Living by Faith - Galatians

The Meaning of the Resurrection

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 10-19

Genre: Talk

Track: 10

Dictation Name: Tape 05B

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. The Lord is risen indeed, hallelujah. I am He that liveth and was dead, saith the Lord, and behold I am alive forever more, hallelujah. Let us pray.

All glory be to Thee oh God the Father almighty who didst raise Thy Son from the dead, and has made us partakers of His victory over sin and death. All glory be to Thee oh Lord Jesus Christ, who for us has overcome the power of sin and death and made us members of Thy new creation. All glory be to Thee oh Holy Spirit, who dost lead us into all truth in the wisdom of Christ. We praise Thee, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and we rejoice that Thou hast called us to be Thy people, and has given us so great a heritage, and so great promises, in Christ our savior. In His name we pray, amen.

Our scripture is from Galatians 3:27-29, our subject: The Meaning of the Resurrection. Galatians 3:27-29.

“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.”

These verses are important to Paul’s statement of the gospel, because they represent a theme that he restates frequently in his epistles. For example, he tells us in Ephesians 4:24 that we are to: “Put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” And again in Colossians 3:10, that we are to: “Put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.”

Paul tells us that because of Jesus Christ’s coming, His atonement and His resurrection, He is now the first fruits of them that slept, that is, the new Adam as he tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:45-50, of a new human race. How seriously the church viewed this is the fact that they called themselves for a few centuries ‘the third race,’ because the common designation in those days, racial term, was: ‘Greeks and Barbarians.’ Or ‘Romans and Barbarians.’ The world was divided into two races, and the Christians said: “We are the third race, the new humanity that supplants all the old divisions of mankind.”

In fact, if you go to the liturgy of the early church, what it declares is that because Christ is risen, we are now members of the third race. We are a new man, a new creation, because Christ has destroyed the power of sin and death by His atonement and resurrection. No man can become a member of this new humanity, of this new race, except through Jesus Christ. His atonement, resurrection, and regenerating power create a new race, a new humanity.

Moreover, Paul tells us throughout his epistles, and he stresses it in this letter to the Galatians, that there is no status before God in terms of our race, our human status, our sex, our works; neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female. All these distinction have no standing with respect to our salvation, with respect to our standing before God, and we are all one in Christ Jesus. Our status in the third race, in the new humanity, is in terms of Him and of His resurrection.

Paul makes this point repeatedly; for example in Romans 10:12 “For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him.” Again in Colossians 3:11 he says: “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.”

Paul is striking at Phariseeism, at every form of human merit, human elitism. He says that God establishes His own view of power, of place, of authority in this world through Jesus Christ. Therefore we are baptized into His body by the Holy Spirit, so that we are now members of a new humanity, a new human race; and before the sovereign grace of God, all the human differences, however real, become nothing. Christ abolishes the law as an indictment, a death sentence against us. He renders all human works null and void. But mankind always seeks to establish elitist authority, elitist rule; and over and over again throughout history men have dreamed, men have conspired, men have worked to establish elitism as a premise; the Plato vision in the Republic, this is elitism. A handful of philosopher kings are to rule the whole world, to govern totally the life of all men, and this vision has never died, but only been more and more implemented generation after generation, and Paul says the resurrection renders all of this null and void, and God will bring it all down; as he says in Hebrews: “The things which are, are in process of being shaken, so that only those things which are unshakable may remain.”

Now we are in the decade one such great shaking. Before this decade and the next, before this century is over, we shall have seen one of the greatest shakings of all history, because God has determined that all human elitism, whether in Washington, London, Moscow, or New York, or Sacramento, is going to be destroyed. It is going to be smashed.

Paul tells us that God has passed a death penalty against us in our sin, and against all human orders, all human society in their elitism. He says further in Ephesians 2:13-18:

“13 But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.

14 For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us;

15 Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace;

16 And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby:

17 And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.

18 For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.”

‘The twain were made one man’ refers to the Jews and the Gentiles, to all human divisions, hostilities, which are a product of a fallen, sinful world. But all who are created anew are one body in Christ who is the head, they are a new creation, a renewed people. This is Paul’s theme in Romans, it is our Lord’s statement in John 17:21, and John 10:16, it is a common theme of the gospels and of the epistles.

Men in every era have sought to establish elitist standards, to make themselves the God’s of creation. And the whole of Biblical history is of God’s continuing war against this pretension. God allows all these pretensions of man to come into focus, to be revealed in their sin, to be revealed in the evil that they are; and then He smashes them deliberately. All these pretensions rest on the elitism of Genesis 3:5, the tempters program: ‘Ye shall be as God, every man his own God, knowing, determining good and evil, all law, for yourself.’ So that man makes himself into elitist man, and God says He will destroy it. He will reduce it to rubble.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:22-31 makes this point emphatically, and we don’t understand the full impact, the full meaning of the gospel unless we see it as God’s war against human pretensions, human elitism. As Paul says:

“22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:

23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;

24 But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

26 For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh,” (in terms of human standards) “not many mighty, not many noble, are called:

27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world” (what the word despises) “to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world” (we, who in the eyes of the world are weak) “to confound the things which are mighty;

28 And base things of the world,” (things which have no prestige) “and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:

29 That no flesh should glory in his presence.

30 But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption:

31 That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”

Now this same fact is stated also by James, to give one more reference. Because James says: “Hearken my beloved brethren, hath not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love Him?”

