If God is the one to whom we are
accountable, we need to know how we can have right standing with God. For
insight, we turn to Paul’s letter to the Galatians 2:15-21. What we notice
immediately is that God has already put you in right standing with God. We learn
in this passage the importance of justification, faith, law, and divine love.
In verses 11-14, Paul his narrating
his version of an event that occurred in Antioch. Paul seems to have lost a
significant argument with other leaders. Think of it. Paul has received in the
previous verses the commendation of the other apostles. Yet, quite quickly, a
controversy arises. While eating with Gentiles was fine for Peter in general,
when some leaders who represented James came from Jerusalem, he separated himself.
Paul called him down publically for what he viewed as hypocrisy. Yet, other Jews
joined Peter rather than Paul. In fact, even Barnabas, the companion of Paul,
joined Peter.
The specific point in question was
table fellowship between Jews and Gentiles. While Jewish Law forbade (and
forbids) observant Jews to eat Gentile meat, no prohibition prevented shared
meals, provided the Jew could still observe basic dietary restrictions. Paul
accuses Cephas of hypocrisy in his vacillation between strict separatism and a
more accommodating stance toward Gentile table fellowship, depending on who
(and especially whether "the circumcision faction," v. 12) was
watching.
Paul actually begins his public
speech in 2:14. After having accused Peter of hypocrisy “before them all”
(2:14), Paul reminds Peter that they share a common bond in their Jewish
heritage (“we are by nature Jews and not Gentile sinners”), clearly an attempt
to temper his harsh words. However, Paul’s conciliatory gesture is not a
precursor to compromise, for he continues by asserting that freedom from the
Law is brought to the believer through justification by faith (2:16). The text
is concerned with the theological fall out created by the actions of Peter and
the others in Antioch. Jews by birth and
Gentiles sinners shows the most basic insider/outsider distinction. Despite his privileged position as a Jew,
Paul now declares that the Law does not offer justification. Nothing human beings can do, not even obeying
the Law, can create this rightness.
Nowhere here does Paul dismiss the Law as useless. He only denies that it serves any purpose in
justifying anyone before God. Paul is
making his point in a strong way: Those who seek to justify themselves by
obeying the Law given to God's people Israel are doomed to failure in the light
of God's justifying and salvific work in Christ's death and resurrection.
Paul is stating that it is
impossible for him to turn back and accept again that it is possible for human
beings to be justified by means of the Law. He is also making a forceful
statement that his apostleship, far from being inferior to that of Peter, as
his opponents suggest, is on equal footing with that of Peter.
In verse 16, we find one of the
most succinct and dense statements about faith in Jesus Christ anywhere in the
letters of Paul. The first clause, “a person is justified not by the works of
the Law,” draws on courtroom imagery to describe the status of the believer
before God. Here and in other places in his letters, Paul seems to envision God
as a judge, while the believer is a defendant who stands accused of a crime
(i.e., exhibiting sinful behavior, or in some cases simply possessing a sinful
nature). The question, then, is the way in which the defendant can gain an
acquittal (i.e., be “justified”). Paul here asserts that Torah observance
(“works of the Law”) is not sufficient for such a verdict. Rather, he
continues, a person is justified “through the faith of Jesus Christ,” or,
“through faith in Jesus Christ.” Faith is the means of justification.
Verse 17 lets us know the argument
of those who advocated that Gentiles must become Jews before they can become
Christians. Betz says that the phrase “found to be sinners” means that the
opponents of Paul were calling Gentile Christians “sinners” because they have
not come under the grace of Torah. Paul’s argument was that God never called
Gentiles to come under the specific grace of Torah. They had to come under the
general grace of God. The teaching of Paul does not lead to moral anarchy. In
fact, to rebuild the edifice of Torah would itself be sinful. For the apostle
Paul, faith in Christ was a sinner reaching out personally in love to embrace
the good news of God's reconciliation of the world through Jesus' saving life
and work. In so doing, a person is justified or reckoned as righteous by the
God from whom all people, including Paul, are estranged naturally by sin (v.
17). "No one will be justified" echoes Psalm 143:2, although Paul
sets the phrase in an entirely different context here.
For Paul’s audience, any attempt to
keep all of the provisions of the Mosaic Law in the effort to keep one’s house
clean, is doomed to failure. For us it means that no amount of volunteerism,
church-attending, tithing, singing in the choir and the like is going to set
our house in order.
That is something only God through
Jesus Christ can do.
In this context, Paul's faith in
Christ is his renunciation of the world, including its established moral
precepts. Paul expresses that renunciation as his having "been crucified
with Christ" (v. 19). For Barth[1],
Paul has died to the Law, which amounts to making the error of a justification
of humanity by the fulfillment of another law than this, in order that he may
now live for God. In the crucifixion of Jesus, he himself experiences
crucifixion and therefore destroyed and done away, the man who willed to
justify himself in this impossible way. It has become impossible for him to try
to go further along this impossible way.
That is why Paul writes:
“It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ
who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the
Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of
God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing”
(2:20-21).
If it was shocking for Paul's
listeners to hear him declare that he had died to the Law, it was even more
startling to hear him claim he had also died with Christ. Under the Law, a right relationship with God
was dependent upon how obediently Paul followed the works of the Law. Paul specifies two unmerited, unexpected acts
of God's Son that makes commitment to Christ, not to the Law, so easy. Because Christ loves me and gave himself for
me, Paul refuses to nullify the grace of God.
In verse 20, by faith Christ
becomes the subject of all the living acts of a Christian. Though Christians are still living in the
flesh, they already have the Spirit. In the previous verse, death was release
from past obligations. In the present
verse, it is annihilation of old sins. Paul
ties together crucifying and rising. The
"now" is his new life in Christ.
Paul applies God's love for the world personally here.
We are clean because we live by
faith:
“The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20).
For Pannenberg,[2]
the notion of the Son involved in this loving giving up to death introduces
another complexity. Significantly, when we reflect upon the action of Father
and Son in the cross, Paul sees the love of God in Romans 5:8 and the love of
Christ in this verse, who also gave himself up for us. In essence, in the cross
we have one event, in which the Father and the Son cooperate so fully that the
work is that of God and that of Christ. This orientation of the obedience and
suffering of the Son toward the salvation of many is also the will and work of
the Father here.
Paul grew up believing that he would be justified — made right with God
— by doing what was correct according to Jewish Law. Paul was very good at
this, bragging to the Philippians that he had more reason than anyone else did
to be confident:
“circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the
tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to
zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless”
(Philippians 3:4-6).
When it came to being made right with God through works of the law,
Paul was batting a thousand.
“Yet whatever gains I had, I regard them as
rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a
righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through
faith in Christ” (vv. 7-9).
Circumcised Jew, Israelite, Benjaminite, Hebrew, Pharisee, blameless
law-abider. It is all rubbish, says Paul. In fact, what he really says, using
the Greek word skubala, is that it is total “excrement.”
Yes, God has already
taken care of getting you right with God, and for that you can be grateful. After
all, we blow it far too often to count. Your turn to Christ in faith is a way
of saying that your life is now about Christ, a powerful statement indeed. After
that, you have a life of steadily allowing Christ to form you into the person
Christ wants you to be.
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