THE STUMBLING BLOCK OF THE CROSS
GALATIANS 5:2-12
SEPTEMBER 6, 1998

            Heresy is no laughing matter! We can be sure that Paul was not laughing at what was transpiring among the Galatian churches. He was not worked up about the splitting of theological hairs on extraneous issues. Everything was at stake! For they were on the brink of falling into an eternal error, that of substituting something for the sufficiency of the cross of Christ.

            In the case of Galatia, it was a dependence upon circumcision as a means to righteousness before God. Circumcision stands as a representative in this case of any system that attempts to by-pass or add-to the sufficiency of Jesus Christ and Him crucified for salvation. There can be a multitude of ways that some form of "Galatian-circumcision" stealthily dupes deceived unbelievers into a 'salvation' that is no salvation. It can be seen in the substitution of church attendance for the cross or baptism for true faith in Christ. There are those who substitute acts of service or good deeds for the substitutionary work of Christ. The danger remains ever present that those among us and those with whom we discuss the things of God have fallen prey to the same error Paul addressed in Galatia.

            Our text leaves us with Christ alone as the only hope for sinners. But this distresses multitudes of religious people.  For the cross is a stumbling block to all who would pursue salvation by works. As John Stott put it, "People hate to be told that they can be saved only at the foot of the cross, and they oppose the preacher who tells them so" [The Message of Galatians, 137]. The Apostle points out that clinging to works is...

>         a hindrance to obeying the truth (v. 7), as it cuts in the way of those pursuing a righteousness by faith, turning them away from the only refuge for sinners;

>         not from God (v. 8), in that the persuasion to follow a pattern of works for salvation comes from religious legalists not from God;

>         defiling to the church (v. 9), in that such doctrinal error eventually spreads and engulfs the entire church (we need only take a casual glance at church history to see that this is so);

>         liable to divine judgment (v. 10), so that those who would try to shake people from faith alone in Christ will bear the burden of this error before the justice of the Almighty;

>         in need of being removed from the church (v. 12), since the error of Galatia was so serious that the church must not be passive in removing it from their midst.  Timothy George explains clearly, "Any community of faith that is unwilling to recognize and to reject perversions of the gospel when they crop up in its midst has lost its right to bear witness to the transforming message of Jesus Christ, who declared himself to be not only the Way and the Life but also the Truth, the only truth that leads to the Father" [NAC, 365-366].

                The cross of Christ excludes all rivals. For to be justified before God, our only hope is in Christ and His all-sufficient sacrifice on our behalf. Is your trust in Christ alone and His atoning death? Let us see how Christ alone stands for the salvation of sinners.

 

I.          The failure of a works-oriented salvation

            The big battle facing most religious people, even those professing Christianity, is that of embracing a works-oriented salvation rather than faith in Christ alone. We have already noticed throughout this epistle how this is the natural bent of the human nature. Man will do anything to keep from abandoning faith in himself and trusting in Christ and His merits alone. Yet, as Martin Luther wrote, "...nothing under the sun is more hurtful than the doctrine of man's traditions and works" [Commentary on Galatians, 303]. A man feels so good about his religious traditions and all the wonderful things he does. Because he feels good about them he wrongly supposes that God is pleased with them. Yet "without faith it is impossible to please God" (Heb. 11:6).

            Because the gospel is fixed only upon Jesus Christ and His cross, the common person finds himself offended over this gospel message. He cannot believe that all of his good works and acts of service fail him before God. I think of how so many churches in our land, and even in our own city, never preach the gospel. It is not part of their thoughts. They may become sentimental about the cross as the supreme act of love, but they have no consciousness of abandoning faith in one's own works or faith in one's church affiliation to cling only to the cross of Christ. Nor do they dare mention the propitiatory work accomplished on the cross and how God Himself demanded such a price to be paid for our redemption.

            The cross is offensive to the unbelieving mind. It is "a stumbling block" to some and "foolishness" to others, but to us "who are the called,...Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (I Cor. 1:23-24). Paul's message was the cross of Christ and His accompanying resurrection. He was forever heading down the path of bringing the cross and resurrection into the subject at hand. For he knew that only through what Christ accomplished on the cross can sinners be delivered from slavery to sin and brought into the liberty of sons of God.

            The troublers of Galatia, a group we call the Judaizers, had evidently spurred the rumor in Galatia that Paul himself had preached the need of circumcision for salvation. They had taken the fact that (1) Paul himself was circumcised, (2) Paul did not preach against circumcision as a cultural identification among Jews, and (3) he had gone to the trouble of having Timothy, who was from the Galatian region, circumcised. Now they took these facts and distorted them into a Pauline promotion of circumcision for justification. Paul asks, "But I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted?" In other words, if this is true, then why was Paul the object of their ridicule and persecutions? If he had been in agreement with the Judaizers on circumcision, then the whole issue of the cross would have been laid aside, as he writes, "Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished." They could have existed in harmony if Paul agreed with their Christ-plus-works salvation.

