New Life in Christ

Galatians 2:14-21

What is legalism?

• Legalism requires works and religious performance in addition to trusting in Christ alone by faith alone for salvation.
• After we believe on Christ, we can fall for another form of legalism that requires OT laws and superficial, man-made rules to please God and grow as Christians.

The book of Galatians teaches us about both forms of legalism and how we should think about it and respond to it in the church.

In the church, there’s a difference between a false believer who pushes a legalistic gospel and a fearful or hypocritical believer caters to a legalistic people.

• The men who slipped into the meeting between Paul and Peter in Jerusalem, for instance, were pushing a false gospel (Gal 2:4).
• When Peter showed favoritism towards legalistic men in Antioch, but he was capitulating to the pressure he felt from the legalistic people around him.

This contrast shows it’s possible for a sincere believer to have a legalistic mindset. When this happens, it’s a problem in the church because it sends a bad signal about the gospel.

Legalism was dividing the church.

Paul opens his first significant theological discussion by sharing the story of an experience he shared with Peter at Antioch.

• Antioch was Paul’s home church, where he’d spent quite a few years teaching and pastoring the people before traveling into Galatia to plant more churches. The members of this church were predominantly Gentile (or non-Jewish).
• Jerusalem was the hotbed of Pharisaical Judaism and the center of orthodox Judaism in general, so the church in that city faced a lot of pressure to observe Jewish traditions and laws. This was Peter’s home church.

On one occasion, Peter traveled north see what God was doing in the church at Antioch.

• At first, his visit went very well. He enjoyed good fellowship with the Gentile Christians, even eating with them at mealtimes. Doing this violated kosher laws that forbade them from eating certain foods that Gentiles ate and from eating with Gentiles at all. Eating together was considered a form of close association and friendship.
• But then, Peter’s visit took a turn for the worse. Some men from the church in Jerusalem arrived in Antioch sometime after Peter arrived. When they showed up at mealtimes, Peter removed himself from the Gentile believers and ate separately with the Jewish believers from Jerusalem.

Can you see the problem? Peter had no trouble treating Gentile believers as equals by setting aside Old Testament (OT) kosher laws to eat with them. Yet when legalistic Jewish Christians arrived, he acted differently. He catered to their legalistic preferences because he was afraid of offending or upsetting them.

When Peter – a respected leader in the church – acted this way, a domino effect occurred. Other converted Jews in the church at Antioch followed his example. They also removed themselves from the company of their fellow Gentile church members to eat with the visiting Jewish Christians instead. The pressure became so strong that even Barnabas, Paul’s spiritual mentor and another pastor in that church, did the same thing.

When Paul saw this trend gathering steam, he corrected Peter in public because Peter’s example was sending the wrong message about the gospel.

By catering to legalistic people, Peter was being hypocritical. (Gal 2:14)

As Paul pointed out, Peter had been “living like Gentiles and not like Jews” but now was “compelling Gentiles to live like Jews.” Before the men from Jerusalem arrived, Peter had no issue eating with Gentile believers. Life was good and fellowship was sweet. Yet when legalistic men from Jerusalem arrived, the tables turned dramatically as Peter reverted back to observing kosher laws again.

This unfortunate shift in behavior by Peter and other Jewish believers at Antioch sent a bad signal to Gentile believers. The message was, “If you don’t follow OT kosher laws, then you’re spiritually inferior to those who do. You’re not part of the inside group because those who follow OT laws are better than those who don’t.” That’s what Paul meant when he said, “They were not being straightforward with the gospel.”

By calling Peter a “hypocrite,” Paul described him as two-faced. He was pretending that kosher laws were important in the church and Christian life when they were not. When legalistic people were around, he acted all sensitive to the law, but when they weren’t around, he disregarded those laws instead. Only one of those choices could be right and it wasn’t the one he made when the legalists were around.

Paul and Peter both knew that obeying OT laws could never make them right with God. (Gal 2:15-16)

Paul switches from speaking to Peter to speaking about he and Peter together. They were both “Jews by nature” and not Gentiles. As ethnic Jews, they both knew how important the OT law was to their culture, heritage, and religion. Yet Paul points out that even they who had such profound respect for the OT law knew that trying to obey the law would never make them right with God. He repeats this fact three times:

• “a man is not justified by the works of the law”
• “we are not justified by the works of the law”
• “by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified”

This threefold repetition makes it impossible for Peter (or anyone else listening) to miss the main point of Paul’s message. The law had never, could never, and would never make anyone one, even a Jewish person, right in the sight of God. That’s why it doesn’t deserve the level of importance that legalistic people require.

