Law vs. Faith
I'll include a link to the entire chapter of Galatians 3 here, as the subject matter is woven through this chapter verse by verse. The introduction, however, bears some discussion, and probably more discussion than the whole rest of the chapter which is pretty straightforward.
In Galatians 3:1-5, the Galatians (meaning several churches of Galatia) are called foolish by Paul. Paul wants to know who has bewitched them that they ceased to obey the truth they had been taught after having received the Holy Spirit. I mention this last fast from verse 2 to emphasize this. Even Spirit filled believers can be drawn away from the truth of the gospel if they stop listening to the Spirit! Some denominations have a once saved always saved belief. You can look at Dake's 210 Plain Laws and Warnings if you are of this opinion. After a person stops listening to the Holy Spirit and lets false beliefs creep in, they are on the road to falling away from God completely.
I'm not sure what the dividing point is. I'm pretty sure that this chapter was written to stop them in their tracks of going back under the law and get back to relying on faith. So they probably weren't there yet, or at least most weren't. Hopefully Paul's warning to stop trusting in the law was sufficient and they put their faith back in Christ. But I am certain that the Holy Spirit wasn't the one trying to get them to go back to Judaism.
You see, Satan offers up all sorts of false religions to people. He has been doing that since early Bible times. Through most of the Old Testament (at least post the giving of the law), the Israelites had a national true religion. It was God ordained until Jesus came and died for everyone's sins. Now they didn't always follow it. The oftentimes drifted into the false religions which surrounded them. But overall, they eventually came back under God's umbrella.
Gentiles could adopt this religion as well and come under the law of God and so also could be in His grace before Christ. But post crucifixion, Judaism became just another false religion. It had served its purpose with God and God had moved on. Not all of His people moved with Him. In addition, with the destruction of the temple and the ceasing of sacrifices, even their ability to follow their false religion became impossible. It's been almost 2,000 years since a sacrifice in Judaism had any significance or purpose. It's just another false religion now.
But for us today, the main point of this part of scripture is simply this. If Paul were to examine your life, the church you attend, the online church to which you listen if you can't or don't want to attend church or the online video producers who might not even be a church, the denomination that church is part of, and the church as a whole, would he ask the same thing? "O foolish Galatians, who hat bewitched you?"
There have been a tremendous number of divisions in the church over its existence. If you're interested, you can find some of the reasons why through various search engines. I won't bother to list them all here. But the basic reasons boil down to either a group of believers were listening to the Holy Spirit and moved on while the rest of the church which wasn't listening to God stayed put or a group of believers were like the Galatians, not listening to the Holy Spirit and they moved on while the church, listening to the Holy Spirit, stayed put. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. Every break comes down one of those two basic truths.
I don't believe that God would have preached unity in the body of Christ as strongly as He did, including in this letter, unless He meant it. That doesn't mean that every church has to be identical. We don't all have to be having sermons read in Latin and have choirs singing Latin doxologies or longer hymns.
But at the same time, everything should be more united than we are. At this point, only God will be able to put the pieces back together because --- history. Everyone doesn't look to the pope as God's master head of the church because in history, some pope's should have never been pope and made some really bad decisions and all the Cardinals and Bishops who should have reined in the pope if they were listening to the Spirit didn't do so. So they lost the Protestants. That doesn't mean that there haven't been some great popes since. But once trust is broken and people held to be above reproach are tarnished, it's hard to put faith in the office ever again.
For a break that should never have happened example, John Smith made his own bad choices, and the church lost what would become the LDS group. For an example where the church moved in a direction at God's leading, look at the Azusa Street Revival. There, when the Pentecostal movement started with a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the rest of Christianity should have got on board. Many churches did, but many didn't, and some denominations rejected it completely.
In these, and in many more instances, Paul would have been saying something like "You foolish Galatians" to one or the other side, depending on the reason for the division. The splits are still coming. When the splits aren't about sin, doctrine, and salvation, it might not matter too much. But recent splits today are centering on LGBTQ+ issues, women in leadership positions, and even political leanings. And these things should not be happening. Some shouldn't even be a discussion in the church at all. The Bible is clear on what God has called sin (Romans 1:18-32 for a long list). And also, "Render therefore unto Caesar..." (Luke 20:25) and all that.
Regardless of the remainder of my comments on the rest of this chapter, where Paul lays out what was an issue for the Galatians, I ask you to prayerfully consider where you are at, where your church is at, where you should attend if you are avoiding church attendance, and where your denomination is heading if you're part of a denomination (and if your church isn't, why not?)
The battle is against Satan and his work. It shouldn't be among ourselves. Even if it would take an act of God to correct the various courses of all the Christian denominations and get them united again (which would be awesome), it isn't out of reason for the Christian churches of each town or city division for large cities, to band together, put aside their differences, and work together to save their city for God.
Everyone has a place and a setting in which they feel comfortable. The very most important thing is for all Christians to seek the Holy Spirit baptism. God must be directing each church's efforts for there to be any hope for unity. But each person is different. I belong to a church where there's a worship team, electric guitars, loud drums, and repetitive choruses. I'd much rather attend a church where hymns were sung, but I don't want to give up the presence of the Holy Spirit in the service to get that. Work together. Be filled with the Spirit, and listen to Him and you'll know what God expects of His church in dealing with whatever "faith vs. law" issue you're facing today.
God hasn't changed, but His church sure has, and many of those changes weren't for the better. Let's try to reverse that process!
