Free In A Sinful World

Daniel 3:16-18 (NIV)
16 Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter.
17 If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king.
18 But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”

Daniel 3:24-26 (NIV)
24 Then King Nebuchadnezzar leaped to his feet in amazement and asked his advisers, “Weren’t there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire?” They replied, “Certainly, O king.”
25 He said, “Look! I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods.”
26 Nebuchadnezzar then approached the opening of the blazing furnace and shouted, “Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out! Come here!” So Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego came out of the fire,

John 8:36 (NIV)
36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

Galatians 5:1 (NIV)
1 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Galatians 5:13 (NIV)
13 You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.

2 Corinthians 3:17 (NIV)
17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

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1. Freedom in Christ (5:1–12)

(1) Stand Firm in Freedom (5:1)

1It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

5:1 If Galatians is the Magna Carta of Christian liberty, then Gal 5:1 has reason to be considered one of the key verses of the epistle. With the language of freedom and slavery still ringing in their ears from the analogy of Hagar and Sarah, the Galatians are now told by Paul: “Plant your feet firmly therefore within the freedom that Christ has won for us, and do not let yourselves be caught again in the shackles of slavery” (Phillips).10 This verse contains both an assertion, “For freedom … Christ has set us free,” and a command based upon it, “Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

The juxtaposition of an indicative followed by an imperative is a common grammatical feature in Paul’s writings, as we see in the repetition of this pattern in 5:13. The imperative, “Stand firm,” not only does not contradict the indicative, “Christ has set us free,” but in fact results from it. Because of who God is and what he has done for believers in Jesus Christ, Christians are commanded to “become what they are,” that is, to make visible in the earthly realm of their human existence what God has already declared and sealed in the divine verdict of justification. When this indissoluble connection is forgotten or downplayed, the temptation for the Christian to lapse into legalism on the one hand or into libertinism on the other becomes a serious threat to Christian freedom.

The structure of the indicative/imperative formula in Paul also relates to the salvation-historical situation of the believer who must live out the Christian life in the eschatological tension between the No Longer and the Not Yet of this “present evil age” (1:4). We have seen Paul struggling with this tension throughout Galatians, and it continues to shape his ethical instructions in Gal 5–6. As W. Grundmann has put it: “The Christian stands in the tension of a double reality. Basically freed from sin, redeemed, and reconciled … he is actually at war with sin, threatened, attacked and placed in jeopardy by it.”11 The fact of justification propels the Christian into a world of struggle, an in-between time bounded by the great accomplishment of redemption in Christ’s finished work on the cross on the one hand and the yet-to-be-realized consummation of God’s salvific purposes at the second advent of Christ on the other. In this real world of struggle and temptation, the sham gods of this present evil world, ta stoicheia tou kosmou, war against the people of God, ever seeking to subject them “again” (palin) to the yoke of bondage.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, however, Christian believers are enabled to “stand firm” against the encroachment of such demonic forces. The indicative of their Christ-won freedom secures the imperative of their Spirit-led obedience and victory. In the words of Herman Ridderbos, “Indicative and imperative are both the object of faith, on the one hand in its receptivity, on the other in its activity. … The indicative represents the ‘already’ as well as the ‘not yet.’ The imperative is likewise focused on the one as well as the other.”12 On the basis of the No Longer, Paul could say to believers that all things are theirs, and they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s (1 Cor 3:22–23). On the basis of the Not Yet, he could command, forbid, warn, and even threaten, as he did here in Gal 5–6. The object of Paul’s ethical exhortations, then, is not a final justification, as if the first application did not quite take, but rather the Christians’ growth in grace, their call to holiness, sanctification, and new life in Christ.13

