(Lincoln’s Inn, 5th Sunday after Easter, May 21, 1854.)
‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. —Galatians iii. 13, 14,’
As I proposed in my last sermon to examine the uses of the word Redemption in the New Testament when it is connected with sacrifice, you may wonder that I passed over such a memorable text as this. I passed it over, because I thought I should treat the subject more fairly, if I confined myself to the word λύτρον, its compounds and its cognates. The verb ‘redeemed’ here is not one of these. This, however, is not one of the cases, of which there are many in the Epistles, that offer a fair ground of complaint against the authors of our version, for adapting the same rendering to two different words. It would be difficult, perhaps, to find a better equivalent than that which they have chosen for either expression. The mere word here does not suggest the thought of ransom quite so directly as those of which I spoke last Sunday; it means simply ‘to buy out;’ but the idea of a slave for whom a friend obtains freedom, not by arms, but by purchase in the market, is always present in it. Although it sometimes occurs without any distinct allusion to price or purchase-money, as in the phrase Redeeming the time, yet generally, that is not only implied, but forced upon our notice. It is so in that celebrated passage, in the fifth chapter of the book of Revelation (where, indeed, the simple verb ἀγοράζω is used), ‘Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.’ It is so assuredly in the sentence before us, where Christ is said to redeem us from a curse, by becoming a curse Himself.
I might, therefore, at once assume, that the purchase spoken of here came under the same principle with the ransom or redemption which we read of in the Epistle of St. Peter, and in the Epistles to Titus and to the Hebrews. I might take it for granted, that, in one case as much as in the other, God was spoken of as delivering His creatures from an oppression under which they had fallen, and as bringing them back into their true and rightful service, which is perfect freedom. I might assume that Sacrifice was the method, the only method, by which the chains that bound man’s spirit could be broken, precisely because they were chains on a spirit, not on a mere animal. I might trace here, as I traced before, that union and co-operation of the will of the Father with the will of the Son, which was, as St. Peter taught us, before all worlds; which lay in the very ground of creation, but which was never manifested in its fulness till the Son yielded up Himself to the death of the Cross.
I know, however, that there are associations with the phrase, ‘curse of the Law,’ which greatly interfere with this belief. I do not say how far these associations are produced, or promoted, by one system of theological teaching or another. I do not profess to trace them to their origin. I am sure that they haunt you and me. I am sure it requires an effort, and a very careful effort, to disengage ourselves from them, because they are intertwined with very righteous and sacred feelings; and because, at the same time, they gain great strength from tempers and habits, which, though not righteous or sacred, are very natural to us all. Every Englishman understands, and confesses, that Law has its root in the mind of God, that it is one great utterance of His mind. He feels that the decrees of Law must be executed; that no tenderness or graciousness towards individual offenders, or towards a multitude of offenders, ought to suspend or weaken their execution. The curse of the Law he feels is something very tremendous indeed; how can it be other than the curse of God? But if it is this, when Christ is said to redeem us from the curse of Law, can anything else be meant, than that He redeems us from the curse which God Himself had denounced, and was prepared to enforce, against His creatures? that He stepped in, as their Advocate, to shield them from His Father’s indignation; that He offered His blood which was an adequate purchase-money or ransom from it?
