Galatians Is the Antidote to Legalism and Antinomianism
Paul’s strong admonition in Galatians 1 helped spur Luther and other Reformers to recover the true gospel in the Reformation. The same gospel must be asserted and reasserted in every generation. Peter sought to stir up our minds by way of reminder because we are a forgetful people (2 Pet. 1:13). And the first thing to go, usually, is the gospel. But the gospel we reassert must be the gospel of God’s grace in Christ. As Paul points out in Galatians 1, all other so-called “gospels” are the broad road that leads to destruction (Gal. 1:6–9).
I’ve found that many Christians, post-conversion, tend toward legalism or antinomianism in their pursuit of sanctification.
I’ve seen this trend both in churches I’ve pastored and in Christian friends. One woman grew up in a strict Reformed Baptist home. She always tended toward legalism and fought it biblically for years. Another friend was converted in his mid-thirties after spending many years searching for joy in bars and honky-tonks. He has battled an antinomian impulse for many years. Others pendulum-swung after conversion: from legalism to license, or vice versa.
Not all Christians struggle deeply in one of these areas, but the tendency is widespread. That’s why we so desperately need Galatians.
Give My Life Back to Jesus?
My discovery of the spiritual riches in Galatians came at the end of a long road. For more than a decade, I tried to follow Jesus by “rededicating” my life to him over and over and over again, maybe two hundred times. I was converted at age 10 and was fortunate to grow up in church. That church preached the gospel pretty well. My sin. His grace. Repentance. Faith. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. God’s anger at sin and sinners was always present.
But discipleship and sanctification? Not so much.
Although my childhood church helped me understand how to become a Christian, it took me a lot longer to learn about the pilgrimage that follows salvation — the need for daily repentance and killing sin, praying for the fruit of the Spirit, and other crucial elements of sanctification. I lived as if justification came by grace through faith but sanctification came by law.
My life was a frustrating merry-go-round of sin — rededication, law-keeping in my own strength, sin, rededication, law-keeping — you get the picture. I had to keep proving to God that I was serious about him. Practically, it was a strange brew of Baptist nominalism and Roman Catholic formalism.
Sanctified by Grace
Then, at a national conference for Christian men in 1995, I heard a plainly worded sermon on Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but 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.
Through the preaching of that passage, God worked in my heart. The gates of paradise swung open (to use a phrase from Luther), and I walked through. At age 28, I understood (perhaps for the first time) that both justification and sanctification are by grace — I was saved by grace and am now being sanctified by grace. Though I hadn’t yet begun to study the Reformation in any depth, I comprehended more clearly two vital solas: sola fide and sola gratia.
I understood how they applied to my daily walk with Jesus: I was saved (justified) by grace through faith alone, and I am being saved (sanctified) by grace through faith — the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God. For all the effort involved in the Christian life, we grow, at bottom, by faith in Jesus Christ, as we rest on the grace he gives us. The cycle of rededication, sin, and rededication stopped; my growth in the Lord accelerated, and I eventually entered the ministry with a heart to help others.
And I fell in love with Galatians. Nearly 25 years later, I have preached or taught through Galatians five times and have read meditatively through it dozens of times.
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One Thing My Parents Did Right: A Home Grounded in Reality
When I was around 10 years old, I was a little philosopher piecing together life’s meaning in a world without God. I once confidently told my mom the purpose of life was to pursue happiness. I was sure that in a world devoid of any transcendent standards to which I might be held accountable, this was the only sensible answer to life’s meaning. But my mom quickly rebuked her little hedonist and told me life was about more than enjoying yourself. Life is about helping others and making the world a better place, and while happiness is a good thing, it can’t be the ultimate thing. Her words rang true though I couldn’t assemble a solid foundation on which to place these ideas.
My mom is the single greatest influence on my life, and the Lord used her in a vital way to bring me to a saving knowledge of Christ. She laid a framework that made the Christian worldview intelligible and, eventually, compelling to me. I’m certain my story is like countless others where God worked through the discipline and instruction of parents to reach their children.
But one thing makes my situation unique: my mom isn’t a Christian.
For most of my childhood, she’s been an atheist. During my growing up years, she talked about church as punishment. She’d even threaten to take me and my siblings to church when we were misbehaving. Yet in many ways, the manner in which Mom raised us betrayed dependence on a Christian outlook on reality.
We were brought up with an unshakable sense that we lived in a morally charged world—meaning was derived from the world around us, not something we imposed on the world. We heard we weren’t the only significant people but rather part of a larger network of people who are just as important as us. My mom knew the most loving way to raise us was to teach us we weren’t the center of the universe.
