The Law is Our Schoolmaster: Part 2
Galatians 3:19-24 · Randy Peterman · Jun 13, 2010
Galatians (2010), No. 24
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492626265484

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Galatians 3, 22-24, we looked at 19-21 last week. What's the summary from last week? What did we take away from last week when we looked at the passage about the law and the promise? Did one negate the other? No? Alright. Who is the source of both? God. Did one have a mediator? Yeah, Moses was a mediator. Okay, so we have a little bit of context coming in here.

Paul was quoting the authority of the promise and he was quoting the authority of the law previously but as we take a look at 22 through 24 which we'll read in just a moment, he's actually going to step more broadly to all of scripture and appeal to all of scripture and we'll take a look at why he would do that as well as what some potential passages for that reference that he makes. Let's go ahead and read 22 through 24.

I've got it on the handout but hopefully you've got your Bible and can follow along. But the scripture has shut up everyone under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Therefore the law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.

The question that we have here is, why is it that Paul is jumping from the specifics that these Galatians would have been familiar with, the specifics of the law and the promise, why does he step out just a little bit more broadly and cite the scripture? Logically, why would you want to do that?

There's a good chance that they're going to want to refer primarily to the first five books, the Pentateuch. That is officially the Torah or the law. But Paul is looking for something more logically important. We'll say it that way. Why, if you were making an argument would you want to step outside of just one small area of the text? To get the big picture. Okay, to get the big picture.

It also reflects consistency on God's part. One of the biggest problems that I, you know, looking back on my theology growing up that I had, one of the large problems was that I didn't understand how to use this headset. I didn't understand the consistency that should have been there. I thought that the law saved you. That's why God sent it, I had thought. We've already been over that in past classes, so we'll not belabor that.

But there's a consistency throughout Scripture, and so Paul is going to cite that. Now he's the apostle. Paul is the apostle that he could speak from his own authority, right? This is an apostle. But if you're a Judaizer, you're not going to take that. You're not going to sit there and say, oh yeah, I'm alright with that. He's an apostle.

You're going to question it. So he's going to step outside of his own authority even though he had it. But what I wanted to take a moment to explore or look at this morning was that By citing the authority of Scripture, he was also citing the authority of God and the character of God and his attributes and his holiness. So the Judaizers, when they heard Scripture, they knew that that was tied in. It's going to bother you if I hold this, isn't it? I don't care. I use my hands for the clicker. There we go. That was the easy way out.

But Paul, he's citing the scripture and he's referencing it. One of the things that's important is that Paul doesn't try to argue to validate the scripture. They already understand that the scripture has authority and it already comes from God One of the things that I think is important as we look at this, I'm going to read right from my handout here, it's in the second paragraph under the authority of scripture. Paul assumes rightly that the Scriptures come from God and reflect His character, attributes, and holiness. He then asserts that the Scriptures carry with them the full authority of God's message through language, a creation of God's, which carried the fullness of the message born of the Holy Spirit through the prophets to whom it was given. That's a very long run-on sentence and I apologize. But Paul is cramming in an entire system of authority and an entire system for why it needs to be respected just by citing the Scriptures. And I think that's important because if you consider these Judaizers, who was their authority for their teaching? Moses. It was Moses, and they went there. But who else had come in between Moses and the time to the Galatians? Rabbis? Yeah, Rabbis. Pick anybody.

The thing is that they had a lot of influences that are there, and one of the big problems that the Rabbis brought with them, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum was one of the teachers I had in seminary, he had this joke that made me chuckle, but it was basically that wherever there are two Rabbis, there's three opinions. And the thing that, you know, that's logical and consistent, you say, how horrible, but the truth of the matter is that with these ideas, people would come to the rabbi and they'd say, Rabbi, please teach me. And the rabbis would rather leave you pondering the merits of the different arguments rather than really go to the authority of scripture and come down on a straight line and say, this is how it is. you know, ask one of the elders here at Holly Hills a question and have them leave you scratching your head going, they don't know. Roger's probably thinking, oh there's this one time.

But the truth of the matter is that at Holly Hills we hold the truth of scripture to be an important, factual, absolute, knowable thing. And in doing so, It allows us to approach Scripture and come to it and get something out of it. Paul had that same attitude. I'm citing the authority of Scripture. It's believable, it's reliable, and it's knowable. And those are important. The other thing is that it says it's accurate. And I think that's a really big critical problem that we face in our culture.