To finally get back to the issues the Galatians were having, Paul leads into this chapter asking if they received the baptism of the Holy Spirit by the law or by faith in Jesus Christ. He asks them if all the things they have suffered as Christians have been in vain or if they are going to choose to remain Christians, directed to perfection and holy living by the Holy Spirit, or if they are going to go back under the bondage of the law.
Paul points out that it is the Holy Spirit that was ministering to them via the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including miracles that were being done by various Spirit filled people as proof that God was with them and such things were never possible under the law of God given by Moses.
Purpose of Law
In Galatians 3:6-9, Paul leads into the history before the law was given. The same faith in God which is both a gift of the Spirit and a fruit of the Spirit was the same faith that Abraham was blessed with and which was counted to him for righteousness. Those who are Christians, having that same faith in God and Jesus Christ's sacrifice for their sin, are by their nature children of nature. We are grafted into the promise of God for salvation. We have the same blessings that Abraham enjoyed because of our faithfulness to God.
Galatians 3:14-18 continues with the discussions of Abraham. God had a purpose of reaching the Gentiles so that they could get the promise of the Holy Spirit poured out on them (which was only provided to particular individuals at particular times during the Old Testament Jewish religion, when God needed a judge or a prophet for example).
After God's promise to Abraham, it would be 430 years before the law was given. But that wasn't the fulfillment of the promise. It would take many more centuries before Jesus would come, die, go to heaven, and then send the Holy Spirit in Acts 2.
In Galatians 3:19-21, Paul speaks to the purpose of the law. It was given because of the sinfulness of mankind in order to show man how they should live as holy people. It was given to show how to temporarily bridge the gap between man and God until Jesus came. It wasn't a final solution. It was a temporary measure until Jesus came.
And we should be very thankful for God's plan. Can you imagine the number of sacrifices required for 8 to 10 billion people if God tarries? The estimates I've seen on Google point to a cumulative number of humans so far at around 117 billion. Nearly 7% of all humans who ever lived are now alive. Think of that staggering number and then how many animals would have needed to be sacrificed under the law for that many people! That's just a silly aside and really isn't relevant to the discussion.
But the end result of all the sacrifice was that it still was insufficient to be a permanent bridge between God and man. Until Jesus died, the righteous dead went to a place sometimes labeled "Abraham's bosom" that was separated by a wide gulf from the place of torment of the unrighteous dead. They had to stay there until Jesus won the battle with Satan on the cross.
Purpose of Christ and the Spirit
In Galatians 3:10-13, Paul turns to the work of Christ. He points out that those who live under the law are cursed. If you wish to be saved under the law, then you have to follow the entire law. You can't pick and choose which parts you like.
You have to do all the right things and none of the wrong things. And remember, always, the Sermon on the Mount. In it, Jesus put teeth into the law. Over and over He declared that the law held this standard (of things not to do or things to do), but He declared God's true standards and the standards we were expected to live by were beyond both of those boundaries that the law had set. The law said don't kill, but Christ said don't curse someone to die. If someone strikes you, turn the other cheek. It's good reading if you haven't read it lately (Matthew 5-7).
So the reality is that the law is very difficult to follow. There's a reason why the Jewish priests were routinely sacrificing animals to cover the sin of the people. But the Jewish faith was only supposed to point to Christ as the ultimate sacrifice to bridge the gap fully between man and God.
Once it had served its purpose, it was of no more use and should have passed away. The law is still there to condemn sin and sinners to hell if they refuse to accept Christ as Savior and don't follow the Holy Spirit. But its curse is gone. We have to have faith in the atoning blood of Jesus, and rely on the Holy Spirit to help you to correct your life to one that is pleasing to God.
It sometimes isn't easy. This chapter was a real struggle, for example, to figure out what God wanted said. Just because you're a Christian doesn't mean things are easy. They are frequently hard as people turn against you as you live out your faith to the best of your ability.
Galatians 3:22-29 goes back to talk about the work Christ did. His dying as a perfect sacrificial lamb, having endured and triumphed over all of Satan and the world's temptations. Once Jesus died, He descended and led that group of souls who were righteous that I mentioned in the last section to heaven. Now, when we die, that's where we go if we're righteous. If not, you go to the torment side, awaiting the great white throne judgment and eventual banishment to the lake of fire.
Jesus provided the acceptable righteous sacrifice for sin that God required to bridge the gap. The law was never sufficient. Paul declares that the law was meant to be a training school to lead us to Christ. The law, combined with the prophesies about the messiah should have made it clear to the Jewish people that Christ was the messiah and that He had performed the final sacrifice required under the law in order to save, once and for all.
Sadly, not only did many of the Jewish people of the day fail to see the truth (or were so disillusioned that their messiah was not yet planning to break off Roman rule and set up his eternal kingdom) that they rejected Christianity. Eventually, there wee no more sacrifices to be made.
All of the Jewish people who chose Christ, along with all the gentiles who had accepted Christ, were now then a united body of Christians. There was no difference between the Jewish or the Greek or the Roman or the barbarian believer in God's eyes. They were all children of God by their faith in God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Your citizenship didn't matter, your sex didn't matter, your social position didn't matter. God had made all one.
Think back to the first part of my discussion of this chapter. Seek out how you can all become one in the area where you live. It's what God wants.
When we get to heaven, I don't think there's going to be a Catholic suburb and a Protestant suburb and a few ghettos for the groups that just barely made it.... There's going to be one heaven and we're all going to be expected to live together in peace and harmony. Let's try to get it right today as well.