Living by Faith - Galatians

Abraham’s Faith and Ours

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 9-19

Genre: Talk

Track: 09

Dictation Name: Tape 05A

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. This is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. Having these promises, let us draw near to the throne of grace with true hearts, in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee, and will look up. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, grant that we come to Thee in the confidence that Thou art He who dost hear and answer prayer. Oh Lord our God, grant that Thy people across the length and breadth of this land come to Thee in repentance, in confidence, asking for Thy grace and mercy upon us as a people. Turn us from our waywardness, from the murderer of little children yet unborn, from our spirit of surrender to Marxism and evil the world over, to our softness towards those around us who are evil, self seeking, and self indulgent. Oh Lord our God, have mercy upon us, renew us and make us again a free people in Jesus Christ. In His name we pray, amen.

Our scripture is Galatians 3:22-29, Abraham’s Faith and Ours. Galatians 3:22-29.

“22 But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe.

23 But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.

24 Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.

25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.

26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.

27 For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

29 And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

Paul speaks of faith, the promise of faith, and then in verse 23: “But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.”

Now the key to the understanding of Galatians and so much in Paul is in the meaning of ‘before faith came.’ Too often in our time, and too often for some generations now, an interpretation has prevailed which has warped the whole meaning of Galatians, because ‘before faith came’ has been interpreted: ‘before the coming of Jesus Christ in history.’ Is this true? Is this what Paul means? Is he saying that before Christ it was all the law and works whereby man came to God? And after Christ it was by faith? Now that is the interpretation of dispensationalists, and of many who do not call themselves dispensational.

But if that interpretation is what reveals the mind of Paul, then Paul didn’t know what he was talking about when he said: “By faith Abraham was justified.” Genesis tells us that. Paul tells us that in Romans. He has already told us that earlier in this chapter, that Abraham was justified by faith.

Paul then didn’t know what he was talking about, he must have been senile, if most of these people, these pietists, these antinomians are right. A few sentences previously he says Abraham was saved by the grace of God through faith, and now he is saying it was all by works until Jesus Christ came. But that is not what Paul said. When he said before faith came we were kept under the law, shut up under the faith which should afterwards be revealed; the subject of the sentence is ‘we.’ You and I. Every person in every century. So Paul is not talking about historical time, but psychological time. He is saying that before God through His grace gives us faith to believe, what happens? The law is there. We know it outwardly, we know it because in our conscience, in our hearts, the law of God speaks every fiber of our being is made by Him.

Paul has said in Romans 1 that the things visible and invisible witness to God, and all men hold the truth back in their injustice, their unrighteousness. So, Paul is saying: Up to the point of our conversion, before faith comes to us personally, we were kept under the law. The law acted as a restraint on us. In some sense or other, each of us felt a restraint. I’ve had people tell me: “I’ve only been a Christian a year, or two years, or five, or ten, but before that I knew that what I did was wrong, and I often felt the brakes being put on inside of me; and even when I did wrong I knew it was wrong.”

Before faith came we were kept under the law. We were convicted of sin. We knew that we were sinners, that we could not save ourselves, that we could not justify ourselves, make atonement for ourselves, so that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them, and (?) believe. So that we knew because of the law that it had to take a miracle of grace to save us. Faith came, Paul says. That’s passive. It was the gift of God. It was not our believing. He does not say: “Before we believed.” He says: “Before faith came.”

Now Abraham, thus, is an important witness for Paul. The same thing saved Abraham and all the untold saints of the Old Testament era, as saved Paul and saves us, the grace of God unto salvation.

So, faith always, beginning in Abrahams day, looked to Christ. What did our Lord say about that? Why he said in John 8:56, speaking to the Pharisee who claimed Abraham as our Father: “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad.” So beginning with Abraham, those who were saved saw Christ as their salvation. They recognized that it was the blood of an innocent lamb that was their salvation, and the lamb typified the one who was to come.

But we usually have a very alien meaning imported into this text, one that dismisses all that Paul has said about Abraham. For example, Kenneth West translates verse 23 thus: “Before the aforementioned faith came, under the law we were constantly being guarded, being shut up with a view to the faith about to be revealed.” About to be revealed to whom? To the nations or the world at some point in time? He makes it historical, that it is going to come at a particular time, but it came to Abraham; it came to every saint before and after Abraham, whom we shall know in the new creation.

