto Scott] And that particular heresy you spoke about is a very- it is propounded by the media in many different forms, by the persistent glossing over of anti-Christian activities in all parts of the world, and an emphasis on the Christian need to ‘go along with everybody.’ And to go against that requires considerable moral sacrifice, even the physical intellectual, your career can be injured.

[Rushdoony] Even back in the Old Testament God through one of the prophets said to Israel: ‘Don’t see yourself as so important. I am able to raise up a people unto myself tomorrow out of the Ethiopians.’

Well, if there are no further comments, let us bow our heads in prayer. Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that Thou art able, out of the weak and foolish things of this world to raise up unto Thyself a people and an army, able to raise up a witness out of the very stones. Grant oh Lord that in this time Thy witness be loud and clear, uncompromising; that as we go into the days of judgement in the very near future, Thy truth may be heard from pole to pole, and that the peoples might hear, believe, and obey. Bless us to this purpose.

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, this day and always, amen.