In other words, to understand the meaning of Christ’s coming, of His death and resurrection, we have to see it as the creation of a new humanity, and also the planned destruction by God of all human elitism, of all conspiracies against God and against His anointed. God reduces all man’s efforts and pretensions to nothing, as a prelude to establishing His new creation. And Christ is declared to be the first fruits of that new creation, and Paul tells us that each of us in Christ are citizens of that new creation, members of a new humanity.

Now the problem in Corinth had been Greek cynicism with regard to the resurrection. In Galatia the problem was different, the Pharisees who had profoundly influenced that church believed in the resurrection, but they did not see it as significant. A couple of weeks ago I cited a contemporary Jewish scholar, a man who says he is a Pharisee, who says he believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ; but, he says in effect, ‘it’s no big deal. It isn’t an isolated event.’ And he cites of course the episode of the unnamed soldier who was hastily buried in the cave where Elisha’s remains lay, and when his body touched the remains of Elisha the man was resurrected and went out and fought. And Doctor (Pinchas Lapeed?) says: “What’s the difference? It happens, but it doesn’t make Him unique.”

But Paul says the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the beginning of God’s new creation, of His war against all the powers that be, against all the people who conspire against the Lord and His anointed.

Van Til in his study of Paul at Athens deals with the same subject, and he calls attention to the fact that when Paul preached at Athens and he spoke of the resurrection, all the philosophers gathered around. “Well this is interesting, we’ve got to hear what this man has to say.” Why? Well, Aristotle had dealt with the potentiality inherent in nature. And so, Aristotle had a great deal of curiosity about freaks, monstrosities that were born, because he wondered: “What will be the next step in the development in the evolution of the natural world?” And so, one of these possibilities as far as these philosophers were concerned, was resurrection. Nature is full of freaks, of freakish events; therefore this can be perhaps the next step. So they were ready to hear Paul talk about the resurrection. “What’s the evidence for it? Let’s hear it.” They wanted to put it in their naturalistic framework.

But when he put it in the framework of the sovereign God who judges all flesh, they walked off. They were ready for any responsibility, except God; which is very much the situation we face today. But Paul throughout Galatians is talking, as it culminates in these verses, how God renders nothing, all human elitism, all human conspiracies by elitist’s, everything that man does, and makes Christ all in all. The purpose of the resurrection, he says in Galatians 1:4 is our redemption from sin in this present evil world. The redeeming, risen Christ, he says in verse 6 of the first chapter, is our source of grace. Christ makes us free men, he says in chapter 2:4. We have freedom from the death penalty of the law, and we are made a new creation, he tells us in 2:16-17, and in verses 21 as well as chapter 3:24.

Because we are crucified with Christ, because He dies in our stead, we are to die to this world of human elitism, human status, and we are to live in terms of His new creation, rather than the fallen world of Adam, Paul says in chapters 6:14-16.

The atonement and the resurrection give us victory over sin and death, and the freedom of God’s new creation. If we replace God’s grace unto salvation with human works, with elitism, we are he says, “fallen from grace; and Christ is become of no effect unto us” in chapter 5:4.

Paul thus summons us to the freedom of Christ’s resurrection, saying: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”

In both Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11, Paul declares that the just shall live by faith. They are not only saved by God’s grace through faith, but they are to live in terms of Him, and living by faith is the resurrection life. It means that the world of the fall, of Genesis 3:5 has been sentenced to death by Christ’s atonement and resurrection, and we now have the mandate to reclaim all things for Christ. Christian reconstruction is a resurrection theology, and its foundation is the atonement and resurrection of Christ.

In the world of Adam and the fall, men seek to establish a paradise on earth without God, and a justice that denies God’s justice. The result is the reign of sin and death, the prevalence of frustration and envy; the triumph of elitism. The hostility of this humanistic world order is directed against God, His rule and law, and the psalm, Psalm 2, tells us this. As with Aristotle, all possibilities for fallen men must be natural ones; which is another way of saying that only man can be God. Only from the natural order, with man as its head, can there emerge in this perspective, a just social order.

No less than Paul, the humanist wants a world in which all are one, as Paul says in Galatians 3:28, but not in Christ. All one under the philosopher kings, under the elitist rulers. All are to be one in terms of man’s autonomy and ultimacy. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a part of God’s heavenly laughter described in Psalm 2:4, where God sitting in the circle of the heavens sees the conspiracy of the nations against God Himself, and against His anointed, and he laughs at the folly of their planning; and He issues a warning to the nations: “Be ye wise, now therefore oh ye kings, be instructed ye judges of the earth; serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling; kiss the Son lest He be angry and ye perish from the way when His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they which put their trust in Him.”

Let us pray. Almighty God our heavenly Father, all around us we see the powers of ungodliness conspire and take counsel together against Thee; against Thine anointed, and against Thy people; and they seek the destruction of Thy kingdom, and of our freedom in Christ. Oh Lord our God may Thy heavenly laughter at their pretensions resound through all our being, and make us ever mindful that Thou hast given the rule, the power over the nations unto Thy Son, and that He will shake all things and bring them to nought, so that only those things which are unshakable may remain. We thank Thee that through Christ’s atonement and resurrection, Thou hast made us members of the kingdom, of things unshakable. Give us therefore a holy courage and boldness, that we may face these powers of darkness in the confidence that Thou art on the throne, and Thy will shall be done, and Thy kingdom come. Our God we praise Thee, in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now on our lesson? No questions? Well then let us bow our heads in prayer. Our Lord and our God, it is good for us to be here. We thank Thee for Thy grace and for Thy Spirit. We thank Thee our Father that Thou art He who doest all things well; and Thy care for us is greater than our care and concern for ourselves. Dismiss us with Thy blessing. And now, go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always… [tape ends]