In what follows I will offer a meditation on Galatians 3:1–9, where Paul reminds the Galatians of the gospel. In doing so, he intends to calm their hearts, to fix their eyes back on the gospel, to give them the assurance they lost when they started listening to the message of outside teachers. We should begin by hearing the text:
You foolish Galatians! Who has cast a spell on you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? I only want to learn this from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh? Did you experience so much for nothing—if in fact it was for nothing? So then, does God give you the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law? Or is it by believing what you heard—just like Abraham who believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness? You know, then, that those who have faith, these are Abraham’s sons. Now the Scripture saw in advance that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and proclaimed the gospel ahead of time to Abraham, saying, All the nations will be blessed through you. Consequently, those who have faith are blessed with Abraham, who had faith. (CSB)
Bewitched and Beguiled
We see from the outset that genuine believers can become fools, since Paul says, “You foolish Galatians!” Surely, many of those who were tempted to rely on circumcision and the observance of the law for salvation were truly believers. And yet they had lost their heads and had forgotten where wisdom is to be found.
And the same can happen to us today, since we are no better than they were, since we share the same human foibles and follies. Paul isn’t judging the Galatians’ intelligence, of course, but their spiritual wisdom. It is as if they had become bewitched, as if someone had cast a spell over them, charmed them, and deceived them. Though Paul doesn’t name Satan, he must surely lurk in the background, for he is the arch deceiver and tempter.
The Galatians had become fools by turning back to the law for their righteousness. We all easily fall back into old habits, into wrong ways of thinking, which is why we are told that we must not be conformed to this world but should renew our minds (Rom. 12:2). In this instance we see that the Galatians had become foolish by beginning in the Spirit and then turning to the flesh for completion and for perfection. They were enchanted, captivated, and duped by false teaching. Someone had waved a wand over them, as it were, and they could no longer see the significance of Christ crucified. Apparently, they had forgotten about their own evil, about their own incapacity, about their inability to please God on their own. Once we start concentrating on our works, we have forgotten the importance of Christ and him crucified; we no longer consider his righteousness but our own. Paul’s public preaching of the cross was now a distant memory, so they were now trying to gain right standing with God based on their virtue.
How easy it is to forget about our justification, and this is true no matter how long we have been believers. Martin Luther often comments in his writings on how prone we are to forget the comfort that comes from justification in our daily lives, on how easily we begin to believe in a false Christ and begin to ingest a message that is contrary to the gospel. We are inclined to do this because we desperately want to be recognised and applauded for our own goodness. We have to be reminded regularly that in ourselves we are “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17).
Go Back to the Beginning
Paul calls the Galatians back to first principles, to the outset of their Christian lives. How did they first “receive the Spirit” (3:2)? The language of “receiving” points to conversion, to how they first became Christians, and the reference to the Spirit also indicates that Paul attends here to the beginning of the Christian life. The reception of the Spirit is the mark that one is a believer, that one is truly a Christian. Paul makes this plain in Romans 8:9: “You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him.”
It is clear, then, that when Paul asks the Galatians how they received the Spirit, he asks how they became Christians. And the answer in Galatians 3:2 is that they didn’t become believers by their works or their obedience. They became believers by hearing the message and believing it.
As Paul says in Romans 10:17, “Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ.” We receive the Spirit when we put our trust in the message of the gospel, when we embrace Jesus Christ as our fortress, our rock, and our deliverer, when we trust him to save us from sin. Paul makes the same point in Galatians 3:5: God supplies the Spirit and works miracles not on the basis of our obedience, but because we simply hear the message and embrace it in faith.
What does this mean for us? For our hearts to be calm, for our hearts to be assured, for our hearts to be confident, we need to listen—really listen—to the gospel. And we are easily distracted from the good news of the gospel. We can condemn ourselves when God isn’t condemning us. We can listen to the messages that come from our minds instead of the message of the gospel. Yes, we can even read the Bible and not hear the gospel! Thus, we can become convinced that we are no good in God’s sight, that we are utter failures, that God stands against us when he is actually “for us” (Rom. 8:31)!
Martin Luther tells the story of a doctor who killed himself because he came to believe that Christ was accusing him before the Father. This tragedy came in part because the doctor was listening to the wrong message. Christ doesn’t accuse us before the Father but intercedes for us based on his self-giving sacrifice (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25). We are reminded that our hearts will be stirred up with all kinds of anxiety and fear if we listen to the wrong message, if we pay heed to the lies that Satan whispers in our quiet moments.
Remember the Beginning
In verses 1–5, Paul appeals to the Galatians’ own experience. They received the Spirit by faith instead of works. In the subsequent verses (3:6–9), he appeals to Scripture, for the Old Testament teaches that justification has always been by faith. Thus we are introduced to the beginning of the people of God, to our forefather in the faith— Abraham. Paul instructs his readers that their experience when they were converted matches the father of the Jewish people—the first Jew, Abraham.