The subject of the sentence is ‘we.’ It is personal. It refers to our personal lives. Long ago, Saint Chrysostom saw the meaning of this and said with regard to verse 23 and I quote: “Here he, (Paul) clearly puts forward what I have stated. For the expressions ‘we were kept’ and ‘shut up’ signify nothing else than the security given by the commandments of the law, which like a fortress fenced them round with fear and a life conformable to itself, and so preserved them unto faith.” Saint Chrysostom did not oppose law to faith, or God against Himself, but he saw their unity. Thus all too many have perverted the meaning of this text and given us a false meaning.

Charles Simeon, writing about two centuries ago, set forth the meaning very clearly in a passage that is tremendous, and I am going to read this because we need to recognize that we have in our generation fallen under the sway of false interpretations, and act as though the contrary never existed. But here, about two centuries ago Charles Simeon said and I quote:

“The Apostle preached, that the Messiah, the Seed in whom all the nations of the earth were to be blessed, was come: and that all were now to be justified by faith in him, precisely as Abraham had been two thousand years before. The Jews maintained,” (meaning the Pharisees) “that this could not be the true way of salvation; for that God had given a law to Moses; and that law was of perpetual obligation; and, if we were now to be justified by faith alone, the law would be made void, and had in reality been given to no purpose. To this the Apostle answers, that the law, which was given to the Jews alone, could not invalidate the promise which had many ages before been given to Abraham and all his believing seed, whether among the circumcised Jews, or the uncircumcised Gentiles; and that there was no such opposition between the two as the Jews imagined; the law being in fact designed to introduce the Gospel with more effect, and to endear it to all, when it should come to be more fully revealed. This was the state of the question between the Apostle and his opponents; to whom a complete answer is given in the words before us. The question simply was, ‘Is there any real opposition between the law as given to Moses, and the promises as given to Abraham?’ No; says the Apostle: there is a subserviency of the one to the other; and both the one and the other proclaim to us, in fact, the same salvation—salvation by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and by faith alone.”

Simeon saw rightly that the difference was between the Pharisees and Paul. He did not read modern antinomianism back into Paul.

Then Paul goes on in verse 24 to say: “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.” And continuing in verse 25: “But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.”

Now here again we get all kinds of rubbish. We get more than rubbish, we get idiocy. Now, the usual interpretation of these people is that the law was a schoolmaster, and now we don’t need it, we are no longer under a school master. So the law is finished, it is gone. But first of all, Paul does not say the law is a school master, he says the law is a pedagogue, which is the name of a slave, a trusted family slave, who took the child to the tutor, and sat there and made sure the child listened; so that the child might learn.

Moreover, when you take a child to a tutor and he stops going, he is no longer freed from knowledge; he no longer has the privilege… if it is a privilege… of saying: “I don’t need a thing I learned, I can forget everything I learned.” Do we go to school now from kindergarten, let’s say, through graduate school, and when we get our diploma, do we say: “I no longer need to know any of that.” That the B.A. degree I got, or the M.D., or the degree in dentistry, or the degree in engineering; “Now I am entitled to forget everything I have learned. I am through with that, that was the law, therefore I am through with it!” Is it not rather that now you no longer need to be taken by the pedagogue, the slave, because now you have learned it is a part of your life? It doesn’t mean that the law is now dead, it has no more function; it means that now you have learned everything in order to function on your own without a pedagogue. You don’t need somebody standing over you. Faith has come, and with that faith it is now written on the tables of your heart, the whole of the law. It is a part of your being, it is no longer somebody telling you: “This is what you have got to learn, child.” Now it is a part of your life, it is something in terms of which you function.

Then in verses 26-27, Paul continues: “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”

Now, as again, long ago, John Brown following Saint Jerome said and I quote: “To be baptized into Christ Jesus obviously means something more than to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.” As one commentator of a couple of generations ago translated this: “For all of you who have been baptized into Christ have been enrobed in Him.” He is talking, in other words, about a life, a living relationship to Christ. Paul is saying in these verses: “The Pharisees are wrong. Judaism is not a mediator to Christ, it is not God’s way for us to be baptized first into Judaism or Phariseeism in order to put on Christ. We are only baptized into Christ, we only become members of Christ in order to know God.”