How many of you run into people who say the Bible's full of errors? How many of you have found that a majority of them actually can't cite one of them? That's the problem I've run into. It's mythology or it's errors. Really, where, why? Let's talk about this. And unfortunately, often they don't know. But then there are some people who have found some logical things where they think, well, there's an inconsistency here or a problem there, and so you've got to discuss things and look at things in context. But the problem is that people don't trust it. They don't consider it to be reliable. Paul doesn't wrestle with that with these people, but I did want to take a few moments to look at that.

What are some of the erroneous views about the Scriptures in our culture today? We just said that people think there's mistakes sometimes, but what are some of the other variations that we run into? Roy? There's a huge bunch of people in my life today that think you're a bigot and opinionated and you're not inclusive and you've got a phobia of some kind. You believe in absolutes even.

So the Bible is breeding all kinds of psychotral intolerance and what not. and it doesn't embrace psychology, which is just devastating for Adam. What are the consequences of these views, though? What are the logical consequences that the secular mind takes on? Stan?

I hate to use this, but it's like people who say that the Constitution is a living document, and that it has to grow with culture and society. And so a lot of people today, particularly in New Age, who feel there's a new paradigm, and so the Bible doesn't lend itself to growing with the changes in culture in the world, even though in Hebrews it says that it's a living word, and they don't understand that. Well, it's funny.

Anytime they level those kinds of accusations, it ends up being something where they come to you and they say, well, the scriptures are leading you to be culturally irrelevant. And actually, there's a whole church movement that's called the Emerging Church. I don't know if you've heard of that before. It's basically the idea that we want to be culturally irrelevant. And so by culturally irrelevant, they usually end up meaning ignore the scripture on a lot of different topics instead. To make it culturally relevant, what do they end up doing? They end up bringing the culture in.

Last week we talked briefly about syncretism. Syncretism is the idea that you mix two conflicting ideas and merge them into one, and instead of seeing the tension there, you just embrace them both and enjoy that. It's very true in the foreign field especially. It's very, yeah, definitely with missionaries and things like that.

In fact, I was hoping you and I could have a conversation about that because I know it's related but we won't do it in the Sunday School. But this idea of syncretism is that you take different ideas and you blend them together and that happens where we're going to be culturally irrelevant by taking things that are in the culture and just merging into the church. Can anybody think of a major denomination or two that have done that for maybe 1,500 years? Much of the Catholic Church, a lot of their doctrine came from trying to be culturally irrelevant.

Hey, we want these people to come to know Christ. So we'll just take on their symbols and their ideas and we'll sanctify them. Which I think is the most important thing. There's another term they are using today to say the same thing. They're saying rebaptizing. Oh, rebaptizing. That's a good one. You know, I always like it when we use terms like that where we're basically, it's using something that sounds like Christianese so that people drop their guard rather than what does scripture say and how do we compare it to it.

Now, one question is, what would be useful about believing in a Bible with just some error? A lot of seminaries now are not teaching that the Bible is error-free, they're teaching that the Bible is 99.999% accurate. With just a few problems. What good is a somewhat accurate Bible?

Well, that's one logical problem, Stan. Dr. Stanley on the radio one day went into that particular topic and he started off with one error. And then he went to different places of the Bible where if you take this out, then you've got to take those other pieces out as well. And then he went in a very long and involved sermon. But by the time he got done, there wasn't anything left. And that's part of the problem.

When you start hammering away at various parts of the scripture, like, well, the literal seven-day creation, six-day creation, that's not accurate. But that doesn't impact the rest of the Bible, someone will usually say, until you start to look at how the rest of the Bible quotes Genesis, in which case it's very foundational and it needs to be taken in its context.

So, this is obviously potential for a lot of rabbit trail, but we'll keep moving forward. We're going to skip that last question at the bottom of page 1. Now, one last question. This is just something that I find encouraging. At the top of page 2 it says, In the light of this passage, what is the relationship of thought, language, and God's creative being? This is totally philosophical. It's theological and philosophical.

But what are the relationships of thought, language, and God's being a creative being? Well, who has made the brains? Who made the language? Who made all of creation? It really comes on God's doorstep and no place in between. When we look at the creation account, God created over six days and named some big things. And then what did he ask Adam to do, whom he had created in this image? He asked Adam. He said, name these. Give them names.

