A Harsh Nanny

As most of you know, I turned 60 earlier this month. Born in 1964, I am among the youngest of the Baby Boomer generation. Which is the only context in which the word “young” might apply to me these days.

And when I was growing up, I was among the first generation of American children who watched both parents go to work each day. Which meant that I needed a babysitter during my early years.

I remember two of those babysitters well. Ethel Saunders was my grandmother’s closest friend, and Jean Miller was a neighbor who attended church with us.

Both of these ladies were kind and compassionate, godly people, and they both treated me like a prince. And who cold blame them, right?

They loved me and spoiled me and let me get away with just about anything. What can I tell you? They must have known that I’m special.

Then, when my grandmother moved in with us and later retired from General Electric, where she helped build televisions, she became my default caretaker after school until my parents got home from work.

And if Mrs. Saunders and Mrs. Miller treated me like a prince, my grandmother treated me like a king. If I’m spoiled now (and there are some who live with me who’d say I AM), it’s not my fault. It’s the fault of those three fine, godly ladies with whom I spent so much time early in my life. Blame them.

I can only thank God that I didn’t grow up in the Roman Empire during the time of Jesus. If I had, then I may have grown up under the careful, watchful eyes of someone much less interested in letting me have my way all the time.

“In ancient Greece and Rome wealthy parents often placed their newborn babies under the care of a wet-nurse who in turn would pass them on to an older woman, a nanny who would care for their basic needs until about the age of six. At that time they came under the supervision of another household servant, the paidagōgos, who remained in charge of their upbringing until late adolescence.” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 265.]

This paidagōgos or pedagogue, as the word has come to us in English, gave instruction in manners and kept the children in their charge supervised and protected.

But they weren’t generally known for being gentle or even kind to their charges, as my babysitters were and as nannies are expected to be today.

In fact, they were famous for their harsh discipline, and writers from that time said children were often afraid of their pedagogues. So, everybody take a moment to thank God that you weren’t born into that system.

Now, today, as we continue our study of the Book of Galatians, I want you to remember that picture of the harsh — maybe even cruel — pedagogue keeping his charges in line by tweaking their ears, swatting their butts, caning their backs or worse

The Mosaic Law, says the Apostle Paul in the passage we’re studying today, was just such a pedagogue — harsh, unrelenting, graceless and yet of great value for the purpose it was given.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. We’re going to look at verses 19-25 of chapter 3 today, but let’s have a quick review first.

Remember that Paul wrote this letter to a group of churches he and Barnabas had planted in what’s now western Turkey during their first missionary journey.

But after the missionaries had returned home, a group of Jews from Jerusalem had come to the area and begun teaching that faith in Jesus was insufficient to truly save the mostly Gentile believers of Galatia.

Their faith was good, these Judaizers said, but they needed to contribute their own good works — their obedience to the Mosaic Law — in order to be truly saved.

And Paul understood that this false teaching of the Judaizers actually nullified the true gospel message of salvation by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus Christ.

So, he wrote this letter to defend the one true gospel, the message that God, in His abounding grace, had ordained that we sinners can be justified — that we can be declared righteous before Him, acceptable TO Him — only by faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and not through any work of our own.

Characteristically, Paul has made his argument from a variety of vantage points, including the one we read last week, where he appealed to the example of Abraham, whom God reckoned as righteous because of Abraham’s faith in the promises of God.

You can be saved by grace through faith, he said. Or you can be saved by works, but only if you live a life of perfect obedience to God, something nobody but Jesus has ever done — or ever COULD do.

The Law could never bring life, he said. But grace working through faith DOES bring life.

And so, with three-and-a-half chapters of Paul’s argument that the Law — in other words, our good works — can’t bring life, that it can’t save us from the curse of sin and death, he asks the question that he must’ve figured his critics were already asking: Then, why did God give the Law, after all?

Let’s read this passage together, and then we’ll dig into what it says about the purpose of the Law.

Galatians 3:19–25 NASB95

19 Why the Law then? It was added because of transgressions, having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator, until the seed would come to whom the promise had been made. 20 Now a mediator is not for one party only; whereas God is only one. 21 Is the Law then contrary to the promises of God? May it never be! For if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law. 22 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. 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. 24 Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.

Paul’s argument has been focused on the supremacy of grace and the saving power of faith. So, then, what about the Law? What was its purpose in the history of salvation?