I wish you to perceive, not how startling this view of the subject is, but how readily it presents itself to us as a most logical and consistent explanation of the apostle’s meaning; how it conspires with a belief which is sound in itself, and closely akin to the habits of our national character; how it appeals, also, to our sense of an evil in ourselves which requires the most wonderful process for its extirpation. I have no hope of overcoming such influences as these by merely arguing, that, if this be the true and scriptural statement of the case, we must abandon all the conclusions respecting Sacrifice which we have deduced hitherto from an examination of Scripture, and adopt that theory of it which patriarchs, lawgivers, prophets, apostles seem to have agreed in denouncing. Unless this particular phrase, curse of the Law, and the special aspect of redemption which St. Paul connects with it, can be explained, without resorting to the hypothesis I am speaking of—unless the explanation can be shown to be more in accordance with the teaching of the apostles than the popular one—we shall talk in vain about general principles, or inferences from the course of the Bible history. But it seems to me, that, if we will suffer St. Paul to be his own interpreter—not in some other part of his writings, but in that part wherein this sentence occurs—we shall find our way into such an apprehension of the subject, as will make the doctrine of Christ becoming a curse that He might redeem us from a curse, not the confutation, but the most perfect illustration, of the principle, that the loving Will of the Father is the moving cause of the deliverance of man, and of the Sacrifice by which that deliverance has been accomplished.
The Galatians had, at first, accepted St. Paul as the preacher of a Gospel. News concerning the God who made them was what they wanted; that which the tentmaker of Tarsus brought them was emphatically good news. He reminds them in his letter what it was. ‘God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons.’ They had a right to believe that. The God of the whole earth had said that He was their Father. It was not a mere name; He had given them a sign of His adoption; He had promised, with that sign, to give them His Spirit in their hearts, that they might call upon Him as their Father. If they believed this message, they received the sign. St. Paul asked them whether they merely received that? Did there not come with it a joy, and thankfulness, and wonder—a filial feeling such as they never had before? But, very soon, teachers came among them, who said that the Gospel was, after all, but a preparation for the Law. They had been, the most part of them, Gentiles, worshippers of false gods, with none of the privileges of the chosen race of the children of Abraham. ‘Did they really fancy that they were to spring at once into the highest condition which human beings could enjoy? Did they deem that they were to be in as good a condition as those who had for centuries been under the divine discipline, who had the law and covenants? What a monstrous supposition! The man who had encouraged them in it was manifestly imposing upon them, tempting them to their ruin. Baptism was good, but it was the induction to a higher good. If they would be circumcised, then, indeed, they might benefit by the coming of the Christ into the world; for He had come mainly to expound the Law, to bring back the religion of the old times, which the modern teachers had corrupted, to make that the religion of the whole earth.’
The doctrine was most plausible; when is not doctrine that leads men into slavery plausible? The Galatians received it; the preacher of the Gospel was discarded as a dangerous sophist; the preachers of the Law were hailed as wise and moral guides, who could show those who followed them an old and safe road to heaven. St. Paul meets his opponents in this letter. He asks for no quarter, and gives none. He regards the question as one of life and death; one upon which the moral slavery, or freedom, of the nations of the earth depended. He believes equally that the understanding of the Old Scriptures depended upon it. These Judaisers he will not admit to be Jews; they know nothing of their own privileges, or of the end for which God had chosen their fathers.
To this point he especially addresses himself. They wished to be Abraham’s children; they wished all men to be under the Law, as they had been. The two wishes were incompatible. Was Abraham under a Law? No! he was under a blessing. The covenant with him did not mean, if Moses spoke truly, that he was commanded to do certain things, and to leave certain things undone. It meant that the Lord of all declared Himself to him, and took him to be His friend. And the Covenant was to be a universal one. The tenor of it was: ’ In thee, and in thy seed, shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ This was the groundwork of the Jewish nation. This was the groundwork of all the righteousness of its first father. He believed the God who had spoken to him, who had given him this promise! so he rose to the stature of a righteous man. He became like the Being who had adopted him.
But the law, St. Paul goes on to argue, was no part of this blessing. Its function was of a different, a directly opposite kind; it was added because of transgressions. And what it did was to pronounce a curse upon those transgressions. It denounced death against them. ‘What is it then,’ he asks, ’that you, the ’preachers of this new Gospel to the Galatians, want ’for yourselves, and for them? Do you wish to be ’under a curse? Is that the great benefit which “belongs to the chosen people, that the great boon it ’is to confer on the world?”
