January 28, 2025: Tuesday Bible Study on Paul’s letter to the Galatians 3:10 - 14
May the blessing and compassion of our Lord Jesus Christ fill your life.
A quick reminder is that Friday we will be eating out with the Foodies of Faith at Cheddars at 11:30AM. Call the office if you want to join our group. Sunday is our annual congregational meeting at 8:30AM preceded by carry-in brunch items at 8AM. This meeting is for members to set our program budgets and to elect Council members for this year.
Though it may seem cold these days here in the desert, Jesse and I experienced at least 6 days of our twelve-day trip in temperatures below freezing. On the roads we saw many trucks that had slid off the road or crashed on the road in the storm that came right after we had driven through on our way to Michigan. Those trucks and cars certainly must have caused terrible traffic tie ups on the four lane interstates on which we traveled. They blocked the traffic from getting through to where it was headed. To put it simply in today's reading from Galatians, the law was just such a block, according to Paul, preventing the Jews who tried to live by that law which was brought to them by Moses from God. The law's purpose was to build and maintain a community made up of a wide variety of groups, from the Hebrews of Egypt to the wilderness tribes which joined them on their journey to the promised land. It was God's intent that these widely different communities could come together in unity. As we know from the OT, there were constant issues between the people, with Hebrews being drawn in to the worship of a golden calf. But this covenant with God became the foundation of the Jewish Torah, and the way in which Jews and Gentiles must live in order to be right with God under the Torah. But Paul, a former Pharisee, ignores all of the Jewish law for being right with God, and moves immediately to claiming that it is only by faith and trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, just as Abraham had done, with his faith being reconned to him as righteousness. It may well be that it was only because Paul was such an authority in the law that this view of how the Spirit gifts people with faith, and that by faith, through Jesus Christ, being right with God is possible. The language that the law was a curse and a block to the elect of God, the Jews, necessarily drew people to Christ who bore the burden/block of the curse of the law, paying the price with his perfect life, making it possible for everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike, to be made right with God through faith. Just as the wreckers and cranes cleared the blockages on the freeways of the snowstorm area of our country, Christ also cleared the burden of the curse of the law by completing it with His sacrifice and death.
I know that this seems to be a quite short study on this passage, but clear thinking makes this passage a quick read when we come to understand that Paul tells us that God is the one who replaced the failure of the law in the face of human sin, with the sacrifice of the one true lamb, His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and just as God told Abraham that he would carry this faith into the world to all people, Christ brought to reality, the means by which this could happen, and is still happening.
With love in Christ, Pastor Kim
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