The first thing to note is that he says the Law was added. It was added to the promise God had given Abraham. Not as some sort of addendum to the Abrahamic Covenant, but for some other purpose.

In Romans 5:20, Paul writes that the law was added “so that the transgression would increase.” We’ll talk more about how he puts that in today’s passage, but here I want you to understand this word that’s translated as “added.”

It means “to come in by a side road.” The covenant of promise to Abraham — in other words, righteousness and justification by faith — is the main road.

But “the Law has the character of something additional, a side road intended to carry extra traffic and excess baggage and, if we may anticipate Paul’s argument, designed not to lead to a separate destination but to point its travelers back to the main road.” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 253.]

And God built this side road of the Law “because of transgressions,” Paul says in verse 19. Now, I think Paul has three things in mind when he uses this phrase.

First, this phrase can mean “to restrain transgressions.” That’s the normal way that we understand the purpose of laws.

We have laws to keep people from doing things they shouldn’t do. If there were no law against robbing banks, it’s pretty likely we wouldn’t have banks because so many had been robbed, right?

The second thing Paul means by “because of transgressions” is that the Law was intended to reveal transgressions to us. In this sense, the Law is a mirror that shows us how sinful we are.

When we read God’s Word, we find that we’re more sinful than we ever thought we were and that He’s more holy than we could’ve imagined. That was part of the point Jesus was making when He said during the Sermon on the Mount:

Matthew 5:21–22 NASB95

21 “You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ 22 “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.

Third, the phrase can mean that the Law was given to actually PROVOKE transgressions.

Think of it like the sign that says “Wet paint.” How many of you have touched the wall or the bench or whatever ONLY because you saw the sign’s warning and wanted to check things out for yourself?

So, the Law was given as a deterrent to disobedience, as a mirror to show us how sinful we are, and, counterintuitively, to provoke sinners to do what sinners do.

God gave it to mankind at Mt. Sinai in the presence of the angels, and He appointed Moses as His mediator between Himself and the people of Israel.

And the very fact that Moses had been the mediator between the Israelites and God is proof, itself, of the supremacy of God’s promise of justification by faith.

Whereas the Law needed a mediator because it gave responsibilities to both God and the Israelites, the promise to Abraham was unconditional.

The obligations of that covenant are God’s and God’s alone. That’s what Paul is saying in verse 20.

God always intended that the Law would point people to Jesus, the seed promised to Abraham and the ultimate fulfillment of the promises to that Patriarch.

And “just as [the Law] had a point of origin on Mount Sinai, so also it had a point of termination—Mount Calvary.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 3:19, quoting Fung.]

But Paul’s argument here now uncovers a new potential problem. If the Law was intended, in part, to multiply the transgressions of sinful man, then is the Law in opposition to God’s promise? And even more, does it make God the author of sin?

“May it never be!” God would have made our works the route to righteousness if the Law had ever been intended to bring life out of we who are dead in our trespasses. But the Law wasn’t meant to bring life.

As Warren Wiersbe puts it, “The Law is a mirror that helps us see our ‘dirty faces’ — but you do not wash your face with a mirror! It is grace that provides the cleansing through the blood of Jesus Christ.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 3:21, quoting Wiersbe.]

Laws can tell us what to do and what not to do, but they can’t take away the temptation we have to do evil things. And sometimes, like the “Wet Paint” sign, they even provoke us to disobedience.

Indeed, we can think of the Law as like chemotherapy for a cancer patient. The cancer is bad enough, but the treatment brings its own set of problems.

Paul says the Law made the problem of sin even worse for mankind.

Significantly, though, the problem isn’t the Law but rather our own disobedience. The Law puts our disobedience under a spotlight and even exacerbates in order to show us the extent of our sinfulness and our hopelessness without the grace of God.

Even as the Law demands perfect obedience, it makes utterly clear the fact that we can’t save ourselves through obedience, because we can’t BE obedient.

“Like the Israelites in Egypt, we are commanded to make bricks without straw, to be perfectly holy when we have none of the makings of holiness—to love God with all our hearts and the neighbor as ourselves when we are without divine charity.” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 261, quoting Vidler.]

Actually, the situation is even worse for us. The Greek word translated as “shut up” in verse 22 has the sense of a city whose walls are solid and whose gates are closed and locked up.