The question was a startling one; but it was not merely startling; it came from the inmost experience of St. Paul himself; it appealed to the experience of the Jew. St. Paul had gloried in the Law as much as any of them could do. He had boasted of the wonderful advantage he had over the Gentile world in possessing it. And, by degrees, it presented itself to him as a tremendous sword which was hanging over him; which was ready to slay him, whom it seemed so greatly to favour. In the strictest sense, it cursed him. It made him conscious of evil within him which cut him off from God, which made it impossible for him to trust God, though he found that it was the very characteristic of Abraham and David, and of all the heroes of his race, that they did trust God. The Jews, generally, might not have felt all, or a thousandth part of what the apostle had felt, because they were less in earnest; but they knew very well that they were not trusting God,—that they dreaded Him, fled from Him, looked upon Him as having given them a Law which they were to boast of, but which they could not keep, which set them above other nations, and made them more miserable than other nations. It could not be otherwise; according to the eternal principles of the universe and of God’s nature it could not. Law, St. Paul discovered, serves this purpose in the education of a man or of a nation. It awakens the sense of evil; it shows them that they are at war with themselves and with God; it cannot make them right and good; it cannot bring about any peace between them and God.
Was, then, this effect all that God designed for Jews and for men? Was it the first thing that He designed for them? Clearly not, unless the covenant with Abraham was a delusion. The blessing preceded the curse; the blessing which declared by its very terms that it was for all. If the Jews wished to be children of Abraham, they must assert a higher and nobler position than that of being the receivers and subjects of a Law. They must say: ‘God is blessing us, and the world ’through us; God is calling upon us to trust Him, as ’the source and root of all blessings. And this Law, ’which comes with its tremendous curses, is part of ’our discipline, to teach us what our condition is without God; what we are when we are not trusting ’Him; when we are seeking to make ourselves righteous in any other way, but by believing in His righteousness. The Law is our schoolmaster, to bring us ’to the knowledge of that Mediator in whom the promise was made. It was a secondary subordinate dispensation, of infinite worth as a means of leading us to that primary truth of our relation to God in this Mediator, ’on which the covenant with Abraham stood; apart ’from which it would have had no force or validity.’
The more you read this Epistle to the Galatians, the more, I am persuaded, you will see that the argument of the apostle, from first to last, is a refutation of the doctrine, that we are first to learn what God is, what His will is, from the Law which curses, and then to ask whether there is no escape from its terrors and its penalties. He insists upon the priority of the Covenant to the Law, of the blessing to the curse. He insists upon it, that the blessing, which appeals to faith and trust, expresses the mind of God, and that the Law, which appeals to fear, is made necessary by the false condition into which men have brought themselves through distrust of His promises. And then he announces Christ, the Mediator, as coming forth to fulfil the blessing which God had laid up for men in Him, and to redeem them from the curse and separation which they had brought upon themselves. ‘He has redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having been made, or become, a curse for us.’ The curse which the Law pronounced upon men was death, death in its most odious, most criminal, shape; and He underwent it, an actual, not a fantastic crucifixion, the sentence of the rebel and the slave. Do you ask how this act effected the purpose of redeeming any, or how many were included in the benefits of it? The question is, indeed, most difficult, if by redemption you understand in any sense the deliverance of man out of the hand of God, the procuring a change in his purpose or will; then there is need of every kind of subtle explanation to show how the means corresponded to the end. But if you suppose that it is the spirit of a man which needs to be emancipated, a spirit fast bound with the chains of its own sins and fears, then I do not see what proof, save one, can be of any avail, that a certain scheme of redemption is effectual. Appeal directly to the captive. See whether the announcement, that the Son of God has died for him, does dissolve that horror of God, that feeling of him as the tyrant, the forger of bonds, the inventor of a curse, by which he has been possessed.