Paul summons Genesis 15:6 (see Gal. 3:6) as a witness to explain to the Galatians how Abraham was righteous before God. It seems that according to Genesis 15, Abraham (he was actually called “Abram” then) was rather depressed, since he had been promised offspring but still didn’t have any children. He somewhat despairingly tells the Lord that his heir must be his servant Eliezer. The Lord tells Abraham to step outside on a clear night where myriads of stars blazed from the sky. The Lord promised that Abraham would have as many children as there are stars. In other words, the offspring of Abraham would be as immeasurable and as incalculable as the number of stars. Abraham could have dismissed the promise as pure nonsense, but he put his trust in the Lord and believed his promise (see Gen. 15:1–6).
Abraham did not do any great work for God upon hearing the promise, and we must admit that there is nothing he could do to ensure that the promise would become a reality. Abraham honoured God by believing God could do the miraculous, that God could do the impossible. It is the same faith, as Paul tells us in Romans 4, that believes that God raised Jesus from the dead (v. 24). Faith and trust honour the person in whom we put our trust. We honour our spouses when we trust them, our auto mechanics when we entrust our vehicle to them for repair, and coaches when we believe that the play they call is fitting. So too, when we put our faith in God, we honour him as trustworthy.
According to Galatians 3:7, we are Abraham’s children, members of his family, when we believe as Abraham did. We become children of Abraham not by working for God but by trusting in him, not by achieving but believing, not by performing but by resting, not by keeping the law but by looking to God’s promise. As Paul says in verse 8, quoting Genesis 12:3, it was always God’s intention to bless all nations through Abraham, and those of us who believe are now the recipients of that promise. Following the pathway of Genesis 15:6—believing God and having it counted as righteousness—is the way that the entire world will be blessed.
Faith is crucial in our lives because it gives us assurance. If righteousness depended on us and our goodness and our achievements, we would think that we always had to work harder and would be filled with doubt about whether our work is sufficient in God’s sight. Thus our lives would be filled with uncertainty, and we would wonder if God really loves us or if we have to do more for him to smile upon us. But faith takes all of that out of our hands, because ultimately it isn’t our faith that saves us, as if our faith is a work. The object of our faith—Jesus Christ—saves us. Faith looks away from self to Jesus Christ, and in him we find our assurance, our calm, our serenity, our boldness.
Never Leave the Beginning
Let’s go back to Galatians 3:3, because it tells us something quite remarkable. Paul not only teaches in these verses that we are justified by faith; he also teaches that we are sanctified by faith. I am not denying that there are differences between justification and sanctification. Progressive sanctification differs from justification because human beings cooperate in a way that we don’t with respect to justification. After all, we do certain works as we are progressively sanctified. To put it another way, in sanctification we progress and grow in holiness, but justification is perfect the moment we believe.
Still, we tend to miss the message of Galatians 3:3, where Paul asks the Galatians, “After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh?” I understand Paul to say that sanctification is also by faith. Yes, there are differences from justification (see above), but we continue the Christian life the way we began it. We began by believing, and we need to continue to trust in Christ as we grow into his likeness. We don’t begin by the Spirit and then take the next steps by the flesh. We continue the way we began, by trusting God and relying on the Spirit for everything. Paul gives thanks for the Thessalonians’ work of faith in 1 Thessalonians 1:3, but it is a work that flows from faith. Faith is the root, and obedience is the fruit. In sanctification, we progress in holiness, but sanctification is also by faith.
I heard a person say once that our Christian lives could be compared to a car engine. If something is wrong, we look under the hood, and we know that one of two things is wrong with the engine: either faith or obedience. The problem with this illustration is that it separates faith and obedience into two different categories. We don’t begin in faith and then continue in obedience. Instead, we always know that if we are not obeying, it is because we are not trusting. If someone says to you, “Don’t take methamphetamines, for they will destroy you,” and you hear that and take methamphetamines anyway, why didn’t you obey? You don’t trust him. You think methamphetamines will bring pleasure. Paul speaks of “the obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5; 16:26) because all obedience flows from faith.
We see, then, that we progress in the Christian life in the same way we are justified—by trusting in God for everything. I am not saying that justification and sanctification are the same in every respect, for justification refers to the initial verdict that we are right before God by faith. I am merely saying that progress in the Christian life is not by works apart from faith. Works that are pleasing to God always stem from trust in him. Furthermore, we always rely on the righteousness of Christ in our sanctification because we continue to fall short in many ways (James 3:2). Our righteousness is never complete in this life. We can’t use our progress in sanctification as a basis for right standing before God, because our lives are still stained by sin. Our assurance comes from belonging to Christ, from being united to him by faith.
We must remember that all of us, no matter how long we have been Christians, may become fools. Satan will try to cast a spell over us. We may know the gospel in our heads and actually live on the basis of works, and thus, as Luther said, we must relearn the gospel daily. Let’s calm our hearts with the promise of God’s forgiveness in Christ Jesus, with the grace that is so freely and lovingly granted to us.
This article originally appeared in The Reformation Fellowship Magazine 5 (October 2022): 18–25.
