In the fullness of time, we’ve come full circle. First came righteousness by faith and then by the Law of Moses and now again by faith after God sent His Son to redeem us. Let’s examine the history of this and what the purpose of the Law was and why it’s no longer needed for our righteousness.
The Apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 4:4-5 “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”
So, it appears that those under the law needed to be redeemed and God foreordained His Son to redeem them. But why?
God knew in the distant past before the earth came into being that this would be needed because the Apostle Peter writes about God’s Son in 1 Peter 1:20 “Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you,”
To see God beginning to execute His plan of redemption, we must begin in the Old Testament starting with the fall of mankind when both Adam and Eve sinned by disobeying God’s commands and were condemned to death.
Now with the appearance of Satan in the form of a serpent and with the deed done, God told Satan that the woman’s seed would understand what he had done to them and they would be in opposition to him and would eventually destroy (a mortal head wound) his works and those works were the separation of mankind from God due to sin.
This prophecy, while vague in detail shows us in hindsight that Jesus Christ, the Seed, would be conceived by the Holy Spirit, not through a man, ensuring he would be born of a virgin woman without inheriting original sin, thus being completely sinless and able to act as the perfect sacrifice for humanity to redeem us from being separated from God.
Death and the fear of it came upon all of creation due to the original sin of disobedience. Not only did Adam and Eve die as God said they would but they passed on this fallen sinful nature and death to their children and they too were dying bound to their sins, eternally separated from God and no way to reverse it.
Now, as Adam and Eve were forced out of Eden, God made them garments of animal skins after first shedding their blood. In a symbolic way, God was covering their sin with the blood of animals.
Why was blood needed to atone for sins?
Leviticus 17:11 states, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood”.
Blood meant “life”, just as the original sin required the life of Adam and Eve as payment, every sin that followed needed a “life sacrifice” to atone for it while the sinner lived. Those blood sacrifices made the sinner acceptable to God because they were atoning for their sin and it was repeated over and over again during their lives.
The idea of a blood sacrifice began with this act of God and then with Abel who understood it took the firstborn unblemished of his flock of sheep, killed and parted it. He then built altar and burnt it as an offering to God for his sins.
Abel’s offering pleased God while Cain only brought vegetables from his garden and not in the right spirit so it was rejected by God.
This caused Cain to hate his brother and after Abel was killed by Cain, Eve commented about having another seed, one in the stead of the righteous Abel. We see here that Eve did not forget what Satan had done and what God said about her seed in Eden.
It was Seth and his righteous descendents who began to walk with God in faith, learning how to please Him, calling upon His Name and offering blood sacrifices upon altars for their sins.
This desire to please God and to have fellowship with him was in direct opposition to Satan as we know that Satan works to oppose God and His plans for us. He wanted to be like God and to sit upon his own throne in heaven and have everyone worship him. And so we have this “enmity” or hostility and opposition to Satan developing because of his desire to be worshipped instead of God.
Noah was a descendant of Seth and found grace in God’s eyes because he was found righteous so God saved him and his family from the flood which destroyed the rest of all living things. This is the first occurrence of the word “Grace” found in Scripture!
After the flood subsided and he day they came out of the Ark, Noah built an altar and offered burnt offerings of everyone of the clean animals from the Ark. Upon receiving the pleasing aroma of the burnt offering, God swore by Himself that he would never again destroy the earth with water and that as long as the earth lasted, there would continue day and night and the seasons in their turn. God put a rainbow in the sky as a reminder to himself.
It was then Noah’s son Shem that continued that walk with God and it was in his seed that God, who searches all hearts, found one man named Abram. Abram believed in God and was faithful to Him. In Genesis 12, God promised that in his seed, the entire world would be blessed and that he would make a great nation of Abram’s descendants.
Abram was renamed Abraham by God to signify that with God’s blessing, he would become a “father of nations”. Abraham walked with God in faith and believed what God promised him. Because of that, God deemed him righteous, even without the law which had not yet been given.
After the exodus of Abraham’s seed from Egypt some 430 years after Abrahams death, his descendents had forgotten how to walk with God while living as slaves to the Egyptians.