If the spiritual bondage is not real, of course the spiritual redemption is not real. But the whole history of the world, of every portion of the world, for six thousand years, proclaims that it is real; that this is the bondage from which men are seeking by all contrivances to break loose; that all material bondage is but the accident and result of it. If the way of deliverance from it has been found out in some corner of the world, civilised or uncivilised—if it is a way that is available for human beings actually tormented with the sense of evil, actually dying,—then let us know the way, let us try it. But the sacrifices that ascend from ten thousand altars to powers of sky, and earth, and air, to the Spirit of Evil far more than to the Spirit of Good, declare: ‘We have not found it; we never shall; till “you can tell us of some sacrifice which shall be of God; one which proceeds from His will, and not ours; one which fulfils His will and not ours.’
It is such a one of which St. Paul speaks, when he declares that ‘Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us.’ It was the enunciation of his old message with a new clause, which the objections of his opponents had brought out, and which deepened and strengthened that to which it was added. He had preached to the Galatians of a Father who had sent His Son into the world; he had bidden them take up their place, as sons of God. The Judaisers would cheat them of that position, and send them back to the Law. St. Paul declares, that the act which proclaimed them sons was an act of redemption from the Law. It had been a useful pedagogue; it denoted that they had not yet been recognised as children; that they were still in servitude. Now the hour of emancipation had arrived. The Son of God had owned them as kinsmen. In death, He had proved Himself their brother; in rising from the dead, He had claimed His Father as their Father.
I need not tell you what is involved in the use of this Roman comparison. The emancipated child always had been a child; he did not become so when he was allowed to put on the manly gown; that was only the time when, his preparatory discipline having been completed, he could be safely trusted with the knowledge of his dignity, when he could do the acts of a freeman and a citizen.
St. Paul takes the analogy in the length and breadth of it. There was a period, during which it was needful that men should be learning their condition; should be working through many strange experiences to the discovery that they were spirits; should be feeling after the Father of their spirits. During that time He was not forgetting them. When they were stooping most to visible things, when they were least aware of their high parentage, He was awakening to them desires which nothing they saw or heard could satisfy or could quell. By laws He was controlling their indulgence in things mischievous to them; was making them aware of their own low tendencies; was teaching them to shudder at the sight of themselves. Then, sending forth His Son in their likeness, He raised them to the state for which He had created them; He redeemed them from the vassalage into which their own sins had brought them; He redeemed them from the vassalage which He had Himself ordained for their education. They were no longer under the Law as a curse; they were no longer under the Law as a pedagogue. They could not any longer contemplate death as God’s curse, cutting them off from Himself, for Christ had endured it. They could not any longer submit to be servants of a rule, for Christ had come to make their state filial, to give them the spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
St. Paul was, at least as well aware as we can be, of the false inferences which might be drawn from this Gospel, of the miserable notions of liberty which might be built upon it. He is occupied, in the latter part of this Epistle, in protecting his doctrine against these dangers; not by weakening and diluting it, but by bringing out, in its full strength, that promise of the Spirit, of which he speaks in the last words of my text. The Spirit of Christ could not lead them into any of the acts which were inconsistent with the life of Christ. The Spirit of God could not tempt them to violate any portion of the Law of God. He would teach them to delight in that Law after the inner man, as David did, because it discovered God’s will to keep his creatures from the evils which enslaved them and separated them from Him. They could carry out in their conduct the highest meaning and intent of the Law, having that love to each other which is the fulfilment of the Law. ‘But,’ he says, ‘if you bite and devour one another, take heed lest you be not consumed of one another.’ If you exhibit all the mind and temper of the flesh, against which the Law is directed, assuredly you bring yourselves within the curse from which Christ has redeemed you. But is that the effect of your believing the Gospel, or of disbelieving it; of acting as if Christ had redeemed your race, and brought it nigh to God, or of listening to teachers who lead you to suppose that you are at a distance from Him, and that He is your enemy?
Which doctrine caused the Galatians, in the first century, to bite and devour each other? which causes English Christians, in the nineteenth century, to do the same?