10All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law." 11Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because, "The righteous will live by faith."12The law is not based on faith; on the contrary, "The man who does these things will live by them." 13Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." 14He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.
Dig Deeper
As I was driving back from Wisconsin to the college I attended in Oklahoma, I had the directions sitting next to me in the front seat but somehow I managed to get turned around anyway. I didn’t consider the directions to be oppressive or bossy, just straightforward in telling me how to get to where I was going. Yet, somehow I had gotten lost in the middle of nowhere in the state of Kansas. Suddenly the directions became more of a problem than they were a help. The more I tried to follow them, the more lost I seemed to get. What I didn’t realize was that about twenty miles before that I had turned the exactly wrong direction onto Highway 69. That meant, as I tried to follow the directions, they just got me more lost because I was already off course. The only thing that would solve the situation was for me to realize that I was in desperate need of new directions. The directions I had would simply not get me to Oklahoma from where I was at and the direction in which I was heading.
Abraham was chosen to be the recipient of God’s covenant and grace, and, in Genesis 12, was told that all nations in the earth would be blessed through his descendents. This was Israel’s vocation. They were supposed to be God’s people, showing the world who God was and what his kingdom was all about. They had failed to do that, though. Rather than being a light to the world and attracting the nations to them and, ultimately, to God, they had shined the light on themselves and condemned the pagan world for not being people of the light. This was the purpose of the law. The law was given to the Old Testament people as a physical covenant, teaching them to be the people of God. They were directions in that sense. The problem that Paul describes is that what was supposed to be directions leading them towards God’s blessings wound up being part of the problem. The problem wasn’t with the law but with the Israelites. They had disobeyed God and gotten lost. This meant that they were going in the exact opposite direction. Rather than heading towards God’s blessings, they had spent most of the old covenant period hurtling headlong into God’s curses for breaking the covenant (more on curses in a moment). Rather than drawing the nations to them, God’s people found themselves cursed and in exile at the hands of those same pagan nations. What Paul wants the Galatians and the Judaizers to realize is that because God’s people had gotten lost, the directions that they had in the law would no longer work. They needed new directions from where they were at to get them to where they were supposed to be.
Paul says that those who rely on observing the law are under a curse. When Paul refers to a curse, he does not mean that God is dropping the hammer on people for disobeying. Blessings were the original intent of the covenant; they were the destination, so to speak. Curses were simply the dangers of going the wrong way. There is an intersection in my current hometown where if I go in one direction, I will head towards my house. If, however, I go in the wrong direction and speed through the warning signs, I will end up careening off of a bridge that is no longer there. The curses were what happened when they went in the wrong direction and ignored the warning signs. The curses were, in fact, the signs trying to warn God’s people before they hurtled off of the cliff. The curse that Paul refers to (in Deuteronomy 27 & 28) isn’t primarily something that will happen for eternity; It primarily refers to something that will happen in history. It would eventually end with Israel in exile, the exact opposite direction from what God had in mind for His people. Paul’s point is that the law cannot get God’s people to where they are going because of their sin. New directions are needed and anyone who insists on using the old directions is in serious trouble because the only way the law can work is for one to follow the law perfectly without ever breaking it.
God had begun to reveal this truth of a need for something beyond the law to His people through the prophets. Paul quotes from Habakkuk 2:4 (written while Israel was being overrun by pagan nations), which says that the path to the life of the age to come for God’s righteous people will be by faith (Hos. 6:6 also hints at this). Israel had gotten lost and the law was never going to get them back to where they should be. Habakkuk says that God’s people will eventually live by faith, but he doesn’t say faith in what. What Habakkuk doesn’t say, Paul is about to.
The faith that God was talking about all along was faith in the life of the Messiah. What was a surprise though, was that the Messiah would fulfill the promise by taking on the curse Himself. The curse of Deuteronomy was fully borne by the Messiah, Israel’s representative. Paul quotes from Deuteronomy again, saying "cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." What Paul does not mean by quoting that verse (and what the passage in its original context does not mean) is that someone is cursed by God simply because they hang on a cross. It means that death by hanging from a tree (or being impaled on a wooden stake) was the outward sign in Israel of being cursed by God. A criminal was punished for breaking the law by hanging them from a tree, so it was the law-breaking that caused the curse to come upon them. Hanging from a cross, then, was a fitting end for one who was taking the curse of the world upon them. Christ was not cursed simply because he died on a cross. He died on a cross because he had taken the curse upon himself. Although death on a Roman ‘tree’ was different in many ways than the death on a wooden stake referred to in Deuteronomy, for Paul the point was the same. Christ’s death on a tree was the deeper fulfillment that the passage in Deuteronomy foreshadowed.
Jesus did all of this so that any humans who would have faith in His life could get back going in the right direction. The new directions had nothing to do with following the law, they had everything to do with participating in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was only through faith in Christ that they could be considered part of Abraham’s family. For Paul, the promise made to Abraham only makes sense in it’s true fulfillment as a result of the life and work of Jesus Christ. By entering into Christ, Gentiles can now become part of Abraham’s family but that’s not all. God’s plan wasn’t to simply cast the people of Israel to the side. Those who were Jews by birth needed a renewed covenant every bit as much as the Gentiles did. God had finally poured out His Spirit and given a new covenant just as He had promised (Ezek. 34:25 , Jeremiah 31:31, etc).
Devotional Thought
The roadblock to faith in the life of Christ for the Jews was the law. What path blockers are there in the world today that keep people from relying alone on the life of Christ? Is there anything that you are tempted to rely on rather than faith alone in the life of Jesus Christ?
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