Living by Faith - Galatians

From Freedom into Bondage

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 12-19

Genre: Talk

Track: 12

Dictation Name: Tape 06B

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Thus saith the high and lofty one who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite.” If thou shalt seek the Lord Thy God thou shalt find Him, if thou seek Him with all thy heart, and with all thy soul. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, who of Thy grace and mercy has made all things, and has made us for Thy good pleasure, make us ever mindful of Thy word and of Thy Spirit, that we may walk in Thy ways, that we may serve Thee with all our heart, mind, and being; and that in Christ Jesus we may be more than conquerors, bringing all things into captivity to Him. Bless us to this purpose we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Galatians 4:8-20, and our subject: From Freedom into Bondage. Galatians 4:8-20.

“8 Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods.

9 But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?

10 Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.

11 I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.

12 Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am; for I am as ye are: ye have not injured me at all.

13 Ye know how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the gospel unto you at the first.

14 And my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.

15 Where is then the blessedness ye spake of? for I bear you record, that, if it had been possible, ye would have plucked out your own eyes, and have given them to me.

16 Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?

17 They zealously affect you, but not well; yea, they would exclude you, that ye might affect them.

18 But it is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing, and not only when I am present with you.

19 My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,

20 I desire to be present with you now, and to change my voice; for I stand in doubt of you.”

In the Great Commission, our Lord sent forth His disciples to reclaim the entire world, to make it His kingdom, teaching them all things that He had commanded them. In Revelation we have the visions concerning God’s judgement, sent out upon the world to dispossess the false heirs, and to give all things to the adopted heirs according to the promise. Paul tells the Galatians that Christians are in Christ adopted sons, heirs of God. To turn back from one status as heirs to servants is an amazing retreat, and it fills Paul with grief. The Galatians, he says, “have turned again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage.”

This statement in verse 9 has had volumes written about it. All kinds of theories have been advanced as to what these weak and beggarly elements are, which we saw of course previously referred to in verse 3. What Paul means, we saw, are the rudimentary aspects of the faith as promoted by the Pharisees.

Now, there is a seeming contradiction here. Paul says: “Until I came you worshipping Gods who were no Gods.” But now he says: “You are turning again to the weak and beggarly elements” of Pharisaic faith. How could they go back to something they were never a part of? This seems to be a contradiction, because if the elementary things were sacrifices of atonement, the Old Testament sacrificial system, things which pointed to the coming of Christ and now are done away with because Christ is come; in what sense did Galatians return to something that they had not known when worshipping false Gods? This is a very important question to meet with, in fact those who say these beggarly elements represent the law have the same problem; how could the Galatians return to the law they did not believe in, or to the covenant to which they were outsiders as pagans?

Lubbers in his commentary says that the term refers to the basic elements which form the teaching of all works religions, whether they be outright paganism or Jewish legalism.

Another scholar of a century ago, J.S. Howson, says and I quote: “This is not merely repetition,” (the use of again and again in verse 9) “but repetition with anew and additional emphasis. It was not simply a relapse into bondage, but a recommencement of its principles. Having given up external formalism in one shape, they were now ready to renew it in another. It startles us to see Heathenism and Judaism thus clasped together: but St. Paul by no means says that Heathenism is as good as Judaism. Viewed simply as external rudimentary religions, they were alike in character; and in no way could the Apostle have more severely condemned the Judaic system of justification than by this co-ordination.”

In other words, Phariseeism had turned the Old Testament faith, Judaism, into a works religion, and thereby paganized it. So Paul equates the two. To turn to Phariseeism in a Christian guise is tantamount to a return to paganism. They thereby exchanged freedom for bondage, for slavery.

Thus, Paul is saying that all faiths other than Christianity are slavery, and anyone who turns to them exchanges freedom for slavery. But Paul goes on to say that he is assuming that despite their dereliction they are heirs of grace. He says: “After that ye had known God” in verse 9, “or rather: known by Him” a very important distinction. If we know God, then we don’t know Him. Unless God first knows us, because no man is capable with his fallen mind, of turning to God. He will use God, he will invoke God, but he will not truly know God unless he is known of God.