The word justify is important to understand. Paul uses it frequently here and in Galatians. It’s a legal term that refers to our legal standing before God. We are sinners and God is the judge. We want him to say “innocent,” but we deserve him to say “guilty.” To justify means that God is able to say, "You are no longer guilty. You are right in my sight."

To justify means that God is able to say, "You are no longer guilty. You are right in my sight."

Since God requires perfect justice, he can overlook no wrongdoing in our lives, and no matter how many laws we obey, we can never earn his favor or undo the wrongs that we have done. As a result of our sin, we deserve God’s wrath and judgment, so how can we escape that verdict?

Obeying religious rules and laws, even the ones given by God in the OT cannot remove our guilt. The only way to remove our guilt is for Christ to live a perfect, innocent human life that pleases God then accept our guilt for us in our place along with its consequences.

That’s what Christ did when he lived and died for our sins. He did what we cannot do in our place so that anyone who stops trusting in their performance and starts trusting in Christ alone as the substitute for their sins, will be declared to be in right standing with God once and for all because Christ has lived and died in their place.

Christ reveals that everyone is a sinner, but he doesn’t cause anyone to sin. (Gal 2:17)

“But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin? Certainly not!”

Paul’s legalist critics accused him of encouraging people to sin. By disregarding kosher laws, they believed he was causing people to sin by teaching them to disobey the law.

To answer this charge, Paul pointed out their erroneous understanding of the law. God had never declared anyone to be right before him because they had obeyed kosher laws or any other OT laws.

The only person who fulfilled the OT law perfectly was Christ, so that’s why it was appropriate for religious Jews like Paul and Peter to stop pursuing right standing with God through the law and to seek that right standing by faith in Christ alone instead.

In fact, the perfect life and teaching of Christ had a leveling effect. Jews felt like they were more acceptable to God because they “followed” the OT law. They felt as though they could hide behind the Law (and their imperfect attempts at keeping it) to differentiate themselves from non-Jewish people whom they called sinners.

However, when religious Jews like Paul and Peter turned to Christ for salvation, they discovered that they were just as much sinners as anyone else. Whether you tried to follow the Mosaic Law or not, you were a sinner. That’s what Christ made clear. He pulled religious Jews away from the law, that’s true, but by doing so he didn’t cause them to sin – he revealed that they were sinners.

Living by the law ended for Paul when he received new life from God. (Gal 2:18-19)

Here Paul explains his present relationship with the law as a person who converted from religious Judaism to faith in Christ.

He alludes to his former life as something that he “built,” which refers to his super-serious, ultra-passionate attempts at obeying the law. If you thought you followed kosher laws carefully, for instance, but then ate dinner with Paul, you’d find that he was far more serious about kosher laws than you could ever dream of being!

After believing on Christ for salvation, Paul left such super-serious law-observing behind. He moved on from that when accepted Christ alone for his justification and refers to that former view of the law as “those things which I destroyed.” So, for Paul to cater to kosher laws at meals among Christians in the church, then, would be like “building again” his former legalistic approach to pleasing God.

It’s one thing to tear down an old, outdated building with a wrecking ball to construct a better building in its place, but it makes no sense to rebuild the old building from the pile of rubble once it’s been demolished. That’s what legalism does. It attempts to rebuild something that Christ demolished at the cross.

Paul points out that moving on from that way of life was God’s will for him and other believers, which ironically meant that that going back to that way of life would be the real “transgression.” To cater to kosher laws and other legalistic practices in the church would itself violate God’s will for this time. Requiring kosher laws would disobey God.

“For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God.” Paul explains that the law (and his super-serious attempts at observing it) had led him to a positive outcome, even though it could not make him right with God.

• “Through the law” points back to his study of the law and attempts at obeying the law. In other words, the impact and influence of the law in his life. The law and his futile but passionate attempts at observing it led him in an important direction.
• “Died to the law” refers to the end of his attempts at trying to obey the law to earn favor with God. It was the “I give up” moment when he realized that for all his efforts, he could never do well enough for God to accept him. So, he stopped trying.
• “That I might live to God.” This refers to God’s full acceptance of him when he stopped trying to earn God’s favor but trusted in Christ’s perfect person and performance instead.

Let’s visualize a bridge to illustrate what Paul’s argument.

• Bridges are important structures, but they’re not destinations.
• They take you from one place to the next, but you don’t live on them or go back to them once you’ve arrived.
• The law served as a bridge from being punished by God to being in right standing with God.
• The bridge of obeying the law couldn’t make anyone right with God, but if they were paying attention it moved them closer to Christ who could.

That’s what happened to Paul. When he realized that all his law-keeping efforts would never make him right with God, he stepped off that bridge on the other side and believed on Christ alone.

