Paul’s Vehement Opposition to Legalism – Art Katz
The
Apostle Paul said that the Law was holy and good, but he spoke strongly to the
Galatian believers who were including some aspects of the Law to their faith in
Jesus. I never understood why he was
that vehement, but this book, “Of God or Man?
Light from Galatians”, by John Metcalfe, published by the John Metcalfe
Publishing Trust, has helped me to see it more clearly than ever before. It has to do with recognizing that Jesus
condemned in the flesh everything that is of the flesh, and that the Law (any
attempt by man in his own effort, by moral or other means, to bring
righteousness to his life, or use such a means to obtain salvation), is a
contradiction to what Jesus died for.
The death of Jesus is a statement against anything man does in the flesh
by his own effort. In Judaism,
observation of the Law is one of the prominent means by which one tries to
obtain righteousness. To this very day,
self-righteousness through one’s own conduct—ritual observance and various
other practices—by people who have animosity toward Jesus and the faith, is the
last gasp contest between self-righteousness and divine righteousness; it is a
fight “to the death.” It is an utter
paradox that men would employ murder in order to maintain the system by which
they hope to establish their righteousness.
The death of Jesus and the persecution of the early church is an example
of that.
So,
why is Paul that vehement? I believe the
answer lies in his personal history, with the way in which the revelation of
the Lord apprehended him on the road to Damascus. This writer, John Metcalfe, says here, “He
saw that all that was obnoxious to the wrath of God in his life, nature and
flesh had been condemned vicariously in the death of Jesus on the cross. . .
and in the eye and judgment of God he, Saul, had died when Christ died (page
42).” Just to paraphrase this: Paul had
a glimpse of the death of Jesus in a way that comprehended his own flesh; he
died in Christ. In the natural, Paul was
an exemplary Jew, and perfect according to the Law. However, he saw that what he had honored and
celebrated was vile and deserved the death to which it had been brought at the
expense of the death of God’s own Son.
Until we see, in some measure, the death of Jesus as a statement of
judgment and condemnation on all flesh, we will be, like the Galatians, tempted
to augment our faith in Christ by performing acts which issue out of ourselves
and our own uncrucified nature. They
will become supplements to the salvation that is uniquely and exclusively in Him.
Paul
was vehement about this because of his personal experience of the revelation
that came to him in the appearance of the resurrected Christ on the road to
Damascus. This encounter was needful for
the great apostle because he would be laying the foundations of the faith for
the Church and for all subsequent generations of it. He had to nip in the bud every perverse thing
that was already arising in his own time and generation, as for example, when
Peter came to Antioch and ate with the Gentile believers until some Jewish
believers came up from Jerusalem, sent by James. When he immediately changed his tactic and
would not eat with the Gentiles, he went back to the Law, and Paul confronted
Peter to his face in that moment. Paul
would not let the moment pass, because the issue of the Gospel and the truth of
the Gospel were at stake.
We
need to appreciate the fact that his vehemence and jealousy for the Gospel
rested in the death and resurrection of Jesus, or else he would not have been
so insistent upon taking to task any condescension to the Law as a complement
or a supplement to the salvation that is exclusively in Christ. These were great issues in the commencement
of Paul’s apostolic ministry, and they are great issues now. Paul recognized the threat of the Law, which
could be holy in itself, but when it is a means for self-righteousness, let
alone the attainment any kind of salvation through works, it is a statement
against the death of Jesus. I did not understand
that before. I just looked upon his
Damascus experience as simply the way that God met him. But here is the thing: When God said through
Isaiah in chapter six, “I saw the Lord, high and lifted up,” something happened
to Isaiah. He said, “Woe is me, I am
undone, I am a man . . .” What Isaiah
saw is, in essence if not exactly, what Paul saw on the road to Damascus,
namely, the revelation of Christ and Him crucified. We see this as only a formula, a doctrinal
requirement; we have not had the vivid exposure or revelation or appropriation
as it came to these men. One was the
chief prophet; the other was the chief apostle, and that is why they must, of
necessity, have the revelation of Christ and Him crucified in the most vivid
and powerful terms, because it would affect every subsequent
consideration. The Church that does not
follow them in that degree of revelation and seeing loses the apostolic and
prophetic quality of the faith until the crucifixion itself becomes just a
commonplace.
There
is the death, but also the resurrection that makes the death effectual as
justification. The resurrection showed
that death had propitiated the wrath of God and quenched the fire of eternal
vengeance. It revealed everlasting
righteousness already achieved to perfection (page 42).
