Summer vacations are a great time to get away from the busyness of life and spend time with family and friends. For a number of years now, our family has enjoyed camping on some beautiful forest property that Catherine’s parents own. In late June, we somehow coordinated all of our busy schedules to spend another weekend there.

On our first night camping, just before bedtime, we did what we’ve done so many times before. We made our way to the lake with our flashlights, and all laid down on our backs on the small dock that just barely holds the four of us, and stared up at the night sky.

It’s really an incredible experience to gaze up at the millions upon millions of stars. As I lay there I was reminded of God’s conversation with Abraham thousands of years ago. God had just assured Abraham that his own son would be his heir. He took Abraham outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.”

I can imagine Abraham perhaps beginning to count. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, 30, and he must have soon given up trying to count the almost solid mass of white he saw.

Then God made his promise to Abraham: “So shall your descendants be.” And Abraham’s response, we’re told, is that he “believed the Lord”; and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.

Well, if you’ve been here for the last couple of weeks, you know we’re in the middle of a sermon series on Galatians, the Apostle Paul’s letter to a group of young churches. Our text for today is chapter 3, in which Abraham’s faith plays a leading role. Please stand as I read the first nine verses of chapter 3. I’ll be reading from the Revised Standard Version.

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so many things in vain? -- if it really is in vain. Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?

Thus Abraham "believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." So you see that it is men [and women] of faith who are the sons [and daughters] of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, "In you shall all the nations be blessed." So then, those who are men [and women] of faith are blessed with Abraham who had faith.

Well, it’s clear from this passage that Paul is one very exasperated apostle. There is frustration, maybe even a bit of anger and cynicism, in his words. He wants to shake the Galatians for wandering away from the truth they had been taught. Twice he accuses them of being “foolish.” Once he says they’ve been “bewitched.” What is it about faith that you don’t understand?

He can hardly believe the e-mails he’s received about the Galatians. They had begun their spiritual journey by hearing the good news and responding with faith, but now they’ve become legalistic, attempting to base their relationship with God on how diligently they kept the Old Testament laws.

“O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?…Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?”

We don’t have time today to cover all of Chapter 3, or to answer all the questions raised by the text. Instead, I want to provide a “birds-eye” view of the overall flow of the chapter.

If we borrowed language from the world of the theater, we might describe chapter 3 as a play – a three act drama that sweeps chronologically across redemption history, and tells the story of God’s work in justifying and saving his people.

Act 1 we could title “The Promise.”
Act 2 would be “The Law.”
Act 3 would be billed as “The Fulfillment.”
The Promise…the Law…and the Fulfillment.

Act 1: The Promise. Act 1 begins some 4,000 years ago – 2,000 years before the coming of Jesus, before Moses, before the ten commandments, before the giving of the Old Testament law

God has called a 75 year-old man named Abram to pack up his belongings, gather his family, leave his hometown, and move to an unknown land – one that God promised he would show to Abram. Abram’s response to this risky venture was one of faith. We’re told in Genesis 12:4 that “Abram went, as the Lord had told him.”

But Abram, or Abraham as he became known, was concerned that he had no heir by his wife, and they were both old. And so God made another promise to Abraham telling him that “your own son shall be your heir” and that his descendants would be as many as the stars of the sky.

Again, like his response to the move, Abraham’s response to this very difficult-to-fathom promise was one of faith, to trust God, and take Him at his word. No Old Testament law. No Jesus. Just faith that what God promised was true.

“Thus Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’” So you see that it is men and women of faith, like us today, who are the sons and daughters of Abraham.

Just as Abraham responded by faith, so too did the Galatians. But the Galatians were being led astray, or in Paul’s rather colorful language, they were “bewitched.” They had started their spiritual journey on the right foot, but they were now under the illusion that their faith alone wasn’t really sufficient to justify them, or put them in a right relationship with God.

“Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?” It’s a good question. How did you receive the Spirit?

Think back to where God has taken you in your journey with Him.

