Blessings and Curses

Blessing Promised

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

If you choose this way of life, then you need to live by the rules of this life. You need to follow it all the way. This is your path, so go along it to the bitter end. That is how things work. You want to be a gunfighter, then you will die a gunfighter. Sooner or later there will be someone faster than you, someone with the advantage, and you will be gunned down, like you gunned down others. That is the life that you chose, so live it out. The law is the same. You can’t live by the law, and not be subject to it’s demands. God said here is the law, here is a pathway to life. If you follow this path it will lead to life. But if you don’t follow this law, if you wander from the path, then you must face the circumstances. And the Jews couldn’t follow the law. They wandered from the path. And so God gave them what they deserved. He gave them the results of their disobedience. He gave them their wages. Death. That is what Paul is saying in verse ten. You rely on the law, ok, then you receive the curse that comes with the law. That’s the path you chose, the path that God promised to the Israelites. But things went completely opposite. Instead of blessing all the nations through Israel, Israel was cursed. They went into exile, and were oppressed by a pagan nation. So that path was blocked. The chosen people, through whom God would bless the nations, were instead cursed, not blessed. They were cursed not just in a future way, but in a physical real way. They were sent into exile.

Curse results.

Unable to keep the law.

The Pharisees, the ones that Jesus was so hard on, were zealous for the law. But they saw the law in the wrong light. Rather than pointing to God, the law for them pointed to themselves. I am a good person because I keep the law. I do things according to the letter of the law. And because of their zeal, they were able to justify things like ignoring their parents in order to honor the law. To hate people rather than love them. To see themselves as righteous, in the eyes of the law, without seeing that they had lost all hope of ever keeping it. They were separated from the law giver. They didn’t know him. That’s what Jesus said to them. Depart from me, I never knew you. What a terrible sentence. Especially since they thought they had done everything right. It’s one thing to know, i’m a loser, no wonder i get crap in my life, it’s another thing to think, I’m on the right track, and find you are not at all. Story of the spelling bee, and getting the word wrong, when you think you have it right. And so they, and all others who thought they could find life by going down the path of the law, found themselves under a curse. The English language is interesting. We talk about listening up, of getting up, perking up, of shutting up, but you quiet down, you sit down, you go down. Why do we get under a curse? The picture is one of oppression. The master is above you, you are below, they whip you as you bend at the knee, and cower. The curse is on top of you, you are underneath it. Rather than being an umbrella, which offers protection, you are under the raining blows your master, under oppression, under a weight, a burden, a yoke. That is how the law is portrayed. Under it. It weighs on you. it holds you down. Have you ever been under something heavy? I remember as kids we used to play out in the school yard with the highjump mat. We would put some poor little kid under the mat, some times forced some times voluntarily, and then flop the mat on top of them. Then all the kids would pile on top of the mat, squishing them down. We would wait for an appropriate amount of time, then we would start hurling kids off of the mat in an effort to save those caught underneath. Finally we would tip up the mat, and reveal whoever had been stuck underneath it, and allow them to scamper out, moaning in mock pain and misery. I remember getting stuck under the mat one time. I was under there with Chris Woodford. It wasn’t painful, you could breath under there, but it was terrifying, because you couldn’t move. you couldn’t get out from under the mat, even if you wanted to. You couldn’t scream loud enough to be heard, and you couldn’t signal to anyone that you wanted out. You could only wait, and hope that someone would let you out. That’s the curse of the law. You follow the law, and you get caught under it. And just like some of the people on the schoolyard, some of us want to be under there. Because there is a sense that we are in control. But you aren’t in control. You are powerless, held down.

Alternate Route?

Faith bypasses law.

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So That is the curse. But what about the blessing. I mean God said that through Abraham’s seed the nations would be blessed. But they aren’t. They were oppressed, they were beaten down, they were cursed. God’s promises always come true. He doesn’t just say things, and then forget them. He means it. And yet here they are, in exile. The ones carrying the promise of God, have gone off track, have been waylaid by the law that would give them life, and now find themselves under death, because of the law. So what will happen? Well God didn’t lift the curse. He sent someone to get under it with us, and so allow us to be released. He sent his Son, to be cursed for us. Have you ever jacked up a car, and the jack is holding up the car, but you need to get the jack out. So you put a block of wood under the car to hold the weight of the car so you can now remove the jack. That’s what Jesus did. He got down under the curse with us. He took the weight. He let the yoke fall on his shoulders. And he did it by way of the cross. Israel is under oppression. And in the first century, the symbol of oppression, by the ruling Roman empire, is the cross. That’s how they put to death their enemies, the troublemakers, the bad people, and merely those they didn’t like. They hung them on the cross. Well God had said, through Moses, if you are hung on a pole, don’t leave them up on the pole overnight, because that is a dirty thing. It is unclean. All of the laws talked about the holiness of God, about the clean and the unclean, and how to make things that were unclean, clean again. How to cleanse people symbolically of the dirtiness of their sins. So when he said if you are hung on a pole, you are unclean. You are cursed. Jesus comes along, and says I will take the curse, by being hung on a pole, on a tree. It is one reason why Jews don’t believe Jesus is the messiah, because he is hung on a cross. He is unclean. What they can’t see is that because Jesus never sinned, the grime and filth of sin couldn’t stick to him. He carried it, he became sin even, but he remains the sinless one. Like a teflon pan, it won’t stick. He rose from the dead, because the holy one could not see decay. He carried the burden that mankind couldn’t carry. He became cursed, so we could be blessed. We as in the Gentiles, but also the Jews. They had gone of track, but God did not abandon them. No, he said you can come down this road as well as the Gentiles, as well as the pagan nations. The road you couldn’t travel, the law road, or the law train, as we talked about a few weeks ago, is blocked. But through Jesus a new way emerges. Rather than an new way, Jesus is the way. He is the road. He is the alternate route. He is the way through faith, not through keeping the law.

We Pave the Way

Ambassadors for Christ.

So now the circle is complete. God promised to Abraham that through his offspring all nations would be blessed. The law train went off the rails, but Jesus bridged the gap, coming under the curse for us, allowing us to escape. So now the Galatians as well as the Jews could receive the Spirit. That was the promise. That was what the prophets talked about, Ezekiel, Joel, Jeremiah, they all said that God would pour out his spirit on the Jews. And that is what happened. Paul said that we might receive the promise of the Spirit. The we is the Jews who believed. The received the promised Spirit. And we do as well. Not by following the law, but by faith. That’s what Paul told the Galatians at the start of this chapter. Start with faith, end with faith. Don’t get off the train that got you here.

So what does this say to us. Well there are a few things, first of all, what roadblock is in the way of the promise of God now, what stops this message from getting to the nations? The Bible tells us that we are Christ’s Ambassadors. As if he was making his appeal through us. so are you an ambassador, or a roadblock.