            But not a chance! Paul would do nothing to make void the cross of Christ in his preaching or in their response. So he explains the failure of a works-oriented salvation. They had not thought through in a rational way. They had not realized the grave implications of what they were on the verge of embracing. If they tripped over the cross then they had no Christianity, they had no eternal life. This truth has not changed. Those today who hold to their works as merit before God must see that they are no better off than those whom Paul was addressing. To do so means...

 

            1.  Christ of no benefit

            Imagine, a person calling himself a Christian, yet Christ is of no benefit to him. That is precisely what Paul explains for those who try to go some way other than the way of faith which rests in the crucified and risen Christ. "Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you." The Apostle is emphatic. 'Look! Hear what I am saying. I, Paul am telling you these things'. He wants them to understand that he is not giving religious suggestions or offering some type of multiple choice for salvation. If you embrace circumcision as merit before God, then Christ will not benefit you.

            Was the problem the physical act of circumcision? Obviously not, for Paul himself had been circumcised. Instead, it was a problem of resorting to circumcision as a means to righteousness before God. It became the "means of justification" of the one being circumcised. Paul had no problem with Jews being circumcised simply to maintain their Jewish heritage. But he had a major problem when they or any one else viewed this act as merit before God.

            We can be fair in saying, "For Paul, Jesus Christ was all or nothing" [George, 357]. There was no middle ground when it came to a relationship to Jesus Christ. Paul believed that the way to Christ was "narrow" and that "the gate is small" which leads to life (Matt. 7:13-14). To have included circumcision as a means of righteousness would have broadened the gate and nullified the cross of Christ. For if circumcision was adequate to justify a person, then Christ surely would not have died the horrible death of crucifixion under the wrath of God.

            Are you of those who believe that God makes an exception in your case? You read what the Word of God has clearly spoken. You hear the preaching and teaching of the Word concerning these matters. Yet you persist in thinking that you are different. God bends His truth to accommodate you. My friend, see that the unchanging God will not make a different set of truths for our day. What He speaks carries eternal weight and authority. Not the least of His Word will fail nor be changed. "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever" (Isa. 40:8). You may be working diligently in hope that God will change His mind. But see what the Lord has spoken through Paul, "...if you receive circumcision [i.e., as an act for merit before God], Christ will be of no benefit to you."

 

            2.  Obligation to the whole Law

            To add to this matter, there was a requirement that went along with circumcision. "And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law." You are not simply being circumcised. You are embracing the entire Law. You must keep all of it. As he had already pointed out, "CURSED IS EVERYONE WHO DOES NOT ABIDE BY ALL THINGS WRITTEN IN THE BOOK OF THE LAW, TO PERFORM THEM" (Gal. 3:10).  All things? That is precisely what this quote from the book of Deuteronomy demands for the circumcised.

            So Paul appeals to the logic of being able to obey the whole Law for righteousness. Can you do it? Can you obey everything that God demands? Paul was well acquainted with the 616 prohibitions and commands found in the Law. He had spent years trying to follow after all of them as a Pharisee. He trusted in his own righteousness. Yet he discovered that it did not profit him in the least before God. For one breach of the Law was tantamount to breaking the whole Law. As James declared, "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all" (James 2:10). This means that the weight of divine justice against those who have broken His Law will come with all of its fury upon the lawbreakers.

            It seems that Paul was almost saying, 'Are you ready to take on this challenge? If you are going to embrace circumcision, then you will have to embrace what goes with it--the Law. Not part of the Law, but all of the Law. If you are going to justify yourself before God then know that God's standard is perfection and nothing short of it' (Matt. 5:48).

            Are you still thinking that you are the one exception who can keep the whole Law with perfection? You've not done it so far, so that you have mounted up great guilt before God for the past. And you are sure not to succeed in the future, so that the fierceness of judgment multiplies. Do not deceive yourself into believing that you will be that one person in all of human existence who can avoid judgment because of your performance. All stand in need of justification before God.

 

            3.  Severed from Christ

            There is a great irony in verse 4. For it seems that the very people who quote this verse most often are the very ones whom Paul was speaking of: those who trust in their works for salvation. Notice the context of what he is addressing. He is speaking to the churches of Galatia and warning them of the danger of abandoning the grace of God for a dependence upon circumcision and the Law for salvation. They had been under a wonderful measure of grace through the gospel preaching of Paul and Barnabas. Now they were tossing this aside. To do so would be to fall from grace as the means to salvation. Instead, they were exchanging grace for Law.