• What were the circumstances in your life when you first became aware of His presence?
• How did He meet you and draw you to Himself? How did you respond? Or are you just now beginning a journey with Him, and starting to open your heart to God by faith?
• What have been some of the formative spiritual influences in your life? Perhaps it was a parent, a teacher, a good friend, or maybe a book or a speaker at a camp or conference.
• How did you receive the Spirit?

I grew up in a non-Christian home with no religious education at all. When I went away to college, I met five Christians in the fraternity I joined at the beginning of my freshman year. For some reason, I accepted their invitation to join them for a Bible study that met for 30 minutes each morning.

It was there, over the course of about a month, that I met Jesus, and found my life slowly but steadily transformed. There were no rules, no laws. Just giving my heart to God by faith, trusting in His grace, and eagerly soaking in what I read each morning in the Bible.

“Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?”

Of course, Paul’s rhetorical question has but one answer. The Galatians became Christians by hearing with faith. The question is also a reminder for us that we have come to know God by faith, and by believing the good news of the gospel.

But like the Galatians, we often try to prove ourselves to God by what we do, or by how successful we are, or how busy we are. Or sometimes, we allow our pride to drown out our ability to accept His grace.

So Act 1 is about God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants, that justification comes by hearing God, and responding with faith.

Act 2 of salvation history: The Law. Paul fast forwards us through time, hundreds of years after Abraham, to the giving of the Old Testament law, where two images dominate the stage. First, the law as a custodian, and second, the law as a curse.

In verses 23 and 24, Paul writes that:

“before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith.”

So what does it mean that the law was our custodian? The law was given by God to his people to establish a benchmark of behavior. It had its purpose in time, after God’s promise to Abraham, and before the fulfillment of that promise in Jesus.

When our children were growing up, Catherine and I established rules of acceptable behavior around the house, both explicitly and by our example. We would tell Janet and David to “clear your dishes from the table,” or “don’t hit each other,” or “wash your hands when you come home from school.” And as custodians of our children, we also tried to model for them what it means to live by faith, to be generous, and to be shaped by God’s heart for His world. A parent or a custodian provides a stable point of reference during a limited period of time.

Now that our children are in their 20s, we’re no longer their custodian. They’re adults. They’re free to make their own decisions, and behave as they want without our rules, and without our oversight – a scary thought sometimes!

The custodial bank accounts we established for them when they were younger, are no longer custodial accounts, but accounts in their own name.

Our hope, of course, is that the rules we established and tried to model for them during their formative years would now be written on their hearts, and that they would make wise decisions without our oversight, because of who they have become as people.

So, first the law was our custodian before Jesus came. The second image from Chapter 3 is that the law is a curse.

While the intent of the law is good, it has a problem, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that we have a problem. It’s impossible for us to be justified by God on the basis of trying to follow the law, because we’re unable to keep it, and the law becomes a curse to us. Paul writes in verse 10:

“Cursed be every one who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them.”

Both by nature, and by the things we choose to do, and not to do, we are sinners, and we can’t live up to the standards of the law. The law is this harsh and rigid task master that has no spirit of grace, but only demands strict compliance.

In my job at the University of Washington, I’m responsible for managing contracts for the design and construction of buildings on campus. There’s a standard paragraph in all of our contracts that says the University can terminate a contract if the other party doesn’t meet any of the terms of the agreement.

A few months ago, I was negotiating a contract with an architect who objected to this termination language. His concern was that the University could fire his company if they failed to dot their “i”s or cross their “t”s. The contract language was too rigid for him, and he viewed the termination provision as a potential problem that could become, in effect, a huge financial curse for his company.

In one way, the termination paragraph of the contract is like the Old Testament law. It demands total compliance, and failure to meet any of its requirements has consequences – either termination of a contract, or being under the curse of the law, and not justified by God.

It was to this law, to this custodian and curse, that the Gentile Galatians were turning, despite the good news of the gospel they had heard. No wonder Paul thinks they’ve been “bewitched,” and calls them “foolish.” They had started their relationship with God by faith, without the Old Testament law.