So part of God's creativity was the expression of language and thoughts in ways that we could understand. I'm going to slide this over because I keep not seeing Ingrid and she's doing this. It makes me feel bad. But the relationship between language and thought and God's creative being, it's really a cool expression. And I think scriptures, as we read through them, reflect that part of God's character and his attributes. All right, let's keep moving. What do the scriptures do? Now that we've looked at the scriptures, what are the scriptures doing in this passage? force men into silence. They have no answer. There is no answer, there is no argument.

They must go and deal with this problem of sin. So that the text says that it shut up, that the scripture has shut up everyone on their sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Let's look at a complimentary passage if you'll turn in your Bibles to Romans 3 particularly verses 23 and 24. If I could have somebody read that out loud, 23 and 24. for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

All right. So all have sinned. Now there, I mean obviously that's culturally not an acceptable thing. Should we be culturally relevant and ignore that part of scripture? It seems like it would be really friendly. People would like it. Obviously that's not a good way to deal with the problem of sin.

But Paul says the Scriptures, and he just says, I'm citing the authority of Scripture. So let's take a few moments to look at some Scriptures. Now Paul would be citing the Old Testament, right? The New Testament canon isn't complete yet. We're reading part of it, obviously, so we know that as he's writing this We sin to all. Well, it is part of what we need to know. But if we go and recite and take a look at Ecclesiastes and Psalms, we'll find several references. And then we will go into the Adam. Adam is our federal head. But we'll get there. We're not there yet.

Psalm 14.1. says there is no one who does good, and then in verse 3 he says they have all turned aside together, they have become corrupt. So we have pretty condemning language there, but that's just one little passage, and it's in a poetry section of Scripture, so who knows? It's in our modern interpretation of things, we don't take it literally, so we'd have to find another place.

Ecclesiastes 7.20 says, Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins. Now that one, I think, I enjoy because from a philosophical perspective, and Ecclesiastes is definitely a philosophical book, he lets you think of an out and then he cuts that off. So he says, indeed there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and never sins.

Now, what is the theme of almost every single movie that's ever been produced in the last 30 or 40 years? If you go out to the movie theater, almost every movie seems to somehow end up with, there's at least some good guys. There might be bad guys and Rambo's gonna have to blow them up. You might have been a bad dad up until this point, but now after this point you realize, ta-da, I was a bozo, and now I'm a great dad, and now I'm a good guy. Every movie always ends with, there's a good guy, there's a good guy, there's a good guy. We're all good, most of the time. Ecclesiastes doesn't let anybody off the hook with being most legal and most of the time. So, Paul reiterated that concept in Romans 3, and we looked a little bit at that.

But furthermore, and this is what Tom brought up, if you'll turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 15, if I can have one person read verse 22, and another person read verse 45, that would be tremendous. So when you get there, go ahead and start reading. What are the verses? 1 Corinthians 15 verses 22 and 45.

Whereas in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. Okay, so everybody died in Adam. And then verse 45. And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul. Okay, so we have this concept of Adam, the first Adam and the second Adam, and in verse 22 he tells us that all died in Adam, which is terribly depressing, right?

It would be terribly depressing if the scriptures didn't shut us up to something else. And Paul continues on, he says we were shut up in sin, but now we're shut up Now we're shut up to the point of needing to be living by faith, because we cannot do it by the works of the flesh. We're sinners.

All right, and so I have this very, very simple diagram. This is easy. I put zero numbers on it because that made it even easier. But from the time from Adam, Abraham, David, Moses, those are not in chronological order, and all saints, They had been saved by faith in the one who was to be revealed.

God was, through prophecy, revealing that one was coming who would save them and pay for the penalty of their sins. And everybody was saved by faith. No matter how awesome the law was, it never saved anybody. It was not for salvation. It was for sanctification. For setting aside unto holiness. But it never made anybody good enough.

And then, even in the New Testament, Church Age, we still look back to that same point, that fulcrum, if you will, and everything is leveraged still by faith and the work of Christ on the cross. So being shut up unto sin was not the end. It didn't stop there.