So, God gave them the law so that they would know how to live their lives in a way that would please Him and to prepare their hearts for the coming of the “Seed” by providing prophets who prophesied about this promised blessing from generation to generation.
The Law was thought to be blessing and by following it they might be righteous before God. Instead, it only brought death. The Apostle Paul sums it up this way:
Romans 7:7-11
7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
8 But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead.
9 For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.
10 And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.
11 For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me.
How then does the Law of Moses fit into all of this seeing how God’s Grace was what made Abraham righteous in His eyes?
Now, let’s read about Paul explaining to the Galatians how the Law prepared us to receive Christ in faith just as Abraham’s faith without the law made him righteous in God’s eyes:
Galatians 3:23-4:7
23 But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.
24 Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.
26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
27 For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
29 And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
The Law, while good, could not work in that it was weak through the flesh so in the fullness of time, God sent His Son Jesus in the likeness of sinful flesh to do for us what we could not do for ourselves through the law. How did he do that?
Jesus fulfilled the requirements of the law in that every transgression of the law required a blood sacrifice. He did it by taking our sins into His own flesh and shedding his blood upon the cross as payment and dying in our place. The Just for the unjust.
The shedding of Christ’s righteous blood was payment for our sins so that He could redeem us from the penalty of our sins (which led to our separation from God). In doing so, He destroyed the works of Satan as God said would happen way back in Genesis.
1 John 3:8 “He that committeth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.”
Thus, Jesus Christ, having met the requirements of the law for us by His blood sacrifice means that we are no longer under the law for our own righteousness.
If we were still under the law then we would still be unable to obtain righteousness but with the work of Jesus on our behalf we don’t need our own righteousness to be acceptable to God. We now have His!
Philippians 3:9 “And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:”
This is what God’s Word calls Grace and was first extended to Noah and then to Abraham because they believed in God and had faith in Him. God promised Abraham that he would send His own Son who would be a descendant of Abraham through the seed of a woman so that Grace might extend to the entire world and in doing so, fulfilled the promise of the blessing for all people.
The Apostle John said it best in his gospel where he described God’s Grace:
John 3:16-18
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
Thus, Grace is a gift of God that promises eternal life and is received when we believe in and have faith in Jesus Christ and in God.
That belief though comes with an obligation to repent from our sins, to be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit. The baptism of going under the water is symbolic of our old sinful self who lived according to the flesh dying and being reborn living not through our flesh but for God in the spirit.
According to the Apostle Paul, God’s Grace is described as an unmerited favor, a free gift from God that enables salvation and empowers believers to live a righteous life. Paul often emphasized that it is not earned by good works but is solely received through faith in Jesus Christ.
Now, it should be noted here that good works are not to be avoided so as not to appear as though we are working for our salvation as according to James in his Epistle, faith without works is dead. Just like loving our neighbor as ourselves, good works is an expression of that love.
Paul frequently used the concept of grace to highlight God’s love and mercy, particularly in his own life transformation from persecutor of God’s people to an Apostle, where he humbly considered himself a prime example of God’s Grace at work. In fact, Paul refers to himself as the chief sinner.
Yes, we have all been sinners and we still sin but the difference to be explained when someone calls us hypocrites is that as Christians we don’t make it a practice to live our lives through the desires of our flesh, we no longer covet that which we don’t have or only seek to satisfy every desire of our fleshly appetites and we do not highly regard ourselves in pride. We know what we were and who we are now and we choose to humbly rely on Him who saved us and now keeps us.
Lest we be burdened by recalling our old sinful lives, the Apostle Paul showed us that we should forget the past sinful life we once lived and not be condemned by it in regret or by accusations from others but to strive for the prize of salvation that we seek.
Philippians 3:13-14
13 Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,
14 I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
God’s promise to Abraham was that in his seed the entire world would be blessed and to us who received that promise, there is a new promise of eternal life through that SEED who redeemed us. If we are in Christ, whether we die, yet shall we live and if we live, we shall never die. The dead shall be raised and we who are still alive shall be caught up to Him in the clouds as He returns. Our mortal bodies shall take on immortality! Yes, it seems we have come full circle in the fullness of time because of what God’s Son did. We now have the same Grace that Abraham received when he was deemed righteous by God because he believed in Him and had faith in His promises. AMEN