Full Text for Galatians- Volume 43 - Boasting in Christ Crucified (Video)

No. 43. >> I have a little different question about the ending of the letter. What does Paul mean when he says that he will only boast in Christ crucified through whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world? >>DR. ARTHUR A. JUST, JR.: Your question anticipates now what it is that Paul is going to contrast to boasting in circumcision or making a show of the flesh of the circumcised one. This is a very powerful statement by Paul that I think sums up the entire theology of grace and the theology of the cross. And I think we need to pause here for a moment and ask ourselves as we come to the end of this letter and we see how Paul is coming back to Christ crucified what in fact the cross means and what it means then to boast in the cross of Jesus Christ. I think for Paul the cross is that cosmic event in the history of the world in which God steps onto the scene in order to make all things right that have gone wrong. Now, we've been using that language all along. But let's unpack it a moment. The cross is for Paul a cosmic event. It is an Apocalyptic event because it affects the whole