God's Self-Substitution

6 · The pastor expounds Galatians 3:10-12, showing that the law's limitation is not merely that the standard is high but that no one meets it — perfect obedience in belief and behavior is required, and no one achieves it

Read along. For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse. For it is written, cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law 'and do them. Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the Law, for the righteous shall live by faith. But the Law is not of faith; rather, the one who does them shall live by them.' The obligation is perfect obedience. Now, the issue in Galatians isn't merely legalism, although there's lots of legalism going on. I'm going to prove myself right by doing certain things. The limitation of the Law and the legalism that flows from it is that no one actually keeps it. Does that make sense? The obligation is you've got to be perfect. The limitation is nobody can do that. As Paul points out, you must abide by everything in the law. You must do them or else you'll be cursed. It's not just you have to have perfect convictions, right? It's not just what you believe to be truth and right and wrong has to be perfectly in line with Scripture. It's that what you believe to be right and wrong, what your convictions are, has to be perfectly in line with Scripture, and you have to live perfectly in line with those convictions 100% of the time, every second of every day. And the limitation goes even farther. Galatians 3:10: For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse. Now it is evident no one is justified before God by the law. Did you catch the implication? If you rely on works of the law, you're cursed. You try and do this by works and you will fail. No one's justified by the law because no one's kept it perfectly.

7 · The pastor argues that the Old Testament itself testifies to universal human sinfulness, establishing both historically and redemptive-historically that no one meets the law's standard — the limitation is not in the law but in human depravity

The Old Testament consistently expresses this over and over. It's not just that the law says you've got to be perfect. The Old Testament, the law itself, says nobody can be perfect. In 1 Kings 8:46, 'For there is no one who does not sin.' Ecclesiastes 7:20, 'Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.' Paul's argument is true historically. The Old Testament is filled with that argument. You must be perfect And nobody is perfect. But it's also true redemptive historically. In other words, it's not just true for the past, it's true today. Perfect obedience is still the expectation for people living in the New Testament and after. And the limitation is still there. We don't measure up. That's why Paul says in Romans 3:10, 'None is righteous, no, not one, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.' The problem with the law is not the law itself, but this limitation comes from us. It comes from our depravity.

8 · The pastor uses a personal story about his elementary school grading system to illustrate the difference between partial-credit human systems and God's zero-sum law — anything less than perfection earns not just no reward but active punishment

Now, when I was in elementary school and we would get grades, my parents had a system set up, and it was really mostly my mom. Where we would get paid for our grades. So, of course, when we received our report card, the first thing I did on the school bus home was I opened that report card and I started tallying. I mean, this is the closest I ever came to being an accountant. I was running up those totals and I was checking. You know, in elementary school you don't get A's and B's. It was a really cool thing in 6th grade when you get your first A's and B's. Like, 'Oh, that's so cool.' It was like 1 is poor, 5 is excellent, or vice versa, I don't remember. But you'd go and we had a system that tallied, you know, if 5 was excellent and you had a 5, a 5 was worth a dollar. And a 4 was worth 75 cents. And a 3 was 25 cents. And 1s and 2s didn't get you anything. So you'd tally all that up and I would typically get a pretty good amount of money for schoolwork and substantially less for marks on behavior. And I just kind of knew that was coming. It was like, I better make my money in the first half of this report card while they're actually addressing my grades, because once it gets to my behavior, there's not gonna be a whole lot more money going into the purse at this point. That was just the way it unfortunately worked out for me. Well, in God's system, unless the grade is perfect, unless the report card is is perfect all the way through, you get nothing. In fact, rather than no reward and no blessing, you come home with a report card that has one 4 instead of a 5. And it's not just that you're gonna get less pay, not even just that you'll get no pay, you're going to receive punishment.

9 · The pastor establishes that law-keeping is a zero-sum game (99% obedience still earns 100% curse), then pivots to Paul's citation of Habakkuk to show that justification by faith is not unique to Abraham but spans the entire Old Testament canon — the righteous live by faith, not works