Home Didn’t Revolve Around Us Kids
This was perhaps most clearly evident in the decisions my mom made for me growing up. While she cared about what I wanted, she was most concerned with what was best for me. If the two were in conflict, no amount of protesting on my part would change her mind. Our household didn’t revolve around my desires but around the fixed reality of the world I lived in.
I was taught to eat my vegetables, do my homework as soon as I got home from school, and get eight or nine hours of sleep each night. I might not have always appreciated the wisdom of these rules, but even as a kid, I understood at least theoretically that they existed for my good.
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All You Need Is Love
Some of you will say, ‘It is just a lousy movie – why are you getting so worked up about it?’ OK, so call me a sentimental old fool. But some of you will share my reactions. Something very deep down inside of me is touched when I watch a movie like this. It is tapping into some very real things in my life – even if I am not quite sure what.
On the one hand, because we are all different, we all react to things differently. Some things that really speak to us, or really hit us, or really move us might leave others cold. But on the other hand, because we are all made in the image of God, we all have universal experiences, longings, inklings and desires.
This might be a very odd article then, in light of my first point above. But because of the second, many of you might relate. My title speaks of love: a universal human longing. We ALL want to be loved and accepted and cared for. Yet in this fallen and broken world, most of us have known little of this.
Indeed, the place where you should find the most love and care – the family home – so often disappoints. A child might know little love but plenty of abuse and rejection. A child might see his or her parents break up at an early age, shattering their world. Parents might walk out on a child, never to return.
Then again, friends might also leave us or betray us. Spouses might turn on us and turn away from us. Everywhere we see love being smashed, crushed and destroyed. So many people are walking wounded, having never known what it is to really be loved and accepted and embraced.
Of course it is the love of God that must be turned to when all human loves disappoint and depart. Yet so many know nothing of the love of God. Or if they do, as believers, it can be in the form of head knowledge only, with no real sense or experience of its reality.
I know many Christians who feel this way. Many say they do not know what it means that God loves them. Yes, they have all the biblical and theological knowledge, yet it seems to be something they cannot seem to grasp, to appropriate, to experience, to enjoy.
Oddly enough, I too have known this. One can have a head full of knowledge about the love of God, and yet daily struggle to really know it and experience it. It is a funny thing. But I know that even though we are all image-bearers of God, and because we are all alienated from him due to sin, that even after a new birth the sense of knowing God is not always immediately there.
OK, so I am rambling here, but the reason for this piece being penned is this: For perhaps the second time in maybe the last 15 years or so I have watched good hunks of a film on television which for some reason really spoke to me. Indeed, I found myself choking up more than I ever have before. The tears could not stop.
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All Over-Realized Eschatologies Are Attempts to Change the Rules of the Game
Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
We are to be what we are: mere Christians redeemed and sanctified by grace alone, through faith alone, and seeking to live according to God’s moral law, in union with Christ, out of gratitude for God’s free favor in Christ—not in order to be justified and saved but because we have been justified and saved.Some years ago, while explaining Heidelberg Catechism 114, on the moral law, I wrote, “Paul was not a Gnostic, a Valentinian, an Anabaptist, a Familist, nor an Antinomian. He was a sinner saved and justified freely through faith alone, a Christian living in union and communion with Christ, seeking to bring his life into conformity to all of God’s holy moral law.”
A reader wrote to ask what this paragraph means. It is a loaded with historical references that would take some time to explain but each of these represents some kind of over-realized eschatology. By that I mean someone who thinks that he has or can have heaven on earth right now. In order to have it each of these groups changed the rules of the game. In one way or another they got rid of God’s moral law, God’s grace, or God’s church.
The Gnostics (including the Valentinians) did by getting rid of God himself and by making themselves into gods. This is probably the dominant theology of our age. The Anabaptists certainly had an over-realized eschatology. They were not content to be mere Christians. They wanted to make themselves into apostles and fancied that they were super-spiritual—perhaps they were the Super Apostles of the sixteenth century?—who both mastered the law and were free from it. They did not need justification and salvation by grace alone, through faith alone and the basis of the imputed righteousness of Christ alone—the first generation of the Anabaptists rejected the Reformation solas. They fancied that they had the apostolic gifts and powers including tongues, being slain in the Spirit, and continuing revelation. They were the true precursors of American evangelicalism from 1800 to today. The Familists was a movement founded in the 1540s, in Emden. They were precursors to the early Pietist movement of Jakob Boehme (1575–1624). They were radical subjectivists who rejected the sacraments. Their views were adopted by the Quakers. Again, this is a manifestation of an over-realized eschatology.
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