Free To Serve (No Other Gospel #19)
But I think this second section is still connected to the main theme. I don't think Paul would have agreed with the division between doctrinal and practical. Because the keyword of Galatians is “Gospel.” And what is the gospel? It is that Jesus “gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father.” (Galatians 1:4) A gospel that does not have a practical application is not a gospel at all. And so while the first several chapters of the letter are dedicated to defending and defining the nature of the gospel, this last section attempts to apply the gospel to life. The first several chapters tell us what the gospel is and ends with the exhortation to STAND fast in the gospel. But the second section of the letter tells us to live out to the gospel, to WALK in the spirit of the gospel.
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. (Galatians 5:13-15)
Verse 13 may seem like an abrupt transition from Paul's discussion immediately preceding it, but I think there is a definite connection. The main thing Paul seems to have been contending with at Galatia was Legalism, the idea that we can earn our salvation by our own good works. The New Testament church came down solidly against that doctrine. But there was always the danger that, in that denial, they would give room for another doctrine--the doctrine of Antinomianism, the belief that as Christians we can live how we want. It would be easy, in reaction against an over-dependence on the law to go into the idea that we don't need the law at all. If we are saved by faith and not works, then who needs works at all? In Romans 6:15, Paul addresses this question: “What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid.” In Philippians 3, immediately after emphasizing that we are saved by faith and not by works, Paul adds that he was constantly pressing forward; that salvation does not consist with a mere act of faith (v. 13-14) in contrast with some in the church who made a profession of loving God but in reality their “God is their belly... who mind earthly things.” (v. 19) Jude warned of the same thing in his epistle: “For certain men have secretly slipped in among you... ungodly men who have turned the grace of our God into a license for evil.” (Jude 4, NET Bible)
Certainly, there was a danger that over-emphasizing salvation by faith would open the door for Antinomianism. But even that isn't the whole picture. Because while Legalism and Antinomianism are, in theory, polar opposites, in practice they are sometimes the same thing. And I know that sounds strange. If you take Legalism seriously, then you would try your best to obey every single law. Whatever faults such a life would have, lawlessness would not be one of them.
But as we saw before, Legalism doesn't always take that form. Legalism is the idea that we are saved by our own works, by following the law. And so you don't need a lot of laws to be a legalist. You only need one. So it seems as if some of the Judaizers at Galatia had the idea that all you needed to do was be circumcised--that that was enough to fulfill the law and find salvation. That is Legalism, because it is salvation through our own works, even if it is only one. But if doing ONE thing guarantees salvation, then it doesn't matter what we do the rest of the time. So you most certainly have people today who think because they do a few specific acts of charity and avoid a few specific (and often trivial) vices, that they are Christians and accepted by God and THEREFORE it doesn't matter what else they do.
Or, take Covenantal Nomism, which may also have existed in Galatia. In theory, if you believe in Covenantal Nomism, if you think you are saved through the covenant, then you need to at least try to fulfill the conditions of the covenant. But in actual practice you had some Jews (especially in the time just before Captivity) who believed because they were Jews and continued to perform certain ritual acts, that they were safe and so they could flagrantly disregard the law at other times. And in the same way today you have people who think because they go to church or because THEY WENT to church one time and made some profession that that saves them and they can live the way they want to now.
And against all these ideas, we have the assertion of verse 13: “For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.” We have been called unto liberty, liberty from Legalism, liberty from the obligation of self-salvation, liberty from the power of this world--but that liberty is not an occasion for the flesh but for love and service. We will get back to this word “flesh” in another article, but for the time being, we can just say that it means sins; liberty does not mean the freedom to do whatever we want.
We need to stop for a moment and consider this idea of freedom since it can mean a lot of different things. In a religious context, freedom means one of three things: Free will, free grace, free heart.
As Wesleyan-Arminians, we believe that all people are free in the sense of having free will. We can freely choose whether to answer God's call or reject it; not because we natively have such a power (since we have nothing of our own) but because God has so constructed the world and so energized our heart so that we would have this power. Nobody can be saved against their will, and nobody can be damned against their will. We are free to choose. Freedom in this sense is a property of the sinner as well as the saint. Paul presupposes this kind of freedom since an appeal such as that in verse 13 would be meaningless if people didn't have the choice to respond to it, but this isn't the kind of freedom Paul is talking about when he speaks of liberty here.
