The Living Bible (372 page)

Galatians
3

Oh, foolish Galatians! What magician has hypnotized you and cast an evil spell upon you? For you used to see the meaning of Jesus Christ’s death as clearly as though I had waved a placard before you with a picture on it of Christ dying on the cross.
²
 Let me ask you this one question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit by trying to keep the Jewish laws? Of course not, for the Holy Spirit came upon you only after you heard about Christ and trusted him to save you.
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 Then have you gone completely crazy? For if trying to obey the Jewish laws never gave you spiritual life in the first place, why do you think that trying to obey them now will make you stronger Christians?
⁴
 You have suffered so much for the Gospel. Now are you going to just throw it all overboard? I can hardly believe it!

    
⁵
 I ask you again, does God give you the power of the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you as a result of your trying to obey the Jewish laws? No, of course not. It is when you believe in Christ and fully trust him.

    
⁶
 Abraham had the same experience—God declared him fit for heaven only because he believed God’s promises.
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 You can see from this that the real children of Abraham are all the men of faith who truly trust in God.

    
^8-9
 What’s more, the Scriptures looked forward to this time when God would save the Gentiles also, through their faith. God told Abraham about this long ago when he said, “I will bless those in every nation who trust in me as you do.” And so it is: all who trust in Christ share the same blessing Abraham received.

    
¹⁰
 Yes, and those who depend on the Jewish laws to save them are under God’s curse, for the Scriptures point out very clearly, “Cursed is everyone who at any time breaks a single one of these laws that are written in God’s Book of the Law.”
¹¹
 Consequently, it is clear that no one can ever win God’s favor by trying to keep the Jewish laws because God has said that the only way we can be right in his sight is by faith. As the prophet Habakkuk says it, “The man who finds life will find it through trusting God.”
¹²
 How different from this way of faith is the way of law, which says that a man is saved by obeying every law of God, without one slip.
¹³
 But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself. For it is written in the Scripture, “Anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed” (as Jesus was hung upon a wooden cross
*
).

    
¹⁴
 Now God can bless the Gentiles, too, with this same blessing he promised to Abraham; and all of us as Christians can have the promised Holy Spirit through this faith.

    
¹⁵
 Dear brothers, even in everyday life a promise made by one man to another, if it is written down and signed, cannot be changed. He cannot decide afterward to do something else instead.

    
¹⁶
 Now, God gave some promises to Abraham and his Child. And notice that it doesn’t say the promises were to his
children,
as it would if all his sons—all the Jews—were being spoken of, but to his
Child—
and that, of course, means Christ.
¹⁷
 Here’s what I am trying to say: God’s promise to save through faith—and God wrote this promise down and signed it—could not be canceled or changed four hundred and thirty years later when God gave the Ten Commandments.
¹⁸
 If
obeying those laws
could save us, then it is obvious that this would be a different way of gaining God’s favor than Abraham’s way, for he simply accepted God’s promise.

    
¹⁹
 Well then, why were the laws given? They were added after the promise was given, to show men how guilty they are of breaking God’s laws. But this system of law was to last only until the coming of Christ, the Child to whom God’s promise was made. (And there is this further difference. God gave his laws to angels to give to Moses, who then gave them to the people;
²⁰
 but when God gave his promise to Abraham, he did it by himself alone, without angels or Moses as go-betweens.)

    
^21-22
 Well then, are God’s laws and God’s promises against each other? Of course not! If we could be saved by his laws, then God would not have had to give us a different way to get out of the grip of sin—for the Scriptures insist we are all its prisoners. The only way out is through faith in Jesus Christ; the way of escape is open to all who believe him.

    
²³
 Until Christ came we were guarded by the law, kept in protective custody, so to speak, until we could believe in the coming Savior.

    
²⁴
 Let me put it another way. The Jewish laws were our teacher and guide until Christ came to give us right standing with God through our faith.
²⁵
 But now that Christ has come, we don’t need those laws any longer to guard us and lead us to him.
²⁶
 For now we are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ,
²⁷
 and we who have been baptized into union with Christ are enveloped by him.
²⁸
 We are no longer Jews or Greeks or slaves or free men or even merely men or women, but we are all the same—we are Christians; we are one in Christ Jesus.
²⁹
 And now that we are Christ’s we are the true descendants of Abraham, and all of God’s promises to him belong to us.