But now they’d been hoodwinked by Jewish agitators, convinced that their salvation and justification before God depended on complying with the Jewish law of circumcision, and observing various religious festivals, instead of relying on God’s grace. These rituals, Paul told another church in the area, the Colossians, are “only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

And so the Galatians had submitted to a custodian instead of being freed by a liberator, and substituted the blessings of faith for the curse of the law. “O foolish Galatians!” Why have you turned to a different gospel? How can you forget that your acceptance with God is based on your faith, and His grace? How can you throw away your freedom in Christ and bind yourselves to rituals and laws?

So what does this mean for us today? Well, clearly we don’t face pressures like the Galatians did from Jewish leaders to comply with Old Testament laws. But just as the Old Testament law distracted the Galatians from their faith, we too find ourselves distracted by things that get in the way of our faith, of remembering how we received the Spirit, and how we came to know God in Jesus Christ.

Our culture provides us with a wide array of alternatives to choose from that would distract us from our faith.

• Maybe it’s our addiction to success – having the right house in the right neighborhood, the latest car, the perfect job, the most stylish fashions – that has distracted us from remembering that we belong to God by faith, and maybe we’ve begun to rely on our success to prove ourselves to God.
• Or maybe it’s just that the busyness of our lives has sucked away all of our time and energy distracting us from taking our faith seriously, and convincing us that all of the good things we do are what make us acceptable to God.

The list could go on.

The 16th century reformer, Martin Luther, had a very vivid analogy of what it’s like when we become distracted and add works to our faith as the basis of our relationship with God. He said that we’re like:

“a dog who runs along a stream with a piece of meat in his mouth, and deceived by the reflection of the meat in the water, opens his mouth to snap at it, and so loses both the meat and the reflection.”

In what ways do we get distracted and try to add things to our faith? What do we hold up as more important than faith? Have we been bewitched like the Galatians?

Act 1 of our three act play was about God’s promise to Abraham and Abraham being justified by faith, and the importance of us remembering what we’ve heard and how we’ve come to faith. In Act 2 we were introduced to the law with its two images: as a custodian and a curse, and how the law and other things distract us from living by faith.

Finally, we come to Act 3: The Fulfillment – the fulfillment of God’s purposes in bringing salvation to the world.

In this final act of the drama, it is Jesus who plays the central role.

Four thousand years ago, God promised to Abraham that his descendants would number more than all the stars in the sky. Abraham’s response to God was to believe God by faith, even when the promise seemed impossible.

We are the heirs of Abraham – his spiritual descendants – part of a huge multitude of other believers across the centuries and throughout the world today, who, like Abraham, have heard God’s call, believed Him, and responded in faith, as He is revealed in Jesus Christ. In Paul’s final pen stroke of Chapter 3, he writes: “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.”

And not only are we “heirs according to the promise,” but the law has lost its power and potency over us. With the coming of Jesus, Paul notes in verse 25,

“we are no longer under a custodian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons [and daughters] of God, through faith.”

If the law is no longer our custodian, neither is it a curse any more, for in Jesus the curse of the law has been reversed: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.” (verse 14).

From promise to law to fulfillment – this is the story of God’s redemptive work in history, in calling people to Himself.

The good news and hope of the gospel that the Galatians heard, and that we have heard, is that we don’t have to prove ourselves to God by adding anything to our faith. He calls us to listen to Him with our hearts, to believe His word, and to respond in faith to His call upon our lives. Instead of a law that binds us, He gives us His Spirit within us.

The God who created the universe, who spoke to Abraham under the night sky, who gave His people the law as a custodian, who sent His son Jesus to free us from the curse of the law – longs to know us, to have us remember that we are a new creation in Him, and to cast aside all that would distract us from hearing Him and responding by faith.

The drama of God’s salvation work in history in calling His people to Himself continues today and tomorrow and the next day, even in the midst of the pain and suffering and sorrows of our lives and this world, as well as in the joys and hope and gladness of heart we experience.

Each day, we are part of God’s larger story. Each day, we make history as we choose to respond in faith to the One who loves us and gave Himself for us.

May we be people who hear God’s call in this generation and who respond in faith, believing that the One who calls us is faithful.