            "You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace." Was he speaking of those who had truly been born of God losing their salvation? Not at all. As Timothy George explains, "Paul did not here contemplate the forfeiture of salvation by a truly regenerated believer. He was writing to Christian churches that were founded on the doctrines of grace but that were in danger of forsaking that sound doctrinal bedrock for a theology that can only lead to ruin" [360]. John MacArthur adds, "Applied to one who was really an unbeliever, the principle of falling from grace has to do with being exposed to the gracious truth of the gospel and then turning one's back on Christ. Such a person is an apostate" [MacArthur's New Testament Commentaries, 135].

            What Paul is explaining is that a people who are turning away from the teaching of grace to law as the means to justification "are no longer in the realm of grace" [Martin Luther quoted by George, 359]. It is as though they are in a ship--the ship of grace--which has been carrying them along and they jump overboard into the sea. It does not matter what part of the ship they jump from into the sea; they will perish nonetheless. To leave grace for law is to cast yourself from the realm of grace as the means to salvation to the hopelessness of the law for salvation [illustration from Martin Luther, 307-308; cf. George 359]. The Galatians had been exposed to the grace of God in Christ. They heard the message of salvation from that context. Now they were casting it aside for law. Paul was not speaking of believers losing salvation but a people abandoning their only hope for salvation--the grace of God through Christ alone. They were willing to give up on the message of grace for a message of law. And whether you are in Galatia or Memphis, if you spurn the grace of God for that which cannot save you, then you have been severed from Christ and fallen from grace. You are trusting in that which cannot save. You have bolted from the sphere of God's grace to flounder in a sea of law. Repent of such foolishness and plead for the mercy of God to be shown to you.

 

II. The sufficiency of Christ alone in salvation

            After demonstrating the failure of works to deliver a person from his guilt and shame before God into righteousness, Paul proceeds to explain the superiority of grace. The underlying thought throughout the whole epistle is the sufficiency of Jesus Christ and His work on the cross. Paul was not espousing faith for the sake of faith. Nor was he encouraging faith in a religious ideology nor faith in a concept. Faith is never to be thought of as a virtue we try to work up in order for God to reward us with salvation. Faith, instead, is our response to the grace of God demonstrated in Jesus Christ and His atoning death. Faith embraces Christ alone in all of His saving mercy.

            How does this happen in our lives? Within the scope of verses 5-7, the apostle analyzes the working of salvation.

 

            1.  Through the Spirit's work

            True salvation is not a work of man but a work of God's Spirit. "For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness." This is the major point of grace. For grace emphasizes that God is doing the work. To say we believe in salvation by grace implies that we (1) do not believe that we have any capacity for saving ourselves and (2) that the whole work of salvation is by God's pleasure and power. The Holy Spirit is the immediate Agent applying grace to our lives. We cannot boast of our faith nor of our repentance. We cannot boast that we decided to follow Christ. We can only glory in the Lord, who by the Holy Spirit has worked savingly in our lives.

            Perhaps two statements from the 1689 London Baptist Confession concerning the Holy Spirit will be helpful. Both of these demonstrate the work He accomplishes in the believer.

       The grace of faith by which the elect are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls is the work of the Spirit in their hearts. Normally it is brought into being through the preaching of the Word...[chap. 14].

       The repentance that leads on to salvation is a gospel grace by means of which a person who is caused by the Holy Spirit to feel the manifold evils of sin is also caused by faith in Christ to humble himself on account of sin. This humiliation is characterized by godly sorrow, a detestation of the sin, and self-loathing. It is accompanied by prayer for pardon and strength of grace, and also by a purpose and endeavor, in the power supplied by the Spirit, to conduct himself in the sight of God with consistency of life that pleases Him [chap. 15].

            Paul is emphasizing in our text that for any sinner to be saved a miracle of God takes place. How can that sinner bring himself out of spiritual darkness or lift himself from spiritual blindness or raise himself up from spiritual death? He has no power to do so. But in the secret places of the heart, out of the abundance of divine grace, the Holy Spirit goes to work applying the law to our conscience and revealing Christ and Him crucified to our minds, so that we repent and believe. This work of the Spirit leads to a response of faith in Christ alone for salvation.

 

            2.  By means of faith

            The recurring theme of faith comes up again in this passage. "For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness." The opposite of "by faith" as we have seen throughout this epistle is "by law." Again, Paul confronts this biblically illogical idea that a person can adhere to the law and be justified before God. This is not due to the law's weakness but to the weakness of the flesh to keep the law (Rom. 8:3-4). We are the problem rather than the law. The law has its purpose to point us to Christ. Once we come to Christ, we do not gain Him by some act of merit on our part, but only by faith in Christ.

