Today's Quick Word
Today’s Quick Word
Galatians 3:26-29 So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew […]
Galatians 3:26-29 So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
(I have no idea what schema or formula Robert Murray M’Cheyne used to devise his Daily Bible Reading Plan which covers the OT once and the NT and Psalms twice every year, but I have been using it for about 17 years and have commented before on the fact that the 4 Chapters set down for any one day from different sections of the Bible are often serendipitously complementary to each other. It is also ‘interesting’ that Galatians 3 ‘crops up’ on St Patrick’s Day every year!).
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul is concerned that new believers who were influenced by the entrenched legalism of Pharisaic Judaism were holding the view that the ‘good works’ of some aspects of keeping the Mosaic Law (particularly the rite of ‘circumcision’) were an essential part of being put right with God (salvation), and that ‘justification’ was not ‘by grace alone through faith alone’ (cf what he wrote in Ephesians 2:8-10 where he makes it clear that ‘good works’, or ‘Law-keeping’ is the result, not the cause of being right with God.). His statement at the end of the previous chapter in Galatians is unambiguous: “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”
This is what the 16th-17th Century Protestant Reformation was all about. In today’s verses Paul spells out the implications of ‘justification-by-grace-through-faith-alone’. Being ‘born again’ into a right relationship with the Living God, becoming restored as a full member of God’s family (Galatians 4:6), can no longer depend on our ethnic background, our social standing or our gender, but we become all one, simply because of what Jesus did for us by his death on the cross. It should also be clear from the context that this is the sole point being made by the inspired Apostle here, and has nothing to do with what particular different roles or functions might be alloted to us as we share and support one another in the fellowship of the Lord’s Church.
– Bruce Christian
