Galatians 2:17-21 "Just Receiving" Scott Hoezee

Those of us who live in Grand Rapids are well aware of what it means to change planes. Until recently you could not fly directly from Grand Rapids to anywhere, unless you happened to be going to Chicago or Detroit in the first place! When you arrive at a temporary layover like Detroit, you unbuckle your seatbelt, retrieve your carry-on luggage, file out of the plane, and enter the terminal. Just looking at the people getting off the plane, you can't tell who has arrived at their final destination and who is going to another airplane.

Given the passage we just read, you may be wondering what this has to do with anything! Yet seen the right way there is a sense in which the notion of changing planes fits very nicely what Paul has to say here about law and grace. Let me explain.

Paul's letter to the Galatians is the harshest letter in the New Testament. Paul makes no effort to cover up how upset he is. What set Paul off is a report he got that the Galatian Christians had been taken in by some false teachers. While in Galatia, Paul had preached his glorious message of salvation by grace alone. We can't earn it and so we don't earn it.

But then came the false preachers who told the people that grace is fine . . . as far as it goes. But if you really want to get in good with God, then there is a whole set of laws and rules you need to keep. "You need to meet God half-way," these teachers said. "You need to do a little something to measure up to God's minimum entrance requirements for heaven. We can be very thankful for what Jesus did to get the redemption ball rolling, but we need to do our part as well." And the Galatians bought this twisting of the gospel.

Paul sets them straight! He wastes no time in ripping into the Galatians, telling them of his astonishment, calling them foolish, condemning them for being bewitched by the magic spell of a do-it-yourself salvation. But, of course, Paul knew that there is such a thing as the law of God. The Bible does have lots of rules in it. So what are we to make of things like the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount? What is the law for?

Paul says the law refers you to grace. The law is a mirror in which to glimpse how sinful you are and so how much you need outside help. As such, the law is a good and necessary thing, but it is not the end of the story. And here is where my opening illustration comes in as an analogy: the law is a transition point but it is not home.

Two weeks ago I flew from Tampa to Grand Rapids. Along the way I had to change planes in Cincinnati. Like everyone else, I grabbed my stuff, got off the plane, and entered the terminal. But unlike the folks for whom Ohio is home, I was just passing through. So I checked the monitors, found out where to find the plane to Grand Rapids, and continued on to my final destination.

That's how to view the law, Paul says. It's a necessary but temporary stopover--a place that helps you get to the cross. Only a very confused person would ever arrive at a stopover airport but instead of changing planes just settle down into the terminal and try to make a home out of it! So also with the law: on the road to God's gracious salvation in Christ the law is a place to change planes, a place that gives you directions home. In verse 19 Paul says, "Through the law to the law I died." Grammatically Paul combines an accusative with a dative to convey the idea that there is only one reason to approach God's law and that is to pass through it so as to arrive at the cross of Jesus.

Of course, once a person is saved the law is still a useful guide. If someone gives you the gift of a new DVD player, you are very grateful. So thankful, in fact, that you want to use it the right way and so will make regular reference to the Owner's Manual. Reading the operating instructions is not what got you the DVD player in the first place but it does help you use it correctly once you have it. That's why we are in the middle of a Ten Commandments series: it's not the way to get saved or stay saved. But since we want to get along well in God's creation, we're grateful that God has given us the Owner's Manual.

But if we start to think that living in such-and-such a way has anything to do with getting or staying saved, then we, as Paul says in verse 21, set aside the grace of God. And if that happens, then Paul has a startling word for us: we've rendered Jesus' death on the cross as nothing. The fact that God's own Son had to die is a horror. How dare we ever live or think or act in ways that essentially declare it to have been unnecessary?!

Let's try another analogy to help see the punch of Paul's point. Suppose you had a child with a serious health condition. Suppose that for years you had done everything you could to keep and make her well. Every year you easily maxed out your health insurance deductibles and co-pays, the "out of pocket" costs emptying your pockets and so leading to a frugal lifestyle. You could not afford any extras and so sacrificed vacations or going out for dinner once in a while. Ultimately the day came when to make a final cure a possibility for your daughter you yourself underwent a painful surgery through which the doctors harvested various tissues and cells from you to put into your daughter's body.

Had you indeed done this for a child, how would you feel if after all that someone came up to you one day, heard your story, and then said, "Didn't anyone ever tell you? There is a very inexpensive drug which, in just a few doses, could have taken care of all this years ago!" How would you feel? Rotten! You would almost certainly feel deflated and done-in by such a revelation. All those years of pain and sacrifice were unnecessary.