The word ‘know’ means more than an awareness of things. We are told that the devils in hell are aware of the fact that there is a God, and they tremble. But in this sense they do not know Him. The word ‘know’ is both in the Old and New Testament used in a far wider and richer sense than our English word ‘know’ conveys. For example, in Matthew 11:27 we read: “no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.” Again, in John 17:3 our Lord says: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” It is personal knowledge, it is experiential, it is something we know in every atom of our being.

Then Paul goes on in verse 10 to say: “Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.” Many see this as a condemnation of the law. Now it is very obvious, Paul is referring to the Old Testament Sabbaths, the Old Testament holidays and festivals; but this does not mean that Paul abandoned the law. Paul is never accused anywhere of abandoning the Sabbath, of failing to observe those things that the Old Testament with respect to days, seasons, and years prescribes.

For example, in Acts we read that the Pharisees had made certain charges against Paul, and James and the elders tell Paul what these charges are. First, that he had forsaken Moses, that he abandoned circumcision, and he walked no more after the customs of the people. This is an interesting charge; ‘forsake Moses’ meant that he no longer sought justification as by works. This is what this meant to the Pharisees, that he abandoned circumcision. Paul reinterpreted circumcision; he never forbade anyone to circumcise their children, he denied the Pharisaic meaning thereof.

‘Customs,’ and our word ‘ethos’ comes from the Greek word that is here used, had reference to the traditions of the Pharisees, and Paul as he tells us in Philippians 3:5, was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, prior to his conversion. When the riot broke out in the temple, which Acts records, against Paul, the cry of the people against him was four-fold. First, that Paul was against the people. This was a common charge against many of the Christian leaders, Paul in particular. It was a charge that he was anti-Jewish. That is an old charge, a common one then, and over the centuries, to anyone who has broken with Judaism. The second charge, that he was against the law; the third that he was against this place, the temple; the fourth, that Paul had supposedly brought Greeks into the temple to pollute it. All of these charges, were of course, false. The fourth charge, the four men who were with Paul in the temple were Jews. The third charge, against the temple, Paul indeed taught that Christ was the true temple of God, but he had not called on anyone to exercise violence against the temple. Against the law? Well, throughout his epistles Paul regularly invokes the law against his opponents, and as far as being anti Jewish, he was filled with grief against the dereliction of his people, and he tells us he was in prayer constantly for them.

In Romans 10:1 Paul says, in fact he went so far as to say: “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” In Romans 9:3 he makes a similar statement, yet this evil charge made against Paul is still repeated against him by Jews and Christian scholars, and humanists as well. But this Paul, the Paul of the New Testament, throughout uses the law against his opponents. Could he have been against the observance of days? Was he not rather saying: “You are putting an improper meaning on the observance. You are making it a matter of justification, of salvation by works to observe days, rather than observing them to rejoice in the Lord.”

Calvin’s comment here was to the point, and remember Calvin spoke centuries ago, so there is no excuse for the error that prevails today, and what Calvin had to say was nothing new. He said and I quote: “He adduces as an instance one description of “elements,” the observance of days. No condemnation is here given to the observance of dates in the arrangement of civil society. The order of nature out of  which this arises, is fixed and constant. How are months and years computed, but by the revolution of the sun and moon? What distinguishes summer from winter, or spring from harvest, but the appointment of God, — an appointment which was promised to continue to the end of the world? (According to Genesis 8:22) The civil observance of days contributes not only to agriculture and to matters of politics, and ordinary life, but is even extended to the government of the church. Of what nature, then, was the observance which Paul reproves? It was that which would bind the conscience, by religious considerations, as if it were necessary to the worship of God, and which, as he expresses it in the Epistle to the Romans, would make a distinction between one day and another.”

Calvin continued in this vein to make it clear that the problem was not that Paul abolished the Sabbath or any other observance of days, but he abolished any observance of it in terms of a justification of man, of works that would be instrumental in his salvation.

Thus Paul spoke against the Jewish, the Pharisaic observance of days as a matter of justification. It is interesting that Calvin went overboard on stressing this, and went so far, and most Calvinists today do not like to speak of this, to bowl on Sundays to show that he was not a Sabbatarian, a legalist.

Now, without agreeing at all point with what Calvin had to say, his basic point must be accepted: God has given a routine of days, of weekly Sabbaths, of natural seasons to the year, and our lives move in terms of them. We do not observe them to be saved; we can go a step further and say we do not observe any of the commandments, for example “thou shalt not steal,” to be saved, but because we are saved. Therefore we live by all His laws.