Free grace is the idea we've been talking about throughout most of Galatians; this idea that we cannot and do not earn salvation by our own works. This isn't something we can purchase with our efforts. There is no exchange rate on God's grace. We cannot earn it; we cannot buy it; we can only receive it freely as a gift. James Russell Lowell wrote a poem talking about how we have to pay for everything in life, and then adds: “'T is heaven alone that is given away,/'T is only God may be had for the asking.” We can also call this freedom from the law in the sense that we are not under the bondage of trying to earn salvation by following the law.
Finally, there is a third meaning of freedom; I don't know exactly what to call it, so I'm labeling it free heart. But there is a very close connection between salvation and freedom, not just in the context of freedom from Legalism. Someone might even use the terms synonymously; someone might say: “I've been set free” as another way of saying that they've been saved. And this even has Biblical warrant. This is what Jesus said to those who believed on Him: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) This is one of those Bible verses which has passed into common knowledge, often completely deprived of its context. There is a certain universal truth here. Truth always brings a certain deliverance with it. There are many settings--religious, ethical, academic, political, and social--where it is true that the truth can make you free. However, Jesus is not primarily meaning any of these things; He doesn't mean freedom in general but a specific kind of freedom. When he told the Jews that they could be made free through the truth, they responded that they were already free to which we have this response: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” (John 8:34)
The freedom we have as a Christian is freedom from sin. And I realize that this would sound meaningless to some people. Many sinners would say they like their sin and wouldn't want to be freed from it. And they might say that the Christian is the one who is bound because they aren't allowed to sin. There is certainly a paradox here, one that is made very clear in verse 13, in which Paul says we have liberty to “serve” one another by love. That word for serve means literally “to be a slave.” To tell someone that they are free to be a slave might seem just a teeny bit odd to them. If you go down to verse 18, you will see Paul saying we are not under the law and then in verse 19 and following Paul gives more laws that we are under.
To explore this issue fully would be an entire lesson in itself, but I think for our purposes we can go back to words of Jesus; it the truth that sets us free. The service of sin in service to a lie. Sinners are bound by phantom chains to illusions and shadows. We can think of this most easily if we think of pagans, who lived their whole life in terror attempting to placate gods and spirits who didn't exist. I suppose you've all heard of the psychological condition known as Paranoia; where a person lives in fear of some enemy or conspiracy against him, which usually has zero basis in reality. That's what many sinners are like. Or, again, there's another condition known as Delusions of Grandeur, where a person believes they possess great riches or possessions which they really don't; living their life bound up in this idea of something they don't actually have. That is like sinners who spend their entire life chasing the wealth and honors of this world; things which in the final analysis have no value and meaning. Every form of sin is a kind of slavery to a lie.
A man who believed he was a tree and so stood in one spot for his entire life would be in bondage because he believed a lie. But for an actual tree to stand in one spot is not bondage, because it truly is a tree. Living our lives servings the things of sin is bondage for the same reason, but serving one another in love is not bondage, because that is what should be. There is no slavery in doing something right. There is no bondage in the truth. True freedom comes from the truth because it is the freedom to truly be what we are supposed to be. Just like a tree was created to grow; so we are created to serve one another in love. That is the truth; the essence of our reality; and so to fulfill it is not bondage. G. K. Chesterton writes: "You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end."
The freedom we have in Christ--having a free heart--is freedom from sin and so, by the same token, this freedom is not an occasion for the flesh. It is freedom in the truth, and so not the freedom to lie. It is freedom from hatred and so is the freedom to serve one another by love. It is freedom from the law solely because it has fulfilled the law. Notice verse 14: “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” We are not under the law in the sense of trying to find salvation by following it. We have been set free from sin and given a new heart, a new life. And that life is a life of love. And what love desires is to do the best for God and for other people. And the law is what shows us what is best for God and for other people. The law is a yoke of bondage when we use it as a means of salvation; but it becomes a liberation when we use it for its proper purpose--as a light to our feet, showing us the path of love.
And I realize some of this may seem academic and abstract, but Paul says all this to guard against one very brutally practical danger. Paul saw very clearly that a church where everyone lived in selfish freedom, in disregard of others, would lead to disaster. A liberty which is not the liberty in the service of love would lead to their bite and devouring one another, words connected to the actions of wild animals. There's an old poem that tells about this kind of thing between two cats: “There once were two cats of Kilkenny,/Each thought there was one cat too many,/So they fought and they fit/And they scratched and they bit,/Til instead of two cats, there weren't any.” That was the danger which Paul feared. Paul was a strong believer in liberty but he also saw that liberty, taken the wrong way, would become something that would destroy the church and destroy the soul.
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