The implicit point Paul is making in verses 10 to 12 is that no one keeps the law according to the perfect standard that it requires because no one can keep it perfectly. The law is limited because it's dealing with our broken, fallen depravity. We don't have that ability. It's been marred from the fall. Law keeping is a zero-sum game, you could say. It isn't some blessings and some curses according to the percentage by which you obey. Well, I obey 65% of the time, so I can expect 65% blessing in my life and 35% bad stuff, right? No, that's not how it works. It's not in eternity, I was obedient 65% of the time, so 65% of eternity I'm going to spend in heaven and 35% I'll spend in hell. No. I mean, obviously taking out the whole impossibility of the math of taking 65% of an infinite value, that's not the way God works the system. That's what Paul's showing us. A score of 99% obedience gets a grade of 100% curse. That's a pretty serious thing. That's a serious thing, right? There are not a lot of amens right there. That kind of lands with a thud. Thankfully, Paul isn't done halfway through the verse. He continues in verse 11, 'Now it is evident no one is justified before God by the law.' Ah, 'But the righteous shall live by faith.' Where the law curses, the gospel blesses. Now what he's doing here is he's quoting from Habakkuk, and he's repeating that justification is by faith. It's not by works. And what Paul is doing is he's jumping from the example he gave with Abraham earlier in chapter 3 and going all the way now to the minor prophets. So he's going from one end of the Old Testament of the Scriptures all the way to the other end, and he's making a point. It's not just that Abraham is some super unique individual that is made righteous by faith. No, Abraham is the father of faith, but we see now all the way at the other end of Scripture, here's Habakkuk and he receives the same message. The righteous shall live by faith. When judgment comes, when God looks at the report card, only those who trust in Yahweh in Habakkuk's sense, will have a hope of life. So like Abraham and Habakkuk, the people of God are called to trust in God even when life circumstances seem to argue against such trust. So what does that mean for Abraham? Even though I'm old, even though my wife is decades on the wrong side of menopause, I will believe that you can give me a child. For Habakkuk, even as I watch Babylon grow in power, even as I watch Babylon conquer mighty Assyria, even as I see the sins of Judah and I see that this means God is going to bring Babylon to come conquer us, I can entrust myself to God's goodness. Don't see it clearly? I know that immediately the future is bleak, but I can still find joy in God.

10 · The pastor applies the principle of living by faith to specific contemporary struggles — broken marriages, loneliness, unjust criticism — calling the congregation to trust God even when circumstances seem to argue against it

It means even if your marriage seems just completely irreparable, it's just, just messed up, it's filled with strife, there's room to hope in God. Even if your life seems just to be daily filled with loneliness, you just go from one day to the next just feeling like there's no one who walks with you, God But have you no trust in Him? The critical judgments of others might assault you every day. You know that there's people, people who shouldn't treat you this way, maybe even people who are Christians who speak evil about you, and their arrows cut. Like David, you believe and entrust yourself to God. In all these circumstances, God calls us to live by faith.

11 · The pastor expounds verse 12, explaining that returning to law-keeping after Christ's arrival means abandoning faith and forfeiting the New Covenant blessings — the Old Covenant sacrifices are void because they always pointed to Christ, so going back means perfect obedience is now your only hope

And then Paul says something really sobering in verse 12. But the law is not of faith. Rather, the one who does them shall live by them. Now that's kind of a strange sentence, right? The law is not of faith. Rather, the one who does them, the one who does the law, shall live by them. Well, here's what Paul is saying. He's saying the game has changed. You can't go back to the way things were in the Old Testament because the Messiah has arrived. If you give yourself over to circumcision, Galatians, then you're putting yourself back under the law. But here's the deal. The law was always pointing forward to Christ. You're going backwards. So if you take circumcision and go back under the law, that means you've now got to keep everything perfectly, because the Old Testament sacrificial system doesn't work for you anymore. That's the old news. It's been replaced by Christ. You go back to the law now after Christ, and faith is no fallback for you. That's what Paul's saying with those words. The law is not of faith. Your salvation, if you go back, is now dependent on your law keeping and not your believing. Now, it's not that obedience is contrary to faith, but that going back under the law is contrary to faith. So think of it this way: any sort of salvation that has a scheme of, 'I'm going to work my way into God's good grace. I'm going to do right.' Any sort of law keeping that looks back to the Old Covenant, like circumcision in Galatia, or just kind of tweaks the circumcision criteria, makes it a more modern form of piety, right? It's a more contemporary version of piety. I'm gonna earn this. I'm gonna get some credit with God right now by being pious in, not circumcision, but fill in the blank. If you do those things, the New Covenant blessings are vacant to you. You can't return to the Old Covenant. Those sacrifices are void because they always look forward to Christ. You go back now and your only hope is perfect obedience for all eternity. It's a scary thing. Your only chance to stand before God with any hope is you have to obey perfectly, 100% of the time.

