The church in Galatia was in grave danger. False teachers were drawing believers away from the true gospel of grace, leading them instead to a corrupted doctrine that promised salvation through works of the law. Paul warned the Galatians that anyone who seeks righteousness through the law remains under its curse. As he wrote in verse 10: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them.”
Paul reasons further with his Galatian readers in verse 11: “No one is justified by the law in the sight of God…for the just shall live by faith.”
This sermon addresses the futility of believing that salvation can be attained through personal merit―by being “good enough.” No one can fulfill the law’s requirements perfectly. Therefore, our loving Father provided his Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to accomplish what we could not. Through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, God made a way for our sins to be forgiven and the curse of the law to be lifted.
Freedom from the curse of the law is offered to all who will receive it in faith and repentance.
How about you?
Read the full sermon transcript below!
The old covenant writings of Deuteronomy 26-27 record a very significant and poignant scene in the historical life of Israel. It is one of those passages which Christians, in their daily Scripture reading, unfortunately sometimes quickly gloss over. Though much of what it records is not so pleasant, the fulfillment of its conditions and sanctions is seen repeatedly, as God’s judgment later falls on Israel for their having not obeyed the terms of this covenant into which the people voluntarily entered with Almighty God. The same danger is true for all people at all times, including our own day.
There were over six hundred thousand men counted in the census of Israel during their Exodus and wandering years. Along with wives and children, this would have constituted a nation probably exceeding three million souls – quite a crowd to be wandering through the desert for forty years.
At the end of their wandering, the nation having been brought safely by the hand of God over the Jordan River and into the Promised Land, the people carried out what their leader Moses had, at God’s command, enjoined upon them. The people of Israel divided into two groups, like a great antiphonal choir. Six tribes (probably elders and representatives of the six) stood on Mount Gerizim; likewise, six stood on Mount Ebal. There Israel worshiped the Lord by means of solemn oaths and vows declared, and affirmed by the people, as a great antiphonal litany.
The Levites recited that litany of blessings and curses, to which all the tribes in unison loudly responded, “Amen!” By their arrangement, the tribes on Mt. Gerizim blessed the people of God upon the promise of obedience, while the tribes on Mt. Ebal cursed the people if they disobeyed. Thereby, the covenant was affirmed, the people agreeing that the results of covenant faithfulness or lack thereof would surely be visited by God upon the oath takers, the people of Israel.
The curses for covenant unfaithfulness were quite serious, such as: ‘Cursed be anyone who dishonors his father or his mother.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ ‘Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ ‘Cursed be anyone who does not conform to the words of this law by doing them.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’
The Levites recited twelve such curses, and following each one, the people said “Amen!” Thus, they called down upon themselves and their children the curse of God if they violated his holy law. Even a cursory reading of the Old Testament reveals how wretchedly Israel failed in its promise to keep their covenant, until finally, in AD 70, God destroyed that nation.
Commentators inform that in Paul’s day, some fourteen hundred years after that covenant obligation of the two mountains, whenever a condemned man received the standard punishment in Israel—at that time forty lashes with a whip, minus one—the curses of Mt. Ebal were read to the man as he was severely and painfully scourged. Paul was subjected to this cruel, agonizing punishment five times for preaching the gospel of Christ; imagine his deeply scarred and mutilated back.
As Paul received the final lash across his bloodied back, he may well have heard those very words of the final curse of Ebal. That last curse pronounced upon the people of Israel, on that day when they vowed their obedience to God, is the one recited by Paul in v. 10 of today’s sermon text: “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law and do them.”
The Curse of the Law
Those are very solemn words, indeed. They form the background of our first theme this morning, taken from v. 10: the curse of the law. The passage we are now considering carries forward that very serious argument by which Paul has been confronting the churches of Galatia.
Paul has charged the Galatian Christians with foolishness, because having begun their Christian life by faith in Jesus Christ to justify them before God, they are now in danger of reverting back to the vain and unprofitable old ways of Judaism. Namely, it is the false idea that a person can be justified in God’s eyes by his own goodness and personal merit. As if his good deeds in keeping God’s law are somehow chalked up like points on God’s celestial scoreboard, thereby each so-called “good” person earning for himself a place in God’s blessed forever family.
Paul challenges the Galatians, attempting to awaken them from their silly dream of self-righteous salvation, by reminding them of the curse of the law: Everyone who does not abide by all the details of God’s law is cursed! Paul also explains the impossibility of a man being justified by his own righteous obedience when he declares that all who rely on works of the law are under a curse.
By these words, Paul is pointing out the utter impossibility of any human being, except the divine Lord Jesus, to perform all of God’s moral requirements. Perfect obedience to everything God reveals in his law—that is what you must accomplish in this life if you will be saved by being “good enough.” Many times over the years we have heard people say things like: “Well, I think God will accept me. I haven’t been perfect, but no one is. I haven’t done that bad, certainly better than a lot of people. In general, I’ve done pretty well. I’ve done the best I can. I think God will accept me.”