Thus Paul did not ask the Galatians to end the observances of the Lord’s day; he did challenge the premise of their observance. How did the Pharisees observe days? Well, they had rigid prescriptions whereby you could no more do anything without knowing how far any activity was legitimate. Thus, you could only walk so many yards on the Lord’s day. One of the great debates oh Phariseeism was with regard to eggs. Of course you could not eat an egg laid on the Sabbath because the hen had labored over it. This meant that you could not, others said, eat an egg that the hen may have labored over on the Sabbath, but laid the next day. Was she not busy producing that egg on the Sabbath even though it was laid the next day? That was of course a debate that could not be resolved, without saying ‘you cannot eat any egg.’

This kind of thing went on endlessly. Paul had good reasons for attacking it, because it did come into the church, and we have it today in both Catholic and Protestant thinking. In Institutes Volume 2 I cite an instance of attempted incest where after considerable, very detailed inspection of the evidences, it was ruled that the wife had no grounds for divorce because the husband had not been able to make penetration. Now this kind of nitpicking and quibbling when the sin was very real, goes through the history of the church. In fact in a famous medieval case also regarding incest, the decision was rendered that there could be no divorce, because the man was in such a hurry that he went prematurely and therefore was not able to penetrate. Now this is Phariseeism; what Paul was saying was valid then, and it is still valid now. The Sabbath was to be a day of rejoicing, man ceasing from his labors because he knows that it is not his work that saves him, but God’s work that has saved him, and therefore he can rest. He can do what no pagan society has every believed is possible; that you can rest1/7th of the year, and more; one year in seven, and more; because the Lord will bless your efforts and prosper them since all depends on Him, not upon us.

Thus the Sabbath is not to be a day of nitpicking as to: “Can I do this or can I not do that?” but a day of rejoicing in what God has done for us.

From verses 11-20, Paul expresses his grief over the waywardness of the Galatians, saying in verse 12: “Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am; for I am as ye are: ye have not injured me at all.” His emotions run very strongly through these verses, and hence as so often is the case with Paul, he writes tersely, he abbreviates. But what Paul is saying is: “Take the same attitude toward me that I take toward you, think as I do of the basic issues. Basically you have not hurt me at all, you have rather injured yourself.” And he says, “I am afraid” in verse 11, a prelude to verse 12 which we have just considered, “that I have bestowed upon you my labor in vain.”

Then he goes on to remind them that when he first came among them, verse 13-14, that they did not despise what was tempting for them to despise in Paul’s appearance, at the time he came and first preached the gospel to them, they received him as an angel of God, even Christ Jesus. What was this infirmity in the flesh? Well, again all kinds of strange ideas have been promoted, but what Paul is saying is: “I was repulsive to look at when I came there.” What made him repulsive to look at? In 2 Corinthians 11:23-28, Paul tells us of the sufferings he had undergone as Christ’s ambassador: shipwrecked several times, stoned and left for dead, whipped, savagely beaten, and Acts doesn’t record but a few of those episodes which Paul recites in a summary statement, and makes clear that this is merely the high point of his suffering that he is giving us. Obviously Paul arrived in Galatia after one such episode, badly disfigured and mauled; looking more like a reject from prison than an ambassador of Jesus Christ. And he says it was tempting to say: “Who wants any part of this character! What a repulsive sight.” But he says they received him as an angel of God, and as a blessing.

“Where is then the blessedness ye spake of? for I bear you record, that, if it had been possible, ye would have plucked out your own eyes, and have given them to me.” This possibly suggests that one of the things that, whatever it was that preceded Paul’s trip to Galatia had resulted in was damage to his sight. The battering, the bruising, may have temporarily and perhaps possibly continuously injured his sight. We know that at one point in his epistles he says, having dictated it, that he signs it, “and see with what a large hand I write.” Very often the mark of someone whose sight has been damaged.

But now Paul says: “Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?” Before this letter to the Galatians, apparently Paul had heard of what was going on there, and may well have told someone who was travelling there to give them this message, a summary statement of his disapproval of their Phariseeism; and they regarded Paul in effect as their enemy.

“Am I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?” ‘They, the Pharisees in the church zealously affect you, but it is not a proper zeal. They would exclude you, separate you from me, that you might affect them, that you might serve them.’