So Paul continues on here in Galatians 23 but before faith came we were kept in custody under the law being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Okay so we have this issue of faith and in verse 22 he says it's again promised by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Since all have been saved from separation from God by faith in his provision through grace and the work of his Son on the cross which is the Bible message, Paul says that we're shut up to the faith, which was later to be revealed. The same concept is presented as earlier, where we were shut up into sin, but this time we're surrounded by proof that we can only have salvation through Christ. So that being shut up is not the end. Now the Greek word for shut up is to be trapped, or snared in a net. How does a net work? I have to say that slowly. That's two words. How does a net work? It entraps you. Think of fish being pulled in. How many of you have ever seen some of those Discovery Channel fishing shows? Sometimes if I can't sleep I'll turn on the television and that will put you to sleep. I guess I'm not that big into sea fishing.

But what they do with the nets is that there is an opening, but there is only one out on that net. And surprisingly, it's on the boat. I don't know why they don't want to let them go. Don't they love animals? But the net comes up and the mouth of the net funnels right into the boat. So they capture the fish and it goes in.

There's only one out. And so we have the same problem. We're shut up. in the law, to only be able to find one out. Unfortunately, with man's philosophy, it looks more like a rat maze. So we're looking for another out, as long as it's not the out that is the Bible message of the gospel. But we have this concept of being shut up so that we would only find the one out, which is faith. So we have this revelation of faith that is by scripture, and it's clearly there, And it's the same faith that Abraham had by the promise. So Paul is continuing with his logical argument. It's the same way to salvation through faith.

It's not the same thing. Tom? Isn't it kind of an interesting illustration of Jesus when Peter was told to walk on the water and head for him. And only one person who could deliver him was saved. And basically had to take his hand and get him out of the water. God the Lord saved him. But he had to be looking on the one person who could save him. And the one who would allow him to walk in the water. Say Randy? Yeah. Just an observation. Sure.

In my own personal understanding of this, You guys have helped me a lot because when I began to believe on Christ and put this together in my mind, my focus was my out from the law is my faith. But really the focus of this text shows us to bring us unto Christ that we might be justified by faith. Of course that faith is in Him, don't get me wrong. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to convey on this chart.

You did, but that helps, doesn't it? Well, that's the thing, is that when you see that it was always by faith, and everybody was looking to the very same person, it kind of is exciting, at least for me. I don't know, maybe you guys don't find it as exciting, but I think it's really cool. There's a sense of, hey, maybe God had a plan. And not only do you have plenty of a loving plan. And I get to be part of that. Tom? One last thing is kind of looking at the Old Testament example of that. Maybe one of the best, but not probably. I'm sure not the only example.

There was Moses just basically demonstrating before the law was handed down to them, saying, you can't obey this law. It's just not possible. And they said, well, go ahead. Do it. We can do it. He said, then I'm going to sprinkle you with the blood. And it'll be the blood of the covenant. It's just all that's going to prevail.

Yeah, well and that's the thing is that the law could never save. It could only set aside. I mean he had 80 years of experience to know by that time that anything he did and standing in the presence of God and gave him the law, that it was never going to work, never in a million years.

Yeah. I actually heard somebody teach once that humans could actually live up to the law. No one had yet, but it was possible. I was like, well, I'll go get my stones. I got two hands here. I think I saw Stan's first, but we'll go ahead. It doesn't matter. I was just going to say, this basically is trust.

I mean, the people before the cross had to trust that what they were being told by the law and through the law was going to give them salvation. If they did what God told them they were supposed to do, they had to have faith and trust in God. So the people after the cross basically are required to do the exact same thing. That Christ's work on the cross was God's plan and you have faith and you have trust that it is what God says that it was. So faith and trust are are there on both sides of the cross, right? Absolutely.

One of the things that I didn't do on this chart, just because I wanted to keep it simple, was that when you look at the chronology of things, revelation in scripture was, you know, prophet by prophet or book by book, it came through. What did Noah have? What was the scriptures that Noah had? It was a very small amount. Of course God talked to him, so that made some things a little easier. But the thing is that the amount of revelation that was given was small.

But it was consistent. And I think that consistency was the thing that stands out as a pretty monumental and important thing. Consistency through the message. Salvation was always by faith and never by works. I'm just going to interject that just to enhance it. That must have been a pretty profound statement when those guys heard Jesus stand there at the last part of John 14, 6, saying, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and nobody comes to the Father but me.

Well, how did they take that? I'm pretty sure their minds were blown. Well, part of what I think is tremendous is that Christ taught the disciples and he taught them truth. They couldn't argue with him. They knew he was a messenger from God. It wasn't until the Holy Spirit came that things really started to congeal because they started to think things they understood in a very light sense but it was something God brought about through the Holy Spirit a very deep understanding and knowledge as God taught them and brought those things to When Jesus said this, that's what he meant. Because you have to think that as clear as Christ was speaking when he was God, it wasn't like he didn't understand language. There must have been still so many things in their minds that they didn't understand, but it's clear in the upper room that they started, oh, well these things are starting to come together. Jesus said this was going to happen.