Resurrection
is the stamp of the Father’s approval on the death of His Son. The fact that He did pay the price, that He
satisfied every righteous requirement by which sin had to be met in
righteousness by the blood of an innocent victim, and that He was resurrected,
is the statement of the acceptance and vindication of that death. Paul met Jesus as the resurrected
Christ. He had the revelation of the
death, he had the vindication of the resurrection in the very first
confrontation on the road to Damascus; and it was so powerful that it blinded
him.
Because
Paul died with Christ, he saw his own death in Christ’s death. He then also believed that he lived with
Him. Who else is there that has this
profound conviction, that if I die with Christ, I now also live with him? That death and resurrection makes my union
with Him not only His death but also His life?
That’s why it is the same Paul who says, “For me, to live is Christ.” Again and again, Paul makes it very clear
that all that issues from him issues out of union with the life of the Son of
God, because he is also in union with the death of the Son of God, a death that
he deserved as a notorious sinner when he sought in his own flesh to establish
his own righteousness and became thereby, a persecutor of God Himself.
Henceforth therefore Saul of Tarsus would
live in that union, and live by faith in that death. . . . He would live in
that union [of] the power and life . . . which he felt from his [Pauline]
calling, reckoning his natural life in the flesh . . . as having been crucified
with Christ at Calvary. For crucified it
was, and, mortifying it, he would live by the faith of the Son of God, dwelling
in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, being brought into the everlasting love of
the Father (page 42).
By a mystical and divinely created union the
Son had received the sinner into Himself, and that in all Saul’s corruption, so
transferring it to the sinless, the substitutionary, the sacrificial and the
atoning Son of Man. Thus was all judged
and borne away in death. To this
Christ’s faith was addressed, and resurrection shows was justified and
triumphant in the event. . . . nevertheless the union still stands. In resurrection it stands. All the glory of the Son of God is made over
to and actually united with Paul from the hand of the Majesty on high (page
43).
This
shows Paul’s sonship and the authority that issued from it. It shows the remarkable revelation and
knowledge that he had, and the authority that he expressed when he rebuked the
apostle Peter earlier, and that to his face before the hearing of others. It all issued out of the sonship that was
Paul’s by virtue of union with the Son, both in death and in life. I do not know that we have sufficiently
appreciated that now.
Calvary was the faith of the Son of God to
be made a sacrifice for men who could not work, helpless sinners who could do
nothing, those cursed by the law. So
that in their place, made as them, as their real substitutionary sacrifice,
both the justice of the Law and the everlasting righteousness of God might be
poured out, and poured out, and poured out in vengeance and judgment till the
last drop, to the uttermost drain, till all was totally exhausted and seen to
be exhausted, in the drooping head and dripping blood of the slain and dead
sacrifice (page 44).
I
am happy for this description because this is the way Paul saw the atonement of
Jesus: Dripping to the last drop unto death—a statement of God’s provision for
failed sinners, for those attempting by law and self-righteousness to attain to
some kind of righteousness in a failed way.
It is a statement that the only thing that could meet them was the
substitutionary atonement of His blood to the last drop, unto death. So this is not a polite little Jesus on the
cross looking like a ballet dancer heaving a last breath and giving His spirit
to the Father. This is seeing the
sacrifice richly and deeply, and seeing that it covers the entire multitude of
the failings of men and their sin.
Whether they are Law seeking, or Law rejecting, they are equally
sinners, but the blood and the life given up to the last drop covers the
multitude of all that transgression.
This is the foundation of Paul’s apostolic life, the revelation of the
cross, the suffering and the death to the last drop, and the union that comes
in that death, with the life that issues from it in resurrection.
All requirement of justice, legal and
divine, is forever satisfied, world without end. The sinner is justified in Christ for time
and eternity beyond all further question.
Yet, if men go back to the Law, any part of it, sign of it, or all of
it, they are saying, “It was not so.”
And that Paul calls, Frustrating the grace of God, or Christ dying in
vain (page 44).
If
men go back to the Law after this, it frustrates the grace of God and makes the
sacrificial death of no account. It is
Christ dying in vain. Can you see why
Paul was so vehement with the Galatians?
“What has deceived you so much that you can think that adopting Jewish
Law will complement your salvation in Christ?
Why, embracing as little as one figment of the Law, you make the death
and the shedding of that blood null and void.
