Sermon Tone Analysis

law leads away from God’s family where grace leads towards it

Intro me

Galatians 4:21 (NIV)

Tell me, you who want to be under the law...

Today’s passage is all about a group of people who want to “be under the law”.

What it means by “the law” is the Jewish religious Law, called the Torah: a huge set of rules and regulations about how to do everything from cutting your hair to cleaning your house to harvesting your field.

The question we need to think through before we dive into this passage is why.

Why do they want to be under that law?

And more generally, why would we, or people like us, ever be like that, wanting to take on a whole set of rules and regulations?

I mean surely it’s just obviously better to be free, right, not to live under lots and lots of rules, not to choose restrictions on our life?

We’ve lived for nearly two years now under endless and ever-changing covid rules and wouldn’t you just love to be done with them, chuck these masks in the bin and be free?

We all by nature want to be free.

That’s natural and right.

So why does anyone ever take on laws, put themselves under rules?

Well, a couple weeks back we talked about “the good” and one big reason to accept a bunch of rules, even if we’d rather be free, would be for our own good, or for others’ good.

That’s the point of these covid rules and regulations - at least I hope it is!

They’re for our good, for others’ good.

We talked two weeks back about how we want these good outcomes, like less people dying and the sick being cared for and the earth not melting and all that - but these good things don’t just automatically flow out of our freedom ‘cause we’re messed up people - so there are rules to restrict us.

So that’s one reason you might take on rules - want to think more about that?

Go find the recording and listen again!

But that’s not the only reason.

Today I want to focus on another big reason people might take on a set of rules and regulations - ‘cause I think it’s the main one in focus in today’s passage from the bible.

Another reason you might take on a set of rules and regulations would be to belong - to be a part of a group, to find your place among them.

Let me give you an example: say you want to be a part of the surfer crowd.

Now there aren’t published rules and regulations for this - no “surf-law” or anything - but there pretty much is an immutable set of laws you have to keep to really join that crowd: you’re going to need to learn to say “dude” every second word.

Dude.

You have to spend half of the day in a half zipped wetsuit, dude.

You have to - and I mean you have to - own a camper van.

dude.

And, uh, you actually have to get in the freezing water in winter when it’s all windy and wild.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.

Most every group of people has a set of rules you have to keep to really be a part of it, to belong there - often unspoken rules, but rules none the less.

Want to be a church planter?

Your computer has to be a mac.

Seriously, I’m like the only windows guy in the room at basically every church planter thing I’ve ever been to.

And it’s not just how you accessorise, it’s how you speak, how you behave, what you do, what you most definitely do not do.

Want to be a cool student?

You have to go vegan or select a non-traditional sexuality.

It’s the law!

Want to fit in with the rugby crowd?

Have to develop a taste for beer and curry - whether you like curry or not.

One of the key reasons, then, that you or anyone might take on a whole new set of rules and regulations, would be so you could join a group, be a part of it; to be accepted by them; to find belonging among them.

And that, I think, is the big thing our writer has in view as we get into this next section of the short letter from the bible that we’re studying, the letter to the Galatians.

The Galatians want “in” - they want to belong, to be accepted, to be a part of the family.

That’s why they want to be under the law - under this Jewish religious law.

This passage has an encouragement for them - but also a serious warning.

And it has encouragement and challenge for us too.

Listen with me and we’ll read the next section from Galatians together.

We’re in Galatians chapter 4 and starting at verse 21.

Page 1171 in these blue bibles.

Chapter 4 - big 4 - verse 21, small 21.

The passage might seem a bit mysterious at first but stick with me and we’re going to get our heads around it together today.

Page 1171 and Ginger’s going to be reading for us this morning.

Right.

What is going on here?! Two wives, two sons, two covenants, two Jerusalems, a quote from an Old Testament prophet (with two women in it), and two results.

A lot of twos, right, and a lot of mystery.

Let’s unpack this quickly.

Centre stage in what we read is the story of Abraham from back near the very beginning of the Bible.

It’s in the book of Genesis and it’s a corker.

Let me give you a super-fast catch up, an “in last week’s episode” kind of summary: God chooses Abraham and promises he’ll have a huge family with their own land to live in, and through them the whole world will be blessed.

But there’s a problem: Abraham’s wife can’t have children.

And they’re both getting seriously old.

So after years and years, in an effort to make those promises come true rather than come to nothing, Abraham has a child with his slave woman Hagar.

But then God shows up and says “actually I’m still going to keep my promise” and so he does: boom!

The mega-old wife who couldn’t have kids has a child after all.

There’s more to the story but that’s enough for now.

So the two sons we’re reading about here are Abraham’s sons and they come from these two women: the slave woman and the free.

Verse 23 tells us

One comes about “according to the flesh” - or as the New Living Translation puts it: “in a human attempt to bring about the fulfilment of God’s promise” where the other comes about by God’s own hand as the result of God’s promise.

Alright, nice story - but what’s this got to do with rules and belonging?

Stick with me!

Our writer is going to use this story to tell us about two ways to live, two ways to identity, two ways to belonging.

He says this story can be taken figuratively, it pictures something else.

Literally, he says it’s an “allegory” - and for all the language nerds here, allegory is actually a Greek word made up of two parts: alla and agoreu-oh, agoreu-oh meanning “to speak”, and alla meaning of “other things”.

It speaks of other things.

Now just to be super-clear, he’s not saying it didn’t actually happen.

He’s saying it also speaks of other things.

Ok, two wives, two sons, two ways they came about.

What does that picture?

Two covenants, he says.

Two covenants.

Now what’s a covenant?

An agreement between two people where they promise under oath that they’ll do particular things.

A marriage would be one example.

In the bible, there’s a particular focus on covenants between God and his people.

He’s telling us these two mothers, the slave and the freeborn, picture two different agreements between God and his people.

And then in verse 24-25 he tells us about one of them: it’s from Mount Sinai, and it corresponds to Jerusalem in his day.

Now Mt Sinai is where Moses received the Jewish law from God on two stone tablets, and Jerusalem is the centre of the Jewish religion with the temple and all that - so it doesn’t take a genius to id this first covenant in a police lineup!

This is what we’d call the Old Covenant or the Mosaic Covenant, the agreement between God and the Jewish people based on the Torah, the Jewish law.

Here’s the surprise, though: this first covenant results in a people who are slaves, he says here.

That’s a bit ironic if you know the story of Moses because it’s all about how God took his people out of slavery and into freedom.

Calling them slaves rather than free under the Mosaic Law, lining them up with the slave woman rather than the freeborn wife, Jewish people of his day would have choked on that.

Let’s press pause here for a moment, though, and think back to where we started.

This passage is written to people who desperately want to be “under the law”, remember?

They want to sign on the dotted line, agreeing to take on this whole Jewish law.

And a key driver for that is wanting to be a part of the family, wanting to truly belong in his people.

They were being told, and were feeling like, taking on these rules was the way in to the family, was the road to belonging.

Now God has promised that his family will include a countless multitude, people from every nation, tribe and tongue.

God has promised that we can join his people, even become his children, no matter who we are or what we’ve done.

But just taking on the rules, picking up the behaviours, isn’t the way into the family.