And he goes on to say in verse 18: “it is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing,” ‘to be zealous in a good cause’ “and not only when I am present with you.” ‘I want you to show a zeal for the truth when I am not there, when it is not necessary for me to point out the truth.’

“My little children,” having called them a number of things, clearly indicting them, now in grief he speaks of them as ‘my little children.’ This was a Jewish saying, it was the way a Rabbi or a teacher addressed those who were his students, in fact it was a proverb of the time that if one teaches the son of his neighbor the law, the scriptures reckon this the same as though he had begotten him. Paul in calling them ‘my little children, because I am the one who taught you the law; not these Pharisees.’ And of course our Lord uses this expression with His disciples more than once.

“My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you, I desire to be present with you now, and to change my voice; for I stand in doubt of you.”

He says in effect, that ‘I am harsh, harsher than I would be if I were present; but I don’t know the whole truth about you as I would if I were there to talk with you face to face, and to see how deep this infection of Phariseeism goes. I could then if I found that my fears were not entirely justified change my voice; but now I am in doubt.’

In verse 18, to turn to it again, he says he wants them to be zealously affected, to be mature believers, a mature congregation, ‘not only when I am present with you.’ They must have a mature faith, and not be dependent on him and on his presence. This is an important point, because too often in the history of the church as well as in the history of the synagogue, the star system has prevailed; a prominent teacher who fills a great cathedral or a great church, or a synagogue in the days before Christ; and everybody flocks to hear him. This is the star system. It is productive of creating a giant center, but not productive believers. The star systems results have been deadly. The star system makes it easy to be a church member. We have the star system because people want it; whether it is a congregation of thousands or just a handful, they want the man standing up there behind the pulpit to do it all, to believe it all, and to make it easy for them. They do not want to be action-oriented, they don’t want a faith with works. This is of course Phariseeism, it is elitism.

There is another area of misunderstanding, Paul is commonly seen because of the way he writes as authoritarian. Nothing could be further from the truth, that is, in the sense that authoritarianism is used; at the same time the elitists and the Pharisees are seen as democratic and congenial; but they are not. Why? Paul is never concerned with advancing himself, always with advancing the truth of God. So it is the authority of the faith, the authority of the word, the authority of God that he at all times sets forth; he never seeks to promote himself. Paul deliberately did not take pay from the churches. He supported himself as he went from place to place, and when he collected money it was to use it for some other cause, because he wanted the freedom to speak authoritatively without anyone saying he was self-seeking.

Paul exercised God’s authority, he did not promote himself. Paul never made personal demands, even though, as he said, as an apostle, as a pastor, he was entitled to. He never promoted himself. His concern at all times was the truth of God without compromise and without dilution. He sought to please God, not man; he confronted men with the authority of God, and his goal was this: ‘that Christ be formed in you.’ This he requires of all of us.

Let us pray. Oh Lord our God, we give thanks unto Thee that Thou hast saved us and Thy goal for us is that Christ be formed in us; that in us faith and action be united, that Thy kingdom may come in us and through us, and Thy will be done. Oh Lord our God, revive Thy church and make it strong in this Thy purpose, that the ends of the earth might know that Thou art the Lord, and might serve Thee. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now on our lesson?

The problem Paul face in Galatia I think we can say is a constant problem in all human history, in that men honor freedom in name, and run from it most of the time in reality. They want license, not freedom; because freedom means responsibility. Yes, Otto?

[Otto Scott] Well the old thing is to get hung up on procedures; they put procedures ahead of the substance.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Procedures give men the power; procedures put a bureaucracy into existence, and make courts into tremendous powers, so that courts, rather than justice, prevails. Procedures have become law, rather than the law prevailing. We see that today for example in that in California within my lifetime, a case for example, a murder conviction, could not be overturned on a technicality. It had to be substantial evidence of innocence. That has changed so dramatically that most of the current lawyers don’t know that anything else existed; it is all procedure now, and procedures have become an end in themselves.

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

Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee for the truth of Thy word, and for the glory of salvation. We give thanks unto Thee that we live in a time of judgement, where judgement manifests Thy grace and Thy mercy in the rescue of a fallen world. Give us grace to face Thy coming judgments with faith, with patience, and with a holy confidence.

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God… [tape ends]