Message 03-12-17

Galatians 2:19-20

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. 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.

Series: Crucified with Christ

Raised from Law to Life

Series Thesis and Intro

Galatians 2:19-20 tells us there are 4 things that are true of every Person who is Crucified with Christ. These are not terms of discipleship; but rather deep realities that, if we will embrace them and understand them, will transform our lives.

  • Every person who is crucified with Christ is raised from law to life
  • Every person who is crucified with Christ is raised from self to Christ
  • Every person who is crucified with Christ is raised from flesh to faith
  • Every person who is crucified with Christ is raised from loss to love
  1. The whole passage is in past or present tense.
  2. Past: I died. I have been crucified. It is no longer. The Son of God loved and gave
  3. Present: I might (right now) live to God. Christ lives in me. I now live. I live by faith.
  4. When Christians talk about our resurrection, we tend to talk about a future event. But Paul is telling us something for now. We are Resurrection People.
  1. The whole passage talks about a change that is molecular, not behavioral
  2. These are matters of life and death; death and resurrection
  3. This is not guidance for life; but rather the for life -- deep realities

This week: Raised from law to life

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.

Questions to answer:

  1. What is the law and how does it work?
  2. What does this law tell me about my life?
  3. What does it tell me about my death?
  4. What happened to me that ended the effect of the law upon me?
  1. What is the law and how does it work?
  1. What the Law is NOT
  2. Not the whole Old Testament Hebrew Law -- the Law of Moses
  3. Not the Ten Commandments.

The Old Testament Law and the Ten Commandments point me in the right direction. They tell me is that all lawlessness is sin, and that a perfect God cannot tolerate sin in his presence; but some of you may be sitting there thinking, “well, I'm not a Jew, so the Hebrew Law doesn’t apply to me. God can't hold a law against me that he gave to a very specific group of people. That wouldn't be fair.” And you’d be right.

  1. What the Law IS
  2. A very ancient Law
  3. A law that applies to all humankind

The Law of sin and death

Romans 8:1-2 “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.”

  1. We were made to live forever:

Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

  1. God gave man one and only one law to keep him alive:

Genesis 2:15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

  1. The Man and the Woman broke that law:

Genesis 3:6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. (Naked = knowledge of sin/guilt)

  1. The Man and Woman experience the Law of Sin and Death

Genesis 3:17 “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

  1. The ground is cursed - our relationship with nature is screwed up
  2. Childbearing becomes painful and dangerous; even deadly
  3. Work becomes toil and painful
  4. The miracle of the image of God in us dies and returns to dust
  1. What does this law tell me about my life?
  2. Life will be difficult -- many twists and turns
  3. Life will tend toward death
  4. Life will not naturally be lived toward God -- I will tend to forget God
  1. What does it tell me about my death?
  2. Death won’t naturally bring me to God
  3. The result of death will be dust, not union
  1. What happened to me that ended the effect of the law upon me?

A changed Identity. The answer to the riddle “Through the law I died to the law” is that something embedded in the law has changed my relationship to the law so that I am no longer liable to the penalty of the law.

The law says that because I have sinned I have to die.

In the current Western Culture of identity politics in which we all live, we are told to embrace the idea that the narrative or story I believe about myself is “true” and therefore, defines who I am. I identify as a middle aged, middle income, married, white guy American.

My skin color, family background, ethnicity, sexual orientation and experience, and a host of other factors have a huge impact on how I live life; no doubt. I can even talk about life-altering experiences I may have had along the way; defining moments that left their mark on my body or my psyche. Most of the way, I will spend my time reading back the story of my life to friends and family who may be interested. The particulars of what I tell at various stages of my life will change somewhat; but fundamentally, it is the same life story I’m telling.

The law says that because I have sinned I have to die. But what if all that suddenly changed?

But what would happen if someone came up to me and said, “I am changing you from an American mutt into an Ethiopian. I would look at that person and say, “That’s interesting; but I don’t see how that could be. But then I go and look in the mirror and my skin color and all my features have suddenly changed. That kind of re-alignment would first be devastating; then transforming.

See, it isn’t just my skin color that has changed. The kind of hair I have or don’t have on my head has changed. The set of my cheekbones is different. My eyes are a different color. My nose is shaped differently. My body is tall and lanky instead of… this. My bone structure, my blood, the diseases my body is prone to are all suddenly different.

A change like that would have a profound effect on all my interactions. My relationship with my wife and children would change. Some of my friends wouldn’t recognize me perhaps. Those I meet on the street might suddenly be a bit afraid of me because there aren’t many Ethiopians in Wethersfield or in Windsor.

Another metaphor...

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Eustace, a very difficult little boy, turns into a dragon and tries and tries to get the dragon skin off.

“Then the lion said — but I don’t know if it spoke — You will have to let me undress you. I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was jut the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know — if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.

“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on — and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.”

Of course, Eustace was always a dragon. Aslan always had to undress him so he could be a real boy. And then Aslan had to baptize him.

  1. Cf: Hebrews 9:22-24 - Shadow and Substance

“Under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. 23 Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.24 For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.

That means that the sacrifices meant to placate God couldn't do the job because they always were nothing more than we, in our heart of hearts knew they were: pictures. They were no more the real thing than a portrait on canvas is the person it portrays.

In the Incarnation, the Real broke into the Ideal; in the Resurrection, the Ideal has broken BACK into the Real. The law was never anything more than a picture of something real in heaven. That is why the law, weakened as it was by our sin became even less like the real thing; it became an impressionist painting.

b. “The substance having come, he [Paul] had no longer any regard to the shadow.” -- Matthew Henry: Commentary on the Whole Bible. 1708-1710. Digital, v. 6.

C.S. Lewis imagines a busload of people from a place very like earth, only greyer and rainier, and darker than the worst of London’s famed fogs. The passengers are transported to a place very like the Biblical idea of heaven. After they get off the bus, the narrator of the adventure relates what the place is like:

“Then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they always had been; as all the men I had known had been perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn't break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn't twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond. There was a leaf-a young tender beechleaf, lying in the grass beside it. I tried to pick the leaf up: my heart almost cracked with the effort, and I believe I did just raise it. But I had to let it go at once; it was heavier than a sack of coal. As I stood, recovering my breath with great gasps and looking down at the daisy, I noticed that I could see the grass not only between my feet but through them. I also was a phantom. Who will give me words to express the terror of that discovery? "Golly!" thought I. "I'm in for it this time."

-- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, MacMillan & Co., New York. 1946.

“We are ghosts and shadows and our world but a cheap copy of the heavenly one to come, like a landscape painting compared to the real place. In The Last Battle, the friends of Narnia enter into heaven only to find that it’s a new Narnia, like the old one, only bigger, but not really bigger—better to say,fuller, more complete. As one of them puts it, it’s “More like the real thing” (210). And because it’s more real than our world, everything in it means so much more than things do here. If you’ve ever had an experience so wonderful that it made you think, “This is how things ought to be in real life,” maybe you’ve experienced a taste of heaven, a place compared to which, Lewis says, our own world is just ‘shadowlands.’”

-- CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society. ed. Robert Trexler. New York: The New York C.S. Lewis Society, July 2004.

Conclusion

Are you “in Christ?” Do you have the assurance that the Law of Sin and Death no longer has any hold on you? Are you raised from law to life? If this is not present reality, Jesus needs to undress you and clothe you in the reality you were intended to have at the foundation of the world. Righteous, pure, clean, eternal. Raised from law to life NOW.