One scholar of a generation ago, Duncan, brought this up forcefully in his comment on verse 27, and I quote: “His appeal to them is enforced by arguments which serve to remind us what the source of the Galatian trouble really was. The Judaizers had approached Paul’s Galatians converts with the old idea of the special regard which God had for Israel. Even as Christians, they argued, Gentiles could not win acceptance to God without first becoming through circumcision, incorporated members of God’s chosen people. Paul will have none of it. Circumcision may make a man Israelite, but baptism makes him a Christ-man. This is the sole direct reference to baptism in the epistle, but its introduction at this point is a reminder of the significance which Paul attached to it. In baptism the believer on his part professed his faith in Christ, and God on His part accepted his faith and gave him His Holy Spirit. To put the same truth otherwise, at baptism the believer became united to Christ. Paul expresses this though by saying that those who have been baptized into Christ have taken on the character of Christ. The metaphor in this latter phrase is from putting on a garment; hath put on Christ. But in scripture it denotes that the wearer becomes in a subtle way identified with what he puts on as with the Old Testament thought of clothing oneself with righteousness, with strength, etc., and Paul’s use of the same metaphor in Rom. 13:12; and Eph. 4:24. Thus when a man is baptized, he becomes so thoroughly identified with Christ that it is no longer he that lives, it is Christ who lives in him. No matter what that person was before, in Christ he is a new creation. Hence, the apostle reminds his Gentile converts that there is no need for them to put themselves right by becoming like the Jews; for the Jew and the Gentile alike become new men when they put on Christ.”

Then in verses 28-29 Paul concludes: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

Here Paul tells us what our status in Christ is. Phariseeism was a form of elitism. One of the daily prayers of the Pharisees said in part: “Blessed art Thou oh Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast not made me a heathen. Blessed art Thou who hast not made me a bondman. Blessed art Thou who hast not made me a woman.”

Now our Lord referred to this prayer of the Pharisees, and no doubt all his listeners were delighted when he told the parable of the Pharisee and the publican who went up to pray, and the Pharisee prayed: “God I thank Thee that I am not as other men.” Our Lord was referring to the daily prayer of the Pharisees. You can see why they didn’t appreciate Him. Why should gentiles then find Jewish Phariseeism appealing? Why had the Galatian Gentiles gone for Phariseeism? For the same reason that both Jews and churchmen found Greek Gnosticism appealing: for its elitism. For the same reason that people to this day find secret societies and lodges, and Plato’s Republic appealing. For the elitism. People want to be elitists. It appeals to the natural Phariseeism of fallen man to belong to a group which will tell him he is an elitist, he is above and beyond mere mortals, superior to them, and so elitism has its appeal.

Now what Paul is talking about in these two verses is that whatever our human differences, which he says are real, there is no difference with respect to salvation. There are differences which are inescapable on the human scene. There is only one word to describe it, the idiocy of so many commentaries and preachers, in regard to these two verses, as though it asserts in the name of Christ the absolute equality of all things. Is Paul saying there is neither Jew nor Greek, that the distinctions are invalid? That there is neither male nor female; is Paul advocating unisex? That’s ridiculous. These are real differences on the human scene. But in relationship to salvation, in relationship to our standing before God, they make no difference whatsoever. So that whether we are a Bishop or a simple believer, whether we are a president, a king or an emperor, or a janitor, we have in Christ the same status with God almighty. Now that is what he is saying.

It is with respect to salvation that there is no difference. The differences on the human scene are inescapable, they are in our age, in the color of our skin, our profession; we cannot say there are no differences between surgeons and plumbers; you certainly when you are on the operating table, would prefer would you not, a surgeon to a plumber? So the idea that Paul is abolishing all differences is ridiculous. This is with regard to our salvation and our standing before God. The converts were Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, male and female. None of these differences were abolished by conversion. Paul thus speaks here not of equalitarianism, but of God’s sovereign grace to all of us alike.