If we carry this analogy forward, it’s as though Paul dynamited the bridge of law-keeping behind him when he believed on Christ and he refused to pick up the pieces to build that bridge again when he had no intention of traveling backwards from Christ. His law-keeping efforts had taught him a crucial important lesson about Christ, but now that he had believed on Christ alone at last, those law-keeping efforts served no more purpose.

Paul now trusted Christ daily to empower him from within. (Gal 2:20)

“I have been crucified with Christ.” This means when Paul believed on Christ for salvation, the death of Christ became his death. What Paul wants us to understand is that the death of Christ (and Paul’s spiritual union with him in that death) ended his former relationship to the law.

Since Christ obeyed the law perfectly and since I’ve trusted in him for my salvation, then his perfect life has been placed on my record as though I’ve also fulfilled the law perfectly in God’s sight.

Since Paul died with Christ (in a spiritual sense), then he also died to the shadow of the law hanging over his life. Just as a dead person no longer deals with the pressures of paying taxes and following speed limits to stay out of trouble, a person who has believed on Jesus no longer deals with the pressures of practicing OT laws. Legalism brings this pressure back into the Christian life, but Paul says that life after believing on Christ is dead to the law.

“Nevertheless I live.” Paul’s death (or “crucifixion”) was not a physical one but a spiritual one because he was still a living person, walking around and carrying on in daily life. But since he had died with Christ to the law, his life was very different now.

He lived each day not motivated by laws he had to obey, but by his trust in the Son of God. He lived with the conscious awareness that Christ would make his life pleasing to God, not just for salvation, but in his day-to-day activities and choices.

As he relied on Christ for salvation, so he relied on Christ for sanctification – the living out of his new identity before God. Unlike the law which imposed all sorts of requirements externally from without, Christ empowered genuine godly living from within. That’s a key difference between legalistic living and Christ-dependent living.

The law imposes unrealistic pressure from outside, but Christ empowers genuine godliness from inside.

The law imposes unrealistic pressure from outside, but Christ empowers genuine godliness from inside. Christ not only applies his perfect performance to our record before God, but he provides his righteous character within us to empower our feelings and thoughts, words and actions in the daily grind of our lives.

Paul further describes more differences between living under the law and those who push it and living in union with Christ. Christ is someone “who loved him” and who “gave himself for him.” When had the law loved anyone? When had legalistic teachers and Pharisees ever given themselves sacrificially for the benefit of anyone? A Christ-centered life beats a legalistic life any day because Christ has done and will do whatever it takes to enable our lives to be pleasing to God from the inside out, but the law and those who push it onto us make demands we can never fulfill. The law says do, but Christ says done.

Moving on from the law does not negate the grace of God. (Gal 2:21)

“I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain.”

Paul wrapped up his remarks to Peter with this simple point – that by stepping away from living by the law, he was not (as his critics would accuse him) disregarding the grace of God. He was not disrespecting God. Why? Because if following the law could put us in right standing with God, then everything Christ did in life and death, in his coming and his crucifixion, was entirely unnecessary. Yet Christ did come and had beencrucified, so to move on from the law was to embrace the grace of God, not disregard it.

Key Takeaways

Don’t let legalism pull you into hypocrisy.

According to the gospel, we know that God has accepted us in Christ. Thanks to Christ, we have a right standing before God that will never change. But when other people in the church insist on keeping man-made rules and traditions and practicing OT laws as marks of genuine, spiritual, or mature Christianity, they foster an environment in which people are not free to be themselves.

Though God has already accepted us through Christ, we may feel the need to “measure up” to the strict rules and practices of other people in the church to be accepted by them. You should resist this pressure to please other people in this way. Live out your beliefs and convictions with confidence and grace. Don’t pressure other people to be exactly like you and don’t try to be exactly like other people.

Your behavior shouldn’t change one way or the other just because you’re around some legalistic people, nor should you pressure anyone else to change because you’re around. Be who you are. If Christ has accepted you, then the church should accept you, too.

Rely on Christ within you to live the Christian life.

To live the Christian life the right way does not require you to memorize a litany of laws and then do them as best as possible. You die to that kind of living the moment you trust in Christ for salvation.

Instead, you must rely on Christ to be like Christ. When you’re about to commit an action or make a decision, don’t ask, “Is there a law about this?”

• Ask, “What would Christ say or do in this situation?”
• Think about what you know of Christ from Scripture and apply that to your situation.

Yet don’t apply Scripture in a legalistic way. Rely on Christ himself to supply you with the wisdom, strength, and character you need to follow through. A simple prayer like the following may be what you need:

• “Lord, your wisdom please.”
• “Lord, I need your strength.”
• “Lord, please let me love with your love.”
• “I need your patience, Lord.”
• “Your joy, Lord.”

By God’s grace, may we learn to live this way and resist the pressure of legalism in our lives.