Paul’s message for the Galatians is the very same thing that all people, in every place, and at every time, must understand: If you are relying on your own goodness to be justified, counted righteous by God in his sight…if you are relying on such works of the law…you may think all is well with your soul, but, in reality, you are quite possibly under God’s curse. As Jesus said it, the wrath of God abides on you.
The apostle Paul speaks here of the curse of the curse of the law. To have God’s favor toward you…to be accepted by God into his forever family…to be counted righteous and just by God…requires perfect, unfailing, flawless obedience to everything God’s law requires of man. It requires never transgressing God’s perfect law by doing what is forbidden, never lacking in complete conformity to all that is required. Especially serving and loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving your neighbor with perfect love.
The fulfillment of these requirements of God’s law must be performed with flawless precision and full completeness if you are to have God’s favor by the moral value of your good deeds. If you are trusting in your goodness to gain you an entrance into Heaven when you die, but have sinned only one time in your life—you blew it! No one can do it. Yet if we don’t, we rightly deserve the fullest divine penalty as violators and covenant breakers against our Creator, Law Giver, and Judge. That is the curse of the law, and all who rely on works of the law for their righteousness in God’s eyes, explains Paul, are under that curse as offenders.
The Just Shall Live by Faith
If unstained, spotless, immaculate moral perfection is what God demands for us to be accepted favorably into his family of the blessed, but no one able to render such perfect compliance, then all of mankind stands guilty and condemned before God. Consider Romans 3:19-20: Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20 Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law.
How then shall we be saved from our sad estate as transgressors of God’s law? How can we ever be accepted in God’s sight as righteous and justified? How can it be? That is the matter of our next point: The just shall live by faith. The Bible states this very clearly in our sermon text (3:11): But that no one is justified by the law in the sight of God is evident, for the just shall live by faith.
This verse is among the most significant words in all of church history; its theme became the engine of the Protestant Reformation. It is an Old Testament saying from Habakkuk 2:4, which reads: Behold the proud, his soul is not upright within him. But the righteous shall live by his faith.
Here, the Lord God, through the prophet Habakkuk, condemned the wicked pride of the Babylonians who had conquered Jerusalem. They are described by the Lord as a people prideful of heart, who trusted in their own self-sufficiency, rather than humbly bowing and trusting in God. God’s people, on the other hand, are not to be self-sufficient, but trust in God alone to save them and to be their source of authority and blessing in all of life.
Such turning away from ourselves and rather unto Christ’s righteousness being accredited by God to us, that is the key. Nor our own vain efforts and righteousness, but rather by faith, embracing the perfect, complete, flawless righteousness of Christ, we receive as our own and which God accounts as our own. That explains Holy Scripture’s declaration that the just (the righteous) shall live by his faith.
By faith in Christ, rather than our own deeds and merit, we, the redeemed, have been rescued by God from the curse of the law and given by him spiritual life now and forever. Faith in Christ’s righteousness…faith in God to save us…that must characterize our relationship with God from beginning to end. And thus the faithful righteous live while the proud self-sufficient are dead in their own sin.
Before he broke away from Roman Catholicism in the early 1500’s, Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. He dreadfully struggled with constant fear. Dark depression of the soul haunted that troubled man. He could never have assurance that he was good enough to be accepted by God. He subjected himself to severe asceticism. He underwent extended periods of fasting, rigorous self-examination, and self-imposed painful penalties trying to atone for his sin. But he was ever fearful that his efforts, stringent as they were, were not enough, and that he would die condemned by God.
One day, while in Italy with his mind being influenced by the Holy Spirit, Luther was forever changed. Philip Ryken explains that Luther went through a dark period of illness and depression during which he imagined he was under the wrath of God. Lying sick in a bed in Italy, fearing that he was soon to die and depart this life under God’s judgment, Luther found himself repeating the words over and over again: “The righteous shall live by his faith. The righteous shall live by his faith.” Luther eventually recovered from his illness, probably glad that he was not yet in hell and hoping to find some way to escape that most horrible of all fates.
Luther was in Italy for a reason. The pope had promised an indulgence to forgive the sins of any pilgrim who would climb the staircase of the church of St. John Lateran. It was claimed that this reconstructed staircase had been transported to Rome from the Jerusalem judgment hall of Pontius Pilate, and that the blood of Christ had been spilled on its steps. Pilgrims from all over Christendom came to Rome to obtain forgiveness of sin as promised by the pope. They crawled up the staircase on hands and knees, praying and kissing the stairs as they painfully inched their way to the top. Enduring the searing pain in their knees, they hoped to earn their forgiveness.
As Luther made his way up the stairs, saying his prayers on hands and knees, suddenly the words of the prophet Habakkuk came back to him: “The righteous shall live by his faith.” By the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, in sudden clarity of thinking, Luther realized that trying to attain forgiveness of sin and salvation from God by crawling up those stairs, or by any other heroic deeds of self-righteousness, was blind foolishness.
Luther realized that crawling on bloody, mangled knees can never atone for one’s sin. No! Jesus Christ atoned for our sin himself when he shed his own blood and suffered for us in our place. The righteous have spiritual life because they trust not in themselves but in Christ! When this glorious truth dawned upon Luther, he ceased his prayers, left that worthless stairway, returned to Wittenburg in Germany, and took that glorious promise of God as the central theme of his ministry for the rest of his life: the just shall live by his faith.