And if we look back and go, well, duh. But we have the benefit of the whole New Testament canon. I'm always a little nervous when I am talking with people who are church goers on a regular basis, active in their churches and so forth, but they always speak of God. And they don't really talk about the Lord Jesus Christ. God this, God that, and so on and so on.

And I like the way you put that there, faith in the one who was to be revealed, and the one who was revealed. I have to wonder sometimes if faith is their object. I've come to faith and I believe in God, which is what, you know, the devils believe in. And you have to wonder if they're really saved or not.

And yet, faith is the means, merely the road, or the path, or whatever, that brought us to the object. And if they don't stress the object, I feel nervous with that. Well, and that's part, what I've personally taken to doing is simply start asking questions and engaging them. So what do you think about, based on where the conversation is, bring things about to where they're going to have to reveal something about an understanding of identification, even if they don't use the vocabulary of identification truths.

And the thing is that if it takes the faith of a child to be saved, a child can understand it. What makes me sad is how many people stay children and don't grow beyond that point. And that's the part where I start getting nervous and I start asking questions. Is this a child of God? Uh-huh. Okay. Now let's see where can they grow? Because sometimes it's pretty tremendous how long someone will be a babe in Christ.

Well, Paul came to that place after believing in Christ even. will slew him, and at the end of that Romans chapter 7, you guys explained this real well, it says, O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me? It's not my faith, it's who shall deliver me? Well, we're going to get in, at the end of this section we're going to talk about the work of Christ, and we're going to talk about two words that I think are really, really, If you can get somebody to identify these two words, you will more than likely be able to tell if they understood the gospel in whom they're believing in. So we have this concept of faith, because of time restraints we won't go into all of the potential questions that I've got on there about the works that man can come up with.

Basically salvation, as Paul is reiterated and reiterated and reiterated, salvation is by faith. It's clearly by faith and it's always by faith. The law traps us to the point of having to recognize that it can only be by faith because we just can't do it by works. We bring nothing to the table. We have become needy and broken and helpless and homeless and all the things that all the wealth of the world won't get us anything. The law shows us that. So then what? And we have to respond by faith.

So now we can talk about those two words in our demo here. The two words are sufficiency and efficacy. Now you don't have to use those exact words. You may want to pad those with the 6th grade English. Sufficiency is the adequacy of Christ's work on the cross. Our faith needs to be in a Savior whose work on the cross was sufficient before God. This has to do with the quality of the sacrifice. Good to go. Yeah, well, fortunately we believe that here, and I can say that knowing each one of you long enough, there's not a doubt in my mind that everybody believes in the sufficiency of Christ. But what's the problem with sufficiency when you're coming from a secular perspective and someone tells you about this really nice guy, Jesus?

Yeah, what's the catch? Yeah, what's the catch? Basically, people are going to be skeptical, but there are a lot of denominations and cults, primarily, hopefully, that teach an insufficient Christ. The Catholic Church has a place called Purgatory that they teach about.

Why? Was Christ a sufficient sacrifice? No. He was insufficient. you're going to have to make up for some of that, okay? You're going to have to pray him through this place. You'll spend your time, it'll be stinky, but after a while you'll get out and then everything will be awesome and you'll get to go be with Jesus and Mary and God in heaven, right? I feel like that part even should be edited out. That should never go on the internet, that's a misquote.

But sufficiency is a critical word. Did Christ sacrifice Or was it sufficient? When we talk about grace, grace is the totally adequate work of Christ. The end of it is the adequate work of Christ. The unlimited and merited blessings of God due to the totally adequate work of Christ. It's sufficient. His death was all that needed to be paid. It was not something that we come to have faith in a mostly good Jesus. A mostly sufficient Jesus. He's an absolutely, totally sufficient Jesus Christ.

Now the next word I've drawn in there is efficacy, or you could use the word effectiveness, but in seminary, too many people use the word efficacy, so it's not drawn into my brain. I apologize. Efficacy is the ability to produce the desired result. If Christ's work on the cross were not effective, it would be completely ridiculous for the Father to have sent the Son. If it was insufficient, that wouldn't be good enough. If it was ineffective, that wouldn't be good enough.