12 · The pastor argues that forgetting the law's obligation and limitation leads to self-righteousness, which puts one's back to the gospel by reducing it to a past event rather than an ongoing dependence — rule-keeping and faith-based justification are irreconcilable

Now, when we forget the law's obligation and the law's limitation— so you gotta be perfect and you can't do it— that's when we start to leave the gospel behind. When we do those things, when we think that way, We start to move on to this tempting path that, you know, in my mind, when I think about things, when I compare myself to others, I really start to think I'm morally superior. That's one of the things that's indicative of somebody who's forgotten those obligations of the law and those limitations of the law. You start comparing yourself and you regard others as morally inferior. You do it so you can sustain that illusion of your own self-righteousness. You do it so that as you compare yourself to the lowest common denominator, your own self-esteem can get propped up a little bit. On paper, you probably still acknowledge you're a sinner. You know how to answer the questions. You would still say mentally, 'I know I'm a sinner saved by grace,' but in daily practice, You rarely regard yourself in this way. You're growing distant from the gospel. That's what Paul is saying is at stake when you start to walk back towards rule keeping. This is why Jesus rails against the self-righteous. Their posture puts their backs to the gospel. The gospel was a past need. Not an ongoing provision. It's a dangerous place to be. Calvin puts it this way: 'The law justifies him who fulfills all its commands, whereas faith justifies those who are destitute of merit, of works, and rely on Christ alone.' To be justified by your own merit and by the grace of another are irreconcilable. You can't hold those two together. When it comes to justification, rule keeping is not for believers, it's for doers. Nike basically stole the law's slogan. Just do it. That's what the law says. Just do it. And just do it every day. And just do it every second. And never fail. That's a daunting thing. And because we can't outside of faith, Paul reminds us there's a curse. You fail to keep the law, you fail to do that, and there's a curse that becomes involved.

13 · The pastor pivots to the hope of the gospel — that the curse is exchanged for blessing through Christ's substitutionary death — and notes that Paul has been building toward this explanation from the very opening of the letter

Now, this brings us to the final point. The real reason there's hope, the real reason Paul can talk in such a way of expectation in such a way of joy that the law has this ridiculously high obligation and that the law has this incredible limitation and that it's not just utterly devastating is because the curse gets exchanged for a blessing. Follow along with me. After saying all this about the law, he says, Christ He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.' The problem with the law's obligation is that there's a curse for disobedience. The limitation is that nobody can actually keep it. The only way freedom from the curse is achieved is if that curse gets paid by somebody else. So Paul's been building up this explanation for the entire letter. In Galatians 1, he starts up, remember, all the way back at the very beginning, the introduction of the letter, he says, 'Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age.' That was the good news he proclaimed to us all the way back at the beginning of the letter. And he's been building up his argument, waiting to now detail out how is that possible? How can Jesus deliver us? Deliver us from the present evil age? How can He save us from our sins? Well, our redemption happens because Christ becomes a curse for us.

14 · The pastor expounds the Old Testament background of crucifixion as a sign of being cursed and cut off — hanging on a tree was a public declaration of condemnation, making Christ's death an act of bearing the curse meant for covenant-breakers

Verse 14 is an elaboration on the fact that Paul preached publicly. Remember he said, 'I publicly portrayed Christ as crucified.' My preaching laid out that Christ was crucified and it's hope for you. That you can have faith and you can believe and you can turn to that and rest in that. Well, he's now showing To what end that happens? By dying in the way the law promised, by dying in the way the law promised would bring a curse, Christ's crucifixion redeems people from the curse of the law, even when they failed to keep it. Remember I said this is a complex paragraph? It's got complexity to the arguments. One final time, Paul quotes from Deuteronomy. He's citing a passage that promised a curse, that if you're hung on a tree, you'll be cursed. And the reason for that is the context in Deuteronomy and later in the Old Testament is that you hung someone on a tree as an indictment. Now, sometimes it was to execute them, but more often it was you've already executed them and you hang them from a tree as a sign to the community. This person had to be executed for their crime. They're cursed. They're cut off. So that's what Paul is laying out in the context when he quotes from this Deuteronomy passage. Jesus died a death of such disgrace that it's difficult to illustrate that for a modern audience. I mean, how do you make sense of that? That an innocent guy hangs from a tree and now he's cursed? Well, that the Messiah died is disgrace enough. But that His death meant He was cursed by God. Now that's an outrageous thing.