            What is involved in faith? First, it means that we refuse to claim any merit before God for works which we have done. Faith comes to God empty-handed. Faith has no claim on deserving anything from God, but only seeks after mercy. Second, it means that we rely wholly upon Jesus Christ and His substitutionary death as the satisfaction which God demands for sinners. We look not to ourselves nor to our church but to Christ alone. We see Him crucified for us. And we rest our hope for eternity upon Him alone [cf. Leon Morris, Galatians: Paul's Charter of Christian Freedom, 156, who identified "refusing" and "reliance" as components of faith].

            The law cannot save you. Your good-intentioned efforts cannot save you. Your family's Christian heritage cannot save you. Your baptism cannot save you. It is only those who refuse to claim merit before God and who rely wholly upon Christ that are saved. Have you trusted in Jesus Christ and His merits alone? There is growing evidence in our lives when we have truly believed upon the Lord: hope, love, obedience.

 

            3.  Unto an eager hope

            What happens when the Spirit imparts grace and a sinner believes savingly in Jesus Christ? He is imbued with an eager hope. "For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness." The idea of "waiting" is an intense word. It is an 'eager waiting' which persists in the believer's life. It carries with it a sense of expectancy. When you couple this word with that wonderful word "hope," you have the believer's great strength for facing whatever comes his way due to the intense expectancy by the assurance which God has given through His Spirit.

            Hope, as Donald Guthrie explains, "is not simply a pious wish as it has come to mean in modern English usage: rather it is a strong assurance" [quoted by Leon Morris, 157]. Hope is that which has not yet been totally fulfilled but it will. It is the full realization of all that is ours in the redemptive work of our Lord. It points toward the future consummation of the ages when our redemption will be complete and we will receive in full the eternity which Christ has purchased for us by His own blood. Gerhardus Vos wrote that "the hope of righteousness" means "the hope to which the justification of believers points them forward" [quoted by George, 361].

            This does not mean that we have as yet to receive righteousness, but instead, it means that the full complement of all that the righteousness of Christ has secured for us will be ours. The infinite wonder of His grace shown to us will be made known for the ages of eternity. It is this "hope" that secures the Christian in the difficulties of life.

            Faith and hope differ, yet they stand together. Faith rests in understanding Christ and Him crucified. Hope rests in the fact that the work of Christ has already been personally applied.

            Faith teaches us, directs us, and fills us with the knowledge of Christ. Hope inspires us, exhorts us, and motivates us to press on with Christ, even in the midst of great tribulations.

            Faith teaches us to trust in the revelation of Scripture and all its promises. Hope focuses our affections upon the goodness and faithfulness of God.

            Faith in Christ gives us life. Hope makes us conscious that we have this life.

            As Martin Luther explained, "Faith is a teacher and a judge, fighting against errors and heresies, judging spirits and doctrines; but hope is, as it were, the general or captain of the field, fighting against tribulation, the cross, impatience, heaviness of spirit, weakness, desperation, and blasphemy, and it waiteth for good things, even in the midst of evils" [311, both quote and ideas].

 

            4.  Evidenced by love and obedience

            What happens to the person who has received the gracious work of the Spirit, has renounced trust in himself and cast his whole reliance upon Jesus Christ, and who has a new hope assuring him? This person gives evidence of such a work by his love and obedience. We see this in two phrases. First, Paul explains that circumcision and uncircumcision are not what matters, but being "in Christ" does. As one in Christ he will have "faith working through love." The Greek expresses the idea of faith being "energized" so that it produces love. Faith is never idle. It produces love in the believer that shows up in his kindness and acts of charity toward others. It is a love that is best evidenced in not only the way he loves God but the way he loves others.

            This is also seen in obedience to the truth. "You were running well; who hindered you from obeying the truth?" It is interesting that Paul does not separate faith and obedience at this point. He certainly has stated clearly that there is nothing of works that can secure our salvation. But he also points out that once faith has taken root in the heart it issues forth in obedience to the truth.  As Martin Luther wrote, "And although it be true that only faith justifieth, it is not idle, but occupied and exercised in working through love" [315].

 

Conclusion

            Have you stumbled over the cross of Christ? Have you been doing everything you can think of to avoid humbling yourself at the cross, yes, dying to yourself at the cross and embracing Jesus Christ and His work by faith? My friend, see that Jesus Christ is ready to save all who will quit relying upon their own merit and trust in Him alone.

            When the Lord saves you, He gives you a new hope to carry you through life. With this hope comes love and obedience to the truth because of the energizing power of faith born in your heart by the Holy Spirit. Do you know this gracious evidence of the Lord's saving power in your life?

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