Okay? Sometimes people will say, oh, Jesus was perfect, which would have made him a sufficient sacrifice, right? He was perfect. That's what we needed, a perfect sacrifice. But it wasn't effective for everybody. And that's where things start to get tricky as people come up with exceptions. It's not effective for Adolf Hitler's. Too much sin. It was sufficient before God. It pleased God's wrath, but Adolf Hitler It was not effective, it was not efficacious.

Stan? So, I have two questions. Sure. Okay, so was the people looking to the bronze serpent when they were in the wilderness? Was that sufficient and what's efficient? Effective. Effective. And was the annual atonement in a ceremonial law that God laid out for the people, was that sufficient and effective? And if so, why? They were not for salvation.

They were still sufficient and effective because they looked toward Christ and it was God who gave the results in all these cases. It goes back to God. So Christ's work was sufficient and effective because God said it was and this is his plan to do so. Prior to that, the atonement was the plan and it was effective because it looked toward Christ through God. And the bronze serpent was the same thing in the wilderness. They could look toward that because again it was a picture of Christ and God's plan that if they had faith and trusted in what God provided, it was sufficient and effective, right?

Well, but not for salvation, they were for sanctification and setting aside for... Right, but it was still tied to Christ through God. That's what I'm saying. Absolutely. I mean, they were a sign. When we look at John 3, 16 even, or John 3, we should never say just 16, but when we look at John 3, in fact, Christ quotes the symbol of the serpent. So if you want to turn there, you can. All I'm saying is the faith and trust again. Yeah, it's in faith and trust, and this actually ties in with the efficacy. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so the Son of Man must be lifted up. Why was the serpent lifted up? Does anybody remember that Old Testament? Whoever wanted to look at it, he has a chance to look. But it was for snakebites, right? Everybody who had a snakebite would be healed. Everyone who didn't have a snakebite didn't need it. If they had faith and trust in God's provision.

Now, see, this is a brief illustration that Christ is making, but what has the law shut us up to? How many people have snake bites in this parallel? The law says we've all been bitten by the snake. And so we all must look, like Christ is saying here, the Son of Man must be lifted up and everyone's going to have to believe in Him. He makes this analogy, which is just brief and light, and it's not a one-for-one, because not everybody had snakebites, but everybody needs salvation. This is a Genesis reference. What's the significance of a snakebite in Genesis 3? The serpent would be crushed. You will bite the heel of the seed of Eve.

But here we have this need, again it's being shut up, to the point of knowing that we need to have faith in this Son, who is sufficient, who is effective. The world comes and they want to redefine the sufficiency of Christ, if at all. Some people have redefined the sufficiency of Christ to say that You don't even have to believe. Christ paid the penalty for everybody, and it's not even about belief. It was effective for everyone.

No need to believe. Now, I'm not teaching that. May that be on the record. I am not teaching that heresy. But, there are some who redefine sufficiency in that direction, and some people, like we said earlier, have redefined it as not sufficient enough. It's close. You're 95% of the way, you just need to do the other 5%. And then there's the issue of the efficacy. Is it effective for some?

Well, no, because there's some people that it wasn't good enough for because they were too wicked. It's funny how in one Sunday school class we can talk about how movies say everybody's good, or most everybody's good, and then in the end there's some people who are too bad. We went to Madame Tussaud's house of wax last Christmas for the company Christmas party and there was actually a room in there that had wax statues of people associated with genocide. People associated with Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Mussolini, and several others. Stalin. Thank you. Who's my famous Russian name? I've got it wrong.

I'm not a good history teacher apparently. But there were these famous killers And I imagine that everybody would walk in there and say, whoo, because we'd actually already walked through... they had a section that was dedicated to the life of Christ, which was interesting. Anytime you see a wax figure of Jesus, you'd say, I don't know if he looks better than that. It just wasn't what I'd imagined. But you have this problem of efficacy and sufficiency. Oh, it's not effective for Hitler. No way. Or pick your killer.

So we can look at those things, we can see the error that's there. But Paul, as he closes this section here, he says, therefore the law has become our tutor to lead us, or our schoolmaster, to lead us to Christ so that we may be justified by faith. We talked about faith. What's this justified word? Declared righteous. So we can be declared righteous by faith. And that's, I think we've spent, if you're like me, you've spent hours of your life meditating on what it means to be justified.

