Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: We have as our text today one of the most ambiguous statements in the Bible, because the various possible readings are not just different: they are in some respects opposite! While our DP Readers’ version — which, remember, is a paraphrase translation — reads “To increase our awareness of sin,” like all paraphrases it takes a theological stance. The literal meaning is simply “on account of transgressions.” Moses Ten Commandments The most common-sense meaning (and the one that many people might immediately assume is correct) would be that God sought to decrease or restrain sin by delivering laws forbidding it. He was showing us what was right and wrong, so that we could choose to act right. This is exactly how most people look at the Ten Commandments. Why did God say, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”? So that people wouldn’t commit adultery, right? A lot of eminent people have interpreted it exactly that way, throughout the history of the church. And the law, undoubtedly, did decrease sinful conduct. One need only look at the Jewish attitude towards, say, homosexuality or adultery, and compare it to any other major group around the first century A.D. There was less homosexuality and adultery among observant Hebrews than among, say, Greeks. Pederasty, for example, was an integrated element of life in the most enlightened society of ancient times: Athens. In the dialogue know as the Symposium, Plato argued that homosexuality (with younger men or boys) is a higher form of love than heterosexuality! The Hebrews, on the other hand, were directed to stone to death people committing sodomy (among other deviant sexual acts). But Paul is unlikely to be claiming that restraint of sinful behavior was the Law’s primary purpose. His sole topic in Galatians 3 is salvation, and more specifically, the inadequacy of the Law to save the human soul. His purpose is to convince the listener/reader that one cannot attain righteousness by trying not to sin. As Lee Strobel puts it, “Jesus Christ did not come into this world to make bad people good; He came into this world to make dead people live.” Christian family A similar reading (primarily argued by the brilliant Scottish theologian, J. D. G. Dunn) is that the Law, by its numerous forms of sacrifice as atonement for sin, was a sort of interim measure to obtain forgiveness until Christ would come to offer the final and perfect sacrifice. But while there is surely merit to the claim — the Old Testament rituals for atonement are many and frequent — it has the same problem as the first theory, only worse; it not only disconnects from Paul’s topic, but also undermines it. Paul does not say belief in Christ creates a better or longer-lasting righteousness; he says belief in Christ provides the only means of righteousness. At the opposite extreme, and in fact more attuned to the context, is the idea that the Law was given to increase sin! Paul does call the Law a “curse.” If we read through 1 & 2 Kings, we see that Israel actually became horrendously sinful, to the point that God virtually destroyed it. But the idea of God intending to increase sin is inconsistent with one of the core attributes of God: He is purely good. Some verses indicate that God might deafen those He disfavors to truth and allow their sin to run unchecked, but never that He promotes evil. Which leaves us with what would seem the most probably meaning, in the context of Galatians: God gave us the Law to define sin. This is consistent with Paul’s theological emphasis, e.g., “Where there is no law, there is no transgression.” (Romans 4:15) In fact, as we have seen earlier, the Law might be said to create sin in the sense that a law creates a crime; conduct, no matter how evil or offensive to society, is not a “crime” unless and until a law prohibits it. Sin is thus, in a narrow sense, evil specifically defined. And the primary purpose of the Law, at least in the context of this Chapter, is to prove to humanity that it cannot be freed from sin by its own effort.