Christian freedom is the precious birthright of every believer, “An inestimable blessing,” Calvin called it, “for which we should fight even to the death. For we are not talking here about our hearths but about our altars.”14 Yet no word in the Christian vocabulary has been more misunderstood or abused than this one. What did Paul mean by freedom? First, he was not talking about political freedom. However much we Americans may believe on the basis of natural law that God has endowed all persons with certain inalienable rights, including that of political liberty, Paul provided no basis for the kind of philosophy articulated in our Declaration of Independence. Still less was Paul referring to freedom in a psychological sense. Emotional health is a desirable goal, and certain therapeutic techniques developed in the modern world may be quite compatible with New Testament Christianity. However, Christian freedom is not “an innate quality or state of being which the individual discovers (or recovers) by sorting out past experiences and relationships. It is a gift bestowed as a result of Good Friday and Easter.”15 Finally, Paul did not understand by Christian freedom the right to advocate theological anarchy within the confines of the believing community. A church that is unable to define and maintain the doctrinal boundaries of its own fellowship or, even worse, that no longer thinks this is a task worth doing, is a church that has lost its soul. The proclamation of the whole counsel of God involves identifying and saying no to those forms of teaching that, if carried out consistently, would threaten the truth of divine revelation itself.16 This is one of the most serious issues facing the contemporary church today. We can err either by drawing the boundaries too tightly or by refusing to draw them at all. On the one hand, we lapse into legalism; on the other, into relativism.

We will not go astray if we remember that for Paul, Christian liberty was always grounded on the believer’s relationship with Jesus Christ on the one hand and with the community of faith on the other. Outside of Jesus Christ, human existence is characterized as bondage—bondage to the law, bondage to the evil elements dominating the world, bondage to sin, the flesh, and the devil. God sent his Son into the world to shatter the dominion of these slaveholders. Now God has sent his Spirit into the hearts of believers to awaken them to new life and liberation in Christ.

When the Galatians first received the Spirit of God, they also received the gift of freedom, as Paul made clear in 2 Cor 3:17, “The Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” When Paul listed the various graces included in the “fruit of the Spirit” (5:22–23), freedom was not included among these desirable virtues. This is because freedom is already presupposed in each one of them. Thus the fruit of the Spirit is freedom— freedom to love, to exude joy, to manifest peace, to display patience, and so on. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. This means that Christian liberty is freedom for others, freedom that finds its true expression not in theological privatism (“I am free to believe anything I choose”) or spiritual narcissism (“I am free to be myself no matter what”) but rather freedom to love and serve one another in the context of the body of Christ.

Evidently one of the major problems among the churches of Galatia was that believers there did not know what to do with their Christ-won freedom. Some were using their liberty as a pretext for license, to the gratification of their sinful nature. Others were “Lone-Ranger” Christians, having forgotten the mandate to bear one another’s burdens. Still others had fallen into discord and faction, backbiting and self-promotion. Thus in these closing two chapters Paul summoned the Galatians to a mature use of their spiritual birthright, reminding them that it is love, the love of Christ shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit, that brings liberty to its fullest expression.

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[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Zondervan: Grand Rapids

10 Many recent commentators, e.g., Bruce, Fung, Cole, follow Lightfoot in treating 5:1 as the proper conclusion to the Hagar-Sarah analogy rather than as the introduction to a new unit of material. It certainly provides a facile link to the preceding pericope; but, as Longenecker has noted, the lack of a transitional phrase or particle, together with the prominent placement of the watchword ἐλευθερία, suggests that this verse properly marks a new beginning in the epistle (Galatians, 223–24).

11 W. Grundmann, “ἁμαρτάνω, ” TDNT 1.313. Grundmann also describes the believer’s status in Christ as “sinless.” However, as R. Fung has noted, this statement can only be applied to one’s positional sanctification in Christ (Galatians, 283, n. 24). See 1 John 3:4–6.

12 H. Ridderbos, Paul, 256–58.

13 See R. Bultmann, Theology, 330–52; J. K. Chamblin, “Freedom/Liberty,” DPL, 313–16; Barrett, Freedom and Obligation, passim.

14 J. Calvin, CNTC 11.92.

15 Cousar, Galatians, 109.

16 See T. George, “The Priesthood of All Believers and the Quest for Theological Integrity,” in P. Basden and D. S. Dockery, eds., The People of God: Essays on the Believers’ Church (Nashville: Broadman, 1991), 85–95.

[2]George, T. 2001, c1994. Vol. 30: Galatians. The New American Commentary. Broadman & Holman Publishers: Nashville