How many of you have ever been in a discussion with believers and somebody mentions so-and-so who did such-and-such? And this said, I can't believe they went to Las Vegas and they gambled. I don't know if they're saved. Their justification in that context is what? Is it faith? In Christ? What is this person asserting? How are they saved? By works. Now, I'm not suggesting everyone here should get on a plane and go gambling in Las Vegas. We have liberty to do so, but I'm not suggesting it.

The truth of the matter is that as we look at justification, I find so many believers have come with questions. They're looking for that part of justification that has that loophole. What's the sin they could do? Oh, that person cheated on their spouse. Well, not justified. It doesn't matter what the list item is. They're looking for that loophole. What does Paul say? Who are we justified in? Is it me? Am I justified in myself?

I can't be. We already said, because of the law, I brought nothing to the table. So we're justified by the work of Christ. All things are lawful now, but not all things are expedient. Beneficial. That's the NIP, I think. Profitable, yeah. So, there you go. It's kind of like, you can either do it the easy way or the hard way, but God's going to grow you up to a moment. Yeah. He's conforming us. Stan.

I was also going to ask, where did the Catholic religion get the cardinal and the benign sins? Oh, it's the cardinal sins. Is there supposed to be a list of priorities of which are the worst sins and which are the Not so bad. I don't have a phrase about sin unto death.

Yes. Yeah. Well, what's interesting is that somebody actually made a flowchart. This was this was an engineer. If anybody ever would do this would be an engineer. But they made an entire flowchart diagram showing, OK, you start here, you believe, and then it goes up here and then you're kind of in a good loop. and then you screw up and you go out of that. And then it splits off.

It's a cardinal or venial sin. If it is so, you've got to go to confession. You go to confession. But then if it was the wrong kind of sin, I think the venial is the more extreme of the two. Cardinal it is. Cardinal it is. OK. See, I'm not a very good Catholic. And then you've got to start back over here and get re-saved. But it was a really terrible, terrible, but wonderful diagram. But the point of the question is, where do they get it? It's not scripture. Like you're saying, so what sin is forgiven and which one isn't, and how can you rate them? Yeah, that's a good question.

We've all erred because of Adam, but we're all forgiven if we have to trust in faith in Christ. And that means all things, right? I mean, none of them are excluded except the one it talks about in First John, which I assume is idolatry, or similar to that. But that would be the only one that I know of that would even be questionable, because it says not to pray for that. But everything else fits under the cross, right?

Well, everything fits under the cross. That's the thing. Once you're saved, you're bought, you're purchased, there is no undoing it. That's the thing. Because of identification, I made slides, I wouldn't draw on the picture, but because of identification, if we're tied in with this death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seating, I'm going to draw that as a stone. Isn't that a beautiful stone? Ascension and then seating, and that's a chair, it's not an H. That's it, it's unidirectional. It's a one-way street and there's no going back.

There's a guy by the name of Mike Gendron that I got a chance to listen to in Texas when I was going to seminary, and he's got a ministry called, I think it's Pro-Gospel, or something to that effect, and it's two Catholics. And the number one effective tool in talking with the Catholics, this is going to be shocking, it's the Scripture.

What does it say? What did Paul write? What did he say? Well, the Church teaches this. What did Paul say? Well, they teach this. What did Paul say? What did Peter say? Well, they teach this. What did Moses say? You know, it's the Scripture. We talked about the authority of Scripture earlier. The number one conversion tool is God's Word.

Tom? In the Catholic hierarchy's favorite weasel passage is Peter speaking about a lot of things that Paul says that are hard to understand. They take that so completely out of the ballpark. They say, you know, you don't really have to read anything about Paul. Listen to what the first pope said.

Yeah. Oh, man. You know, actually, I'd somehow never run into that, but that's pretty clever. Wow. Well, that's all I have for this morning. I don't know if there's any other thoughts or questions. We can have some more discussion. Gail? Yeah, I kind of hung up back to a few sentences ago where you were talking about Mr. Hitler. Mr. Hitler.

When we say to someone that the work of Christ is sufficient even for guys like that, Where does that leave the believer, unbeliever, not well taught believer, even me, possibly? Where does that leave us with, okay, so when I get to heaven, I'm going to be really upset if I find him there. I'm not really going to like that because he looks really bad. And he deserves to be punished.