Luther wrote, “Before those words broke upon my mind I hated God and was angry with him…. but when, by the Spirit of God, I understood those words—‘The just shall live by faith!’ ‘The just shall live by faith!’—then I felt born again like a new man; I entered through the open doors into the very Paradise of God.”
Redeemed from the Curse of the Law
The curse of the law no longer applied to Martin Luther, just as with all believing Christians, because the righteous lives by his faith. But how is it that the curse of the law is removed from the Christian? That is our next matter of discussion: redeemed from the curse of the law. Paul writes of it in v. 13: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.”
Once again, in arguing his case with Jews at Galatia who are leading Christ’s people astray, Paul turns to the very source of authority they claimed as their own—the Old Testament Scriptures. Those words of truth from God are the very oracles the Judaizers were distorting and wresting to their own destruction.
The appeal is to Deuteronomy 21:22-23 which speaks of the body of an executed man hanging on public display: “If a man has committed a sin deserving of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, 23 his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance; for he who is hanged is accursed of God.
In the ancient days of Israel, criminals who had committed capital offenses were executed swiftly, not held for years in prison as in our society. When a criminal was executed, his body was publicly displayed to expose his shame and to act as a deterrent lest people come to think that lawbreakers get off easy. Sometimes the body was hoisted up on a tree, or in some other conspicuous place, after the man was dead. Sometimes the convicted man was hanged or even impaled alive, his body run through and left hanging there to endure an excruciating death.
The idea was that a man who had been identified as a covenant breaker was thus visibly exposed to God’s wrath before the eyes of the people. But his dead body was not to be left hanging overnight, for that would be an offense to God and defile the land. Justice was to be swift, and the corrupting presence of sin was to be removed with haste, not allowed to linger in the land.
This, explains Paul, is what Jesus Christ endured for us. He was impaled through his hands, feet, head, and side on that cruel instrument of death—the cross. He who knew no sin, Paul explains, became sin for us in our place. The completely righteous Son of God bore the curse of the law and died the death of a covenant breaker in our stead. He bore the angry wrath and justice of God swiftly and completely, his body being removed from the tree that very same day.
Christ endured all this in our place—the righteous for the unrighteous, the covenant mediator for the covenant breakers, the innocent for the accursed. He himself bore the curse of the law that was against us in order to save us from the wrath of God rightly upon us because of our guilty transgressions.
We, the covenant people of God in Christ, have been brought into glorious freedom out of this dreadful slavery of bondage to the law. But how? There must have been some transaction concerning fallen man that occurred there on the cross that day, a transaction of some sort between God and Christ which applied to sinful man. There was such a transaction. Paul explains that it was a redemption; notice v. 13: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.
Redemption is a business marketplace term. We know about coupons. You save your coupons, then take them to the store to redeem merchandise or discounts. In Paul’s day, a time when there were more slaves in the world than freemen, redemption was a transaction common to the slave markets. A set amount of money, called the ransom price, could be paid for a slave, and then he or she could be set free. That was redemption. The ransom price was paid, and the slave was set free from his bondage.
The Bible uses those terms—ransom and redemption—to describe what Jesus Christ did for our sakes to liberate us from the bondage of guilty sin by which we were bound as captives and slaves to the curse of the law. 2 Timothy 2:5-6 explains: For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave Himself a ransom for all. And Jesus said of himself, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
The ransom price God required for us to be set free from our guilty sin and the curse of the law was the blood of his own Son Jesus Christ. By the sacrifice of the sinless lamb of God, Jesus Christ, we were thus redeemed, set free from the awful chains of our slavery to sin and the law, and forthwith covered in the clean white robes of the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Thus, God’s Word exclaims: In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace (Ephesians 1:7). This is what Paul explains in v. 13 of our sermon text: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.”
The Promise of the Gospel
How wonderful! Even unfathomable! That is the forever unbounded and ever-abounding love of God toward us, his own redeemed children. The love of God has been shed abroad and poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. And how great is the love of our blessed Redeemer Jesus Christ, who has purchased our pardon by his own blood. True are his words: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.
Through Jesus Christ we have been pardoned of the guilt of our iniquities, set free from the prison of our condemnation, and by God’s grace are the happy recipients of the promise of the gospel, as in v. 14: That upon the [nations] might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
Ryken comments, as we close:
Here, Paul summarizes everything he has been saying in this chapter. He reminds us of the blessing given to Abraham: a right standing with God. He reminds us that this blessing is for all the nations…He reminds us that God’s blessing includes receiving the Holy Spirit, with all his gifts and graces.
All these blessings never come by works of the law. All of God’s blessings come only through faith in the cross of Christ. Through the old, cursed cross, the nations of the world receive forgiveness for their sins. Through the old, cursed cross, we are accepted by God’s justifying grace. Through the old, cursed cross, we receive the promised Holy Spirit. We receive all these things by faith in the crucified Christ. What was a curse for Christ becomes a blessing to us by faith.