15 · The pastor provides rich historical and covenantal context for Paul's quotation from Deuteronomy 27 by describing the dramatic ceremony at Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, where a million people publicly echoed the blessings and curses of the covenant, acknowledging that covenant-breakers would be cut off from God and from the people

To even get a glimpse of that, we've got to get our minds around what's going on in Deuteronomy 27. Now, the context of what Paul's quoting— he has all these quotes that come from around Deuteronomy 27 in this passage, and the reason he's doing that is there's this remarkable thing going on. For those of you who aren't super familiar with Deuteronomy, tricky book. Moses is about to send the people into the Promised Land, so he's writing this book to remind them of everything that the law requires. And then they do this basically living illustration of what they're doing. They go out, and before entering the Promised Land, Moses takes the people of Israel and he divides them in half. He separates them. And he takes one half of the people, and he says, 'You go up and stand on Mount Gerizim.' Stand on this mountain. And across from Mount Gerizim, immediately across the valley, is another mountain. And he takes the other half of the people and he says, you go stand on Mount Ebal. You go stand over there. And this is what's gonna happen. The people on this mountain represent all the blessings of the covenant, and the people on this mountain represent all the curses. And we're going to read through the blessings and the curses toward each other in this valley as a statement of what's at stake. And so they start to do this, and as they do it in Deuteronomy 27, the Levites begin to read the curses, and as they read each one out, the people on both mountains echo back, 'Amen.' Now, this is probably upwards of a million people. On these two mountains. So you can see these Levites, hear them reading out these passages, and then a million voices, 'Amen! It's true!' So the Levites call out, 'Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law and do them.' Amen. The whole congregation echoes back. They acknowledge if anyone breaks any part of this covenant, they're cursed, which is the nation saying, you break this covenant and we will disassociate from you. You break this covenant and you're cut off from the people. You break this covenant and And you're cut off from God.

16 · The pastor declares the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement — Christ takes the curse, punishment, and exile meant for lawbreakers upon Himself, being separated from God so we could be united to Him — and defends the doctrine against modern objections

Now with that in mind, listen to Paul's words in verse 13. That's the context. Christ redeemed us from that curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.' When Christ is nailed to the cross, He takes our curse, He takes everything that we have as lawbreakers, and He puts it on His own back. And so, as surely as the nail secures Him to the tree, it also separates Him from God. And all the curse, all the punishment, all the exile that should be ours now gets pushed upon Jesus. That's what's happening in this text. And this is why the gospel is a stumbling block to the Jews. And initially to Paul as a Jew, because crucifixion and curse should never happen to the Messiah. The Anointed One who will save His people can't be cursed. That's unimaginable. And Paul was almost right. The Messiah couldn't be cursed for His own evil, or else He'd fail to be the Messiah. But Christ was cursed for us. The gospel hangs on those two words. He was cursed for us. What they're acknowledging here is penal substitution, that Christ receives our punishment in our place, and it's the cornerstone of the gospel. Christ taking our condemnation, taking the curse for us, is the heart of the atonement. It's the heart of what happens in the Gospel. Now, people despise this doctrine today. We sing songs about it. There's other people who would call themselves Christians who this turns their stomach. That is a tragic, tragic thing. There's people who malign this idea that Christ becomes a curse for us, that He has to die on the cross And they say, 'That's just bloody cross religion. That's barbaric.' But the truth is as inescapable as it is scandalous. Christ stands in the place of sinners. He absorbs their punishment by dying a death of shame.

17 · The pastor expounds verse 14 to show that Christ's curse accomplishes two specific purposes: bringing Abraham's blessings to the Gentiles and granting the promised Holy Spirit through faith — an exchange of curse for blessing

And here's why. Christ becomes a curse for us. And in verse 14, Paul says, 'So that.' In other words, here's the reason why. So that in Christ Jesus, the blessings of Abraham might come to the Gentiles. So that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. It's not just that the curse goes away. It's that the curse and the blessing are exchanged.

18 · The pastor unpacks the stunning irony of the cross: the only person who perfectly kept the law and deserved blessing instead receives the curse, so that His earned blessings could be transferred to lawbreakers — a complete exchange of curse for blessing through His death

Now, there's some massive irony here. This passage is ripe with irony. Think about this. The only perfect keeper of the law— there was one person who perfectly kept the law 100% of the time, and the only person to ever do that, to ever perfectly keep the law's requirements, the only person who's ever actually deserving of receiving the blessings of the promise is now placed under a curse. Finally, someone's kept the covenant! And now Christ undergoes the penalty for the covenant breaker, so that, so that the blessings of His obedience might flow to us. In His death, everything that sin should have made ours was made His. Did you catch that? In His death, everything that sin should have placed on us was placed on Him. What should have been our inheritance became His. And everything that was Christ's possession, every blessing that He had earned for His obedience, was now made ours. Our curse is gone, and it's nothing but blessing. It's the things we were singing about this morning. Now, if the nail pins our curse to Christ's body, then His blood is the means by which His blessings flow to us.