So, how do we explain or discuss? Well, I think that has to do with... On the cross, what did Christ do? Was it only with us in nature or was it with us when he came after us? How would we express that to someone when we say, okay, well, Hitler put him in heaven. The point is, if we weren't there when he was about to put the bullet into his head in a microsecond later, we might have had the chance and took it, saying, this was wrong, but it's too late now, the bullet's going in, by faith I trust in Jesus, everything's wrong.

The thing is, the statement about Hitler is not to say that Hitler saved it, it's simply to say that that's the effectiveness of Christ's work on the cross. The thing is that the law brings everybody to that point of having to believe by faith, which means that God created only one exit.

I'm reminded of a pin that you might have in livestock. You can tell I'm not a farmer or a rancher, but my grandparents had a holding pin on their farm. And there was only one way out when they wanted you to get on the loading truck to go somewhere else. They had this ramp, and that was the only way out. You're going to get out that way. They would sometimes try to jump over the fence, but that's the out. So the idea of Hitler, or the naming of Hitler is not to cause people to be wrestling, it is simply to say that grace is unlimited and unmerited. And that's the point where we come back to grace and that definition. Stan?

Isn't there a passage something about that when it says when you get to heaven you will know all things? I think that means that when we go there we are not going to have our judgmental attitudes and our following nature and all the other things that all the other baggage that we carry along with us so when we go there we'll know the answers and we'll see and if he's there we'll be glad about it because there is a reason that he's there because God put him there and again it's faith and trust in what God does And we aren't going to be bringing all this bad news stuff that we carry around in the face of this earth. Sure. Knowing it's flesh. We're going to have a totally new attitude and a very loving, accepting, God-centered will and attitude there. We'll see why. It's not going to affect us, I'm sure.

Well, Ephesians 2.7 says, So that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Which means that for eternity we're going to be shocked and amazed by his grace. And that may show up in people that we're surprised to see there. Quite frankly, maybe this is just me and I'm a bit of a sap, but the idea of seeing people that I really can't stand right now in heaven is warming because I'm pretty sure there's some people out there that can't stand me either.

In the flesh, we're wicked. In the flesh, we bring nothing to the table. You know, I could have been Hitler. You could have been Hitler. If we were truthful to ourselves, our sin nature is so depraved, and we could have done the same thing. So, I mean, in that perspective, we identify with our sin nature, we identify with people that have acted that out.

Yeah. Well, in Romans chapter 1, the second, or the latter half of Romans chapter 1, as Paul lists out all the sins, I mean, this is normal. That's what the flesh does. Over and over again. That makes it a lot less. I've got more on my hands. I opened up a can of worms.

What I'm getting at is, when Christ died on the cross and bore the punishment for all of mankind, no matter what their sins were, in talking to another person, perhaps we need to explain what that means in regard to the sin nature itself. that we all fall short of the glory of God. We all have the same capacity to sin. We cannot escape that, we cannot get out of it.

And when he suffered, he took the punishment for that. But he also, I mean, so that the sin nature itself is no longer an issue in the eyes of God. But the sins that we still produce and the fact that we haven't believed until we come to faith becomes the issue that we have to recognize that we aren't good enough. And the fact that he died for my signature alone. There's something beyond just the sins that we do every day. Yeah, that nature is a critical element. And that's what has been dealt with by Christ that we couldn't deal with. And so what's left for us to deal with is the recognition that I was that bad. Yeah, we always want Hitler to be worse than me. Yeah. Where do I look for the satisfaction of what I continue to do? Yeah. Instead of just saying, well, it might be there. Yeah. I still don't like that. Roy, if you want to share your comment, then we'll pray and we'll close.

Just this, that Paul was a persecutor unto death. Those who he killed in glory are going to wake up in glory and see Paul. That's a good point. That's a very good point. And they will see him as the redeemed Paul. That's a pretty good analogy. The thing is that every time grace is poured out, God is glorified. And that to me is just an amazing thing. No matter what you do, grace is poured out.

That's the operating system we live under in East Glorified. Let's close in prayer. There's a tremendous number of hours of discussion that could be had on this topic. Heavenly Father, thank you for this time. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for sending your Son to be the way out from the law that you showed to be an example of your righteousness.

We ask that you would Continue to draw these things to our mind as we go throughout the weeks ahead of us, if you tarry that long. And Lord, we want to lift up all the prayer requests again. We pray for the safety of those traveling and dealing with medical things. Just praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.