The equalitarians, by the way, and the elitists, are brothers and sisters under the skin; they are alike enemies of grace. The equalitarians hate everyone who is better than they, so they are going to drag them all down to their level; and the elitists refuse to believe that anyone can be better than they, so they form their little secret groups and say: “It is us against the world, we are the elite; we are the best. They don’t come any better.” And they believe that they should rule because of their self-generated premises, that they are wise and superior.

Paul tells us that by God’s grace we are all children of God, one family. We are all to be governed by God’s grace and law, not by our pride, our envy, or our sin. Our human differences must be ruled by the rule of Christ. “For ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Let us pray. Oh Lord our God, it is Thy grace that governs us. Thy grace which saves us. Thy grace and Thy eternal decree which ordains all things, for known unto Thee, are all Thy works from the foundation of the world unto all eternity. Teach us so to walk day by day that we look not at the power of men, but at Thy power; not at what men plan to do, but what Thou would have us to do, and in Christ we may be conquerors, that in Him we may exercise dominion. For all Thy promises unto us in Him, are yea and amen. Our God how great Thou art and we praise Thee, in Jesus name amen.

Are there any questions now on our lesson? Yes?

[Audience Member] I was wondering, would it be right to say that before a person is saved or enlightened by God by gift of faith, that he is bound under the law and has no understanding of salvation, and when he becomes saved then he is enlightened or has the understanding because it comes from God, and thereby he can walk by faith on the promises of God, otherwise prior to that he is blind and dead, he cannot see. Is that in essence…?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] The other thing is, in that quote that you gave there it says: “When they put on Christ.” Now, we don’t put on Christ though, isn’t that what the others are saying, when we believe then we become a child of God, when we put on Christ and we do something; wouldn’t that be that when we are clothed in Christ’s righteousness in Christ, then it wouldn’t be that we put on Christ?

[Rushdoony] Paul says: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” And the ‘put on’ there means ‘dressed’ ‘clothed’, except it means more than that as Paul elsewhere says, we become members of His body.

[Audience Member] We are clothed in His garment, in His righteousness?

[Rushdoony] We are also made a member of His body.

[Audience Member] Yes, but I mean, when it says that ‘we’ it is as though we are putting on Christ, even though we don’t put it on, I mean, I think that part in there…

[Rushdoony] Well, what Paul is trying to convey is something more than we can fully grasp in words, namely that there is a remarkable sense here where we are no longer our own, we become a part of Christ’s new humanity, of His body which is the new humanity. We are enrobed to Him, we are not clothed only in His righteousness, which we emphatically are, but in His life. He is now the truth, the way and the life for us. So we put on Christ and we become a part of Him. It is very difficult to convey, but it is what Paul means, it is putting on Christ, that is exactly what he says.

[Audience Member] I was just wondering about this, you know the elitism, isn’t that what the world says that the believer who says they are a child of God and all the rest of them are not, you know if they are not in Christ, they accuse us of the same thing?

[Rushdoony] Yes they do, they try to say that to believe that we are saved, and a lot of people who are better than we are, as they put it, are not saved, is elitism; but it isn’t, because it is not what we are, but what God is that determines our status.

[Audience Member] But we have been placed into it, so it isn’t what we have done.

[Rushdoony] What they are saying is that: “If these people are not saved how can you dare claim that you are? They are your betters.” So they are manifesting their elitism.

[Audience Member] Would you say that the South African situation is similar to what you were saying on that elitism situation, that I am here and you are there, and therefore we are going to keep that difference?

[Rushdoony] Well, you have reference to the apartheid situation. I am sure that with many people in South Africa the roots of Apartheid are a sense of elitism. With many others I am sure it isn’t, because they are thoroughly concerned with improving the lot of the tribal people, and they believe that because they are coming out of tribalism and a very backward situation, it is going to take time for them to advance to a point where there can be free association on a basis of parity. So I think there are more and more who share that second situation; so it would be difficult to characterize the whole situation in one respect, and certainly it would be hypocritical of us to condemn them, because their treatment of the blacks in many respects has been better than ours.

Are there any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Oh Lord our God, Thy word is a joy unto us, a light upon our way, and the blessed assurance that it is Thy kingdom which shall prevail. Grant us Thy peace, and make us mindful that Thy council stands. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide… [tape ends]