Previous: What the law does to you -- The Grace of God -- Next: Grace and Truth
“You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace” (Galatians 5:4).
When people use the phrase “fallen away,” the context is often to do with sin: such and such a person has sinned their way out of God’s love and acceptance (which is not the way it works).
However, Paul uses the phrase quite differently. What the Galatians fell away from was grace. They did this by depending on something else (rules and regulations) to make themselves OK with God – which Paul calls idiocy and bewitchment, because God’s grace had already made them OK.
Paul had planted a church in Galatia several years ago, and then some teachers from Jerusalem had come to visit. They taught that in addition to believing in Jesus, Christians had to follow the Law of Moses. This may have appealed to the Galatians as a high standard of morality or a long respected tradition, or perhaps they were intimidated by people who seemed outwardly impressive in their zeal for God.
Whatever the reason, the Galatians went along with the idea of adding law to the gospel, and by doing so deserted Jesus (Galatians 1:6) and became alienated from Christ (5:4). Paul feared that all his efforts for the Galatian church had been wasted (4:11), if they were just going to abandon the gospel and turn to a perverted version instead (1:7).
Contrast this with the Corinthian church, who exhibited all kinds of bad behaviour and desperately needed correcting. They were split into factions (1 Corinthians 1:12), some were being sexually immoral (5:1, 6:15), they took each other to court (6:7) and got drunk at communion (11:21). But Paul never felt like he had wasted his time with them; he thanked God for them, affirmed them and encouraged them to be who they really were as God’s dearly loved people.
Paul appealed to the new life God had placed inside them, rather than trying to control their behaviour with laws and rules – which never works anyway. What actually does work is grace: acceptance just as we are, along with the power and life of the Spirit to be all we were created to be.
There is no way to combine law and grace; you either have one or the other. You cannot mix freedom and slavery, life and death, or Jesus’s work and our own work. The joy and wonder of Christianity is that Jesus did absolutely everything that was needed – all we do is receive and enjoy it, and freely love the one who has freely loved us.
For reflection:
Under grace, “work” is transformed from the burden it was under the law to something else entirely. God has prepared good works for us to do (Ephesians 2:10), not to earn points with him but to express his new life inside us and participate with him in what he is doing in the world.
Everything we do by God’s grace will echo through eternity, whether small and secret acts of love or highly visible ones. Being the loving Father he is, he is planning to publicly praise his kids for what they did on earth. But no one will be boastful on that day; it will be obvious that God was working through them (see John 3:21) and that his rewards are just another aspect of his grace. Amazingly, we get to share in Jesus’ glory (2 Thessalonians 2:14) – but like the elders before the throne, we will no doubt lay our crowns before the one who deserves all honour and praise (Revelation 4:10).
“I worked harder than all of them – yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me”
(1 Corinthians 15:10)
Previous: What the law does to you --
The Grace of God --
Next: Grace and Truth