Transcript
Apostle Paul (0:00)
You who have heard the gospel have embraced the gospel. If you now turn away from it, the only thing left for you is not the blessing of the covenant, but the curse of divine wrath.
R.C. Sproul (0:19)
Strong words there from the Apostle Paul, and they should jolt us to realize their seriousness because they are words not only applicable to a 1st century church, but those words, they're true for each of us. Welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing youg Mind as we spend several weeks in Paul's Letter to the Galatians. Although RC Sproul will not cover the entire book in this series, you can study Galatians line by line when you request his commentary with your donation of any amount@renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. It's a Bible study resource that I'm sure you'll return to again and again. Well, Today's sermon from Dr. Sproul is especially clear. If we don't place our trust in someone else's righteousness, the righteousness of Christ, we will face the wrath of God. But those who do trust in the finished work of Christ alone for their salvation will experience peace with God and life eternal. Here's Dr. Sproul in Galatians, chapter three beginning beginning in verse ten.
Narrator (1:30)
After laboring the point that justification is by faith and not through the works of the law, by which the apostle has said, by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified, Paul now changes the tune just a little bit in the terms of the nuance that he wants us to get here by saying, for all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. Let me just pause for a second and look at the beginning of that particular verse. For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. If you are a student of logic, you will recognize that what the apostle has written here is a universal affirmative proposition. And also, if you are a student of logic, you may recognize some of the implications of the truth tables by which certain inferences follow from other propositions. And what Paul is saying is that all who do A are also in a state of B. If you are A, you will also be B. Now again, Paul's not interested in giving us an abstract expounding of logic, but certainly the logic that he is declaring here is one that we dare not miss at the peril of our eternal lives. He says, all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. Now if you are included in that statement, all, and if you have been relying for your justification by obeying the law of God, all you have achieved to this point is to be exposed to the curse of God. Now, when Paul's speaking here to the Judaizers, he certainly has primary reference to the Old Testament law that was given by and through the mediator of the Old Covenant, namely Moses. But if we expand the understanding of the law as Paul does in his Epistle to the Romans, we understand that not only the Jews were under the law, but also the Gentiles are under the law. And what he is saying is that all people, each and every person who has ever lived on this planet, is under the law of God. Now, I know we live in a culture that has embraced, as Alan Bloom has indicated in his book Whatever Happened to Truth? Or so on the Philosophy of Relativism, where he says that 95% of students who graduate from high school and enter college are already convinced of the position of moral relativism. And by the time they graduate from their college experience, that number moves from 95% to 98%. And so he's saying of all those who are educated in our universities here in America, 98% affirm and believe in moral relativism. And it's true that 98% will affirm their faith in moral relativism until or unless somebody steals their wallet. And. And then all of a sudden they're marching in protest against some kind of violation or transgression of the moral law of God. You don't need a Bible, you don't need a professional ethicist to understand the sanctity of private property or to understand that we are held accountable by the law, that God reveals to us not simply on tablets of stone, but through the conscience, so that we are made in the image of God and understand internally the fundamental foundational precepts of what is right and what is wrong. We know that by nature. Now, I understand that all of us are guilty of searing our consciences, of trying to do everything we can to silence the voice of conscience, to destroy our conscience. But I'm convinced that even the most calloused psychopath or sociopath does not have the ability to extinguish altogether the law of God. We know the difference between what is right and what is wrong. And so we are all under. Underneath the law. And there are many senses in which the Scriptures speak of being under the law. That is to say, the law stands over and above us as imposing the obligations of our Creator upon our behavior. So we're under obligation and in that sense, under the law. But what Paul is talking about here is far more serious when he tells us that being under the law involves not only being under obligation to the law, but we are under the curse of the law. Now, if there's any word that's foreign to our contemporary vocabulary, it's the word curse. Other than using it to describe certain kinds of language which we call cursing, for the most part, the concept of curse has all but disappeared from our culture. We may see vestigial remnants here and there. In certain points, we think maybe of the practice of voodoo, where pins are injected into the figures of replica dolls that represent our enem. And the belief is that if you inject that pin into the chest of the replica doll, that it will inflict pain upon the person in reality. And they have received the curse. Even in Melville's great American novel, the Prophet, who cursed at the beginning on the ship Pequod and the crew under Captain Ahud, he predicted that they would suffer a dreadful end, and he would announce the curse upon all who signed upon the crew of the Pequod. But like I say, that language has all but disappeared from our vocabulary. Who believes now in curses that have the power to actually change a person's destiny?