Well, Paul says, magnify that by infinity and you may draw a bead on how God would feel if there really were an alternative route to shalom. Jesus sacrificed everything, went to hell. But God is no fool--had a different route been available, don't you think he would have taken it!? So why are you now trying to tell God he was wrong by trying to pay for your own ticket? The cross tells you that there is no other way.

"I was crucified with Jesus," Paul writes in verse 20. As everyone knows, crucified people don't do anything but die. And that's what we do: we die. We die, which means we cannot do anything. That's what being dead means! When a body gets brought to the folks at Zaagmans, they don't stand around and wait for the corpse to get the embalming process going. They don't expect the dead man to at least help out a little by knotting up his own tie before the public viewing begins! He's dead and so can only have things done to him. So in Christ Paul says we die and so are completely dependent on God to raise us up by grace.

When it comes to the law of God the best thing to do is let it kill you. Pass right through it to the cross and then die. Because after death comes resurrection. And if a formerly dead person comes back to life, then that person should know it was nothing he or she ever did, it was all from God! All of it!

It's a message the Galatians had a hard time with, and we do, too. In recent years a number of alternative atonement theories have flourished. There have been many who want to say that what you see in the cross is not the only way to salvation but rather a kind of cosmic object lesson. Jesus is just a very dramatic example of God's desire to identify with us in our suffering. The cross illustrates God's love but it isn't the only way by which to get saved. But Paul says the cross means more than that God is interested in how we feel. It means God has opened up salvation. "He gave himself for us," Paul writes in verse 20. He took our place. The only thing left for us is to die with him--and that means no more efforts.

So what does it mean to treat the law as the place to change planes instead of the place to call home? Well, it means we no longer look over our shoulders at the failures of the past. It means we don't feel rotten and guilty all the time. It means we do not assess our own, or other people's, standing in God's kingdom based on how well we measure up to this or that standard of good deeds. It means that as we get older we don't let the past cause us to start biting our fingernails as we say, "I don't know! I may not make the grade with God."

No. That's why we come to this table this morning, and we come with empty hands. We come to receive what only God can give, not to offer up some token of this or that fine deed we did last week which earns us a chair around this table. We come to be fed something that has long since been prepared for us and is ready to be served. We need to stop being like a nervous dinner guest who refuses to stay at the table but instead keeps going into the kitchen to ask the host, "Is there anything I can do? Oh here, let me clean that for you! No? Well, then let me stir this for you. Let me .. . ."

Sometimes in life we need just to sit down and be quiet! The first time God brought you to this table you were a corpse. God brought you back to life to enjoy the dinner he had prepared. So let the passiveness of that first visit to the Lord's table set the tone for this and all visits. We can't do a thing and we don't need to, either.

According to John's gospel Jesus' last cry from the cross was, "It is finished!" As Richard Lischer recently wrote, you can understand the English word "finished" in different ways. One way is in the sense of completion. When a baker has "finished" making an apple pie, it's ready to eat. In England, however, the British use the word slightly differently. If you are out for dinner and someone asks for some more kidney pie, the server may say, "Sorry, luv, but the kidney pie is finished." She doesn't mean its baked and ready to eat but that it's all gone. The pie is not completed by depleted.

The Greek word Jesus used to declare his saving work "finished" on the cross means that it is completed, whole, ready to go. Yet sometimes we act as though Jesus really did not wrap it all up. He took the work as far as he could go before getting whacked but then he was finished--now it's our turn to provide the last few missing pieces. But we're wrong.

Sometimes in a film we see a scene in which a son who has long been estranged from his father is told his father has died. And sometimes this ne'er-do-well son will ask, "Did Papa mention me before he died? Did he say my name?" As Lischer notes, contained in such questions is the desperate hope that the words of a dead man might retroactively re-make the past.

Jesus knew that every last one of us has that wish deep down. We want the past to be better than it was. So we keep running, hoping to hit on a winning formula that will make things better by healing the past. We keep trying to extend life to give ourselves more time. An article in last week's New York Times Magazine suggested that breakthroughs in genetics and medicine might let people in the near-future live vibrant lives until they are 150. Maybe such a prospect sounds good to all those old folks who look back on the regrets of their past and conclude, "There just wasn't enough time. If only I had a little more time, I could fix this or that, reconcile with him or her."

But it's not finally a matter of time. There could never be enough of that. We need something more and something else to fix what's broken. We need Jesus. We need his cross. We need to join him on that cross and just get dead so that God can raise us up again. We don't get stuck at any transition point but we move right on to the final destination. We look to Jesus' death and maybe we also ask, "Did Jesus mention me? Did he say my name?" Yes, he did. And he said you could stop running. "It is finished." For this morning that means you can come to this table, sit down, resist the urge to poke your head into the kitchen, and just receive. So come now for all is ready and our Lord awaits. It is finished. Sit down. Relax. Receive. Amen.