So, Paul’s saying here that we’ve all been imprisoned by the Law. We’ve been condemned by the sins it has exposed.

And by condemning us all, the Law was then intended to cause we sinners to recognize there is no way for us to justify ourselves. We are even more sinful than we realized.

But through the Law, God encourages us to turn to Him in faith that He is good and that He keeps His promises, including the promises of new creation, a heart of flesh, and eternal life.

Before faith came — in other words, before Jesus — we were imprisoned by the Law that had condemned us all as sinners and rebels against the kingdom of God.

But with His sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection, Jesus threw open the gates of the prison the Law had created, allowing those who turn to Him in faith to be freed from its condemnation.

And now, Paul says in verse 24, we can understand that the Law serves as a pedagogue of sorts — a “tutor” in the translation you have before you.

The Law demanded our obedience. It condemned disobedience. And it enacted the very harshest penalty — death and eternal separation from God — for those who didn’t follow its precepts.

The Law couldn’t bring new life to we who were dead in our trespasses, because the Law was never intended for such a purpose.

The Law was given — and it’s still important to us today, even for the Gentiles — because it shows us just how sinful we are and how desperate we are for a savior.

It shows us there’s no way we can save ourselves from the punishment we deserve for rebelling against God.

But faith is different, Paul says. Faith DOES bring life. Faith releases us from the shackles of sin. Faith kicks down the walls erected by the Law, giving us true freedom in Christ Jesus.

Faith releases us from the prison whose walls we could never climb with all our good works, combined.

As Timothy George puts it: “The ‘side road’ of the law, which (had we remained there) could only lead us to the gallows, has by the great mercy of God directed us back toward the royal road of salvation, toward the Via Dolorosa and another set of gallows designed for the Prince of Glory.” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 261.]

During the Smoke & Fire Men’s Bible study a couple of weeks ago, I asked the guys what they thought the Church is know for among unbelievers.

One of the answers I got to that question makes it clear that this passage is still relevant to us today, even among Gentile believers to whom the Law wasn’t given.

Someone said the Church is known for its rules. We’re known for telling people how they should and shouldn’t act and then for judging those who don’t follow the rules.

And to the extent that this is true, we’ve failed in our calling to be messengers of the true gospel.

We who’ve turned to Jesus in faith should, instead, be out there telling people that we’ve looked into the mirror of God’s word and found ourselves to be completely without merit before Him.

That we’re filthy sinners who couldn’t wash ourselves clean. That we realized we were desperate for a Savior. And that His name is Jesus Christ.

He was never imprisoned by the Law, because He did what we could not do. He kept it perfectly. He was completely obedient to His Father.

And because of His sinless obedience to God, Jesus could give Himself as the perfect sacrifice — taking upon Himself your sins and mine, as well as their just punishment — so that all who turn to Him in FAITH can be saved by the grace of God.

THIS is the message of the church. THIS is the message we need to be giving to the lost world. Let’s make THIS the message they hear from us.

Now, today is Lord’s Supper Sunday. This observance is important to the fellowship of the church. It brings us together in a unique way and reminds us that we belong to one another in Christ Jesus.

It reminds us of the love He has for us and the love we’re called to have for one another.

Jesus commanded us to observe the Lord’s Supper as an act of obedience to Him, as a way of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him, and as a way of reminding us what He did for us.

The Lord’s Supper reminds us that our hope for salvation rests only and completely on the sacrifice He made for us and in our place at the cross. It reminds us that our life is in Him.

And the fact that we share bread from one loaf reminds us that we are, together, the one body of Christ. It reminds us that we’re called to unity of faith, unity of purpose, and unity of love. That there’s no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, Republican or Democrat, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.

It reminds us that, just as He gave up the glory He had in heaven, we who’ve followed Him in faith are called to give up any claims we might think we have to our own lives as we follow Him.

Finally, it reminds us that, as we’ve been given the testimony of the Holy Spirit within us, we are to share OUR testimony of salvation by grace through faith. We’re not to be lukewarm Christians, but people who are on fire for the Lord.

If you’re a baptized believer walking in obedience to Christ, I’d like to invite you to join us today as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Now, this sacred meal dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified.

The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today. But the significance was the same as it is today.

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Take and drink.

“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.

Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”