You make the grace of God vain.”
That
is why Paul was so insistent, because he esteemed every last drop of that blood
that was required for the effecting of salvation. Nothing less or other than that would do,
because all flesh is inherently sinful and evil, and no good thing can come of
it. Christ in the flesh suffered death
for the flesh. To go back to the flesh
and any form of righteousness through law is to make that sacrifice null and
void, and to make the grace of God vain.
If righteousness comes by the Law, Christ died in vain. That the Son of God came down from heaven and
became flesh and man, and suffered that excruciating death to the last drop –
that was vain? That was needless – as
though the Law could have been perfected, and it would have sufficed? See what I mean? Paul embraced the atoning death of Jesus and
the revelation of his own sinful nature that came to him on the road to
Damascus. The effect of hearing, “Why do
you persecute Me?” was devastating, and it had to be, if this man was to become
the foundational apostle of the Church.
So
what is the point for us? The point is,
we need the same appropriation of the atonement and sacrifice of Jesus. We need to see the same condemnation of flesh
and self-effort that Paul saw in the vivid revelation that came to him,
affecting all his subsequent days and making him the vehement opponent in
Galatia to those Jewish believers who were seducing Gentile Christians. They thought that they needed to embrace some
aspect of the Law to fulfill their faith and come into the full Jewish
inheritance, which is where we are today.
This
is a struggle now. Though it may not be
Jewish Law that tempts you, any act of self-righteousness is a return to the
flesh and makes the sacrifice of Jesus vain.
This is Paul’s total and exclusive concentration, which is the
foundation of the faith that God made in him.
It is not only the embrace of the death of Jesus that brings his own
flesh to death, but he is joined with Him in newness of life as well. He becomes a son of God; he can say “Abba
Father”. The new life has come in as the
old life has gone out. He is another man
– another authority, another reality – because the two go together. There is no appropriation of the life of God
that results in sonship and service without first, the embrace of the death that
results in the complete annihilation of any hope in the flesh for
righteousness. That is why there are so
few sons to be found in Christendom today.
They do not embrace the death.
They may make doctrinal condescension to the death, but not in the depth
of Paul’s appropriation. It has to come
as it did also for Isaiah, through revelation.
We would be wise to ask for some measure of that revelation, or our
faith will remain shallow and inadequate, and we will have made the grace of
God of none effect.
For
Isaiah and Paul, the key word is “saw”: “In the year that king Uzziah died I
saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train
filled the temple.” Paul saw the
crucified and resurrected Christ. There
is a seeing that is the key, and God has to grant that grace; we need to
request it; we need to ask for it.
PRAYER:
So
Lord, we have fallen short of the apostolic truths, of insistence on the
salvation that has come exclusively through Your blood. We have settled for something doctrinal,
something merely verbal that we think that we have because we can articulate it
or make reference to it. But we have not
the vivid sense that Paul had, for if we did, we would be enemies of the flesh
and of the Law, and of any attempt to establish our righteousness by what
issues from the flesh, which You condemned in Your suffering unto death.
So
Lord, I am asking for the church of the last days, that Paul’s great struggle
would not be in vain, that the Church would not lapse again into the
temptations of the hour that came to the Galatians under the seducers that
wanted to Judaize and bring to them the attractive aspects of the Law, any
aspect of which would have made null and void the sacrifice of Christ.
Lord,
make this dear to us, we are pleading with You.
We are asking for revelation; it is the heart of the faith. You gave it to these great men who are
apostles and prophets, and to whatever degree we have a destiny in which those
words are incorporate, we ask for a comparable revelation. May it come in Your time we pray, and we
would strike our chest and say, “Woe is me, I am undone, for I am a man. . . ”
We
thank you Lord for Paul, for the purity and depth of his faith, for his
unwillingness for a moment to allow the faith in any way to be compromised in
condescension to men, and for his insistence on the truth of the Gospel,
confronting the chief apostle Peter to his face in that very moment, in the
hearing of others. Thank you for that
jealousy that is the statement of his sonship and the statement that issues out
of his union with You. That was not just
human verve, that was itself the life of God being expressed with the same
indignation that Jesus would have expressed it, had He been there in that
situation – and was there in the resurrection that is the life of Paul.
Come,
my God and bring us to that reality, for that is the only reality, and we ask
it in Yeshua’s holy name, for Your name’s sake.
Amen
A
transcribed and edited message given in 2006.
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