19 · The pastor synthesizes the dual purpose of Christ's curse: (1) to bring Abraham's covenantal blessings to the Gentiles, reversing the curse echoed at Mount Ebal, and (2) to grant the Holy Spirit as promised in Isaiah, with both blessings flowing from penal substitutionary atonement

Jesus becomes a curse so that Abraham might become a blessing to the Gentiles, namely, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. The reason, Paul is saying, God can relate to us like a father to a son is found in the cross, because He crucifies His own Son. Paul reveals the wisdom of God, Jesus Christ was crucified, that Abraham's blessings might come, that we could be his God, that instead of hearing all the people echo amen for the curses, we would hear all the people echo amen for the blessings. Faith ensures that we We have a union with Christ. It cleaves us to all the blessings that flow from Abraham, blessings that continually get more detailed as Scripture unfolds. There's a second reason God crucifies the Son. Paul says in this text, it's not just so we can get the blessings of Abraham, it's also so that we can receive God's Spirit. He's making an allusion here to Isaiah 44:18. Isaiah 44:3 and other places. For I will pour water on the thirsty land and streams on the dry ground. I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring and my blessing on your descendants. The blessing of Abraham is the Spirit, and the blessing of the Spirit comes through the penal substitutionary death of Jesus. Because the law-keeper gets cursed, we receive the Spirit of God.

20 · The pastor applies the doctrine of curse-bearing to both extremes — it crushes self-righteousness and also relieves condemnation, calling the congregation to daily cast their failures at the cross and trust that the Spirit wipes away condemnation and grants assurance

Now, a little bit ago when we were talking about the law's limitations, we drew some application just in terms of remembering that as we live in light of that, it has a lot to say about self-righteousness, about propping yourself up in terms of moral superiority and leaving the gospel behind, taking on attitudes of judgmentalism without regard to your own failings. Well, the flip side is also true. The exchange of blessing and curse should be a balm. Faith crushes self-righteousness, but it's also helpful to a person who might become so aware of sin that they just walk around with this cloud of condemnation hanging over them. Condemnation is not a fruit of the Spirit. The exchange that happens here when Paul says you've put faith in Christ, he's saying you've put faith in the fact that he took the curse He took the condemnation. You're now united with Him. You receive His blessings. You don't walk around as one who's waiting to get zapped, if you will. That's not the way you think. Living in light of this truth means that there's a joyful, hopefully daily, casting of cares and burdens and anxieties because of your failures at the foot of the cross and recognizing the Spirit wipes away condemnation. The Spirit grants assurance.

21 · The pastor uses Luther's biography as an illustration of someone who was consumed by condemnation before grasping the gospel, establishing Luther's credibility as someone who speaks from experience about fighting condemnation with the gospel

I love how Luther puts this. Luther teaches us how to fight condemnation with the gospel. And he knew something about condemnation. If you know something about Luther, the whole reason he runs into the Gospel and the Scriptures is because he was one guilty dude. He could have never passed that test to become a police officer. I mean, he'd have gotten the whole polygraph wrong, he was so guilty. He was just consumed by condemnation over his sins. He confessed so much that his confessor was like, would you just stop it already? I can't handle that you were just in here 5 minutes ago. Go home for a little bit. At least let them build up for a while before you come back. I mean, he's consumed with this sense of condemnation before he grasps the sense of the gospel. So when Luther says, you know what the gospel does to condemnation, he's speaking from experience.

22 · The pastor cites Luther's instruction on fighting condemnation with the Word of God, then synthesizes the sermon's argument: the law's obligations are unattainable, but faith in Christ unites us to His perfections, granting us Abraham's blessings and the Spirit's testimony that we are God's children, not condemned

That's what he says. Battle against that feeling, condemnation, and say, Even though I feel myself completely crushed and swallowed by sin and see God as a hostile and wrathful Judge, yet in fact this is not true. It is only my feelings that think so. The Word of God, which I ought to follow in these anxieties rather than my own consciousness, teaches much differently, namely that God is near to the brokenhearted and he saves the crushed in spirit, and that he does not despise a broken and contrite heart. The obligations of the law are unattainable for everyone in This room. The law has no ability to justify any of us. But that shouldn't lead us to condemnation if we have faith in Christ, because he was able. And just as he takes our curse upon himself, the cross promises us that by faith we are united to him in all of his perfections. And so we receive all the blessings of Abraham, and we receive the blessing of the Spirit. And the Spirit testifies against a sense of guilt, against a sense of ongoing condemnation. The Spirit testifies that you are sons and daughters of the living God.

23 · The pastor closes the sermon by calling the congregation to prayer

Would you bow your heads with me?