Galatians
4

But remember this, that if a father dies and leaves great wealth for his little son, that child is not much better off than a slave until he grows up, even though he actually owns everything his father had.
²
 He has to do what his guardians and managers tell him to until he reaches whatever age his father set.

    
³
 And that is the way it was with us before Christ came. We were slaves to Jewish laws and rituals, for we thought they could save us.
⁴
 But when the right time came, the time God decided on, he sent his Son, born of a woman, born as a Jew,
⁵
 to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law so that he could adopt us as his very own sons.
⁶
 And because we are his sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, so now we can rightly speak of God as our dear Father.
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 Now we are no longer slaves but God’s own sons. And since we are his sons, everything he has belongs to us, for that is the way God planned.

    
⁸
 Before you Gentiles knew God you were slaves to so-called gods that did not even exist.
⁹
 And now that you have found God (or I should say, now that God has found you), how can it be that you want to go back again and become slaves once more to another poor, weak, useless religion of trying to get to heaven by obeying God’s laws?
¹⁰
 You are trying to find favor with God by what you do or don’t do on certain days or months or seasons or years.
¹¹
 I fear for you. I am afraid that all my hard work for you was worth nothing.

    
¹²
 Dear brothers, please feel as I do about these things, for I am as free from these chains as you used to be. You did not despise me then when I first preached to you,
¹³
 even though I was sick when I first brought you the Good News of Christ.
¹⁴
 But even though my sickness was revolting to you, you didn’t reject me and turn me away. No, you took me in and cared for me as though I were an angel from God or even Jesus Christ himself.

    
¹⁵
 Where is that happy spirit that we felt together then? For in those days I know you would gladly have taken out your own eyes and given them to replace mine
*
if that would have helped me.

    
¹⁶
 And now have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?

    
¹⁷
 Those false teachers who are so anxious to win your favor are not doing it for your good. What they are trying to do is to shut you off from me so that you will pay more attention to them.
¹⁸
 It is a fine thing when people are nice to you with good motives and sincere hearts, especially if they aren’t doing it just when I am with you!
¹⁹
 Oh, my children, how you are hurting me! I am once again suffering for you the pains of a mother waiting for her child to be born—longing for the time when you will finally be filled with Christ.
²⁰
 How I wish I could be there with you right now and not have to reason with you like this, for at this distance I frankly don’t know what to do.

    
²¹
 Listen to me, you friends who think you have to obey the Jewish laws to be saved: Why don’t you find out what those laws really mean?
²²
 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one from his slave-wife and one from his freeborn wife.
²³
 There was nothing unusual about the birth of the slave-wife’s baby. But the baby of the freeborn wife was born only after God had especially promised he would come.

    
^24-25
 Now this true story is an illustration of God’s two ways of helping people. One way was by giving them his laws to obey. He did this on Mount Sinai, when he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. Mount Sinai, by the way, is called “Mount Hagar” by the Arabs—and in my illustration, Abraham’s slave-wife Hagar represents Jerusalem, the mother-city of the Jews, the center of that system of trying to please God by trying to obey the Commandments; and the Jews, who try to follow that system, are her slave children.
²⁶
 But our mother-city is the heavenly Jerusalem, and she is not a slave to Jewish laws.

    
²⁷
 That is what Isaiah meant when he prophesied, “Now you can rejoice, O childless woman; you can shout with joy though you never before had a child. For I am going to give you many children—more children than the slave-wife has.”

    
²⁸
 You and I, dear brothers, are the children that God promised, just as Isaac was.
²⁹
 And so we who are born of the Holy Spirit are persecuted now by those who want us to keep the Jewish laws, just as Isaac, the child of promise, was persecuted by Ishmael, the slave-wife’s son.

    
³⁰
 But the Scriptures say that God told Abraham to send away the slave-wife and her son, for the slave-wife’s son could not inherit Abraham’s home and lands along with the free woman’s son.
³¹
 Dear brothers, we are not slave children, obligated to the Jewish laws, but children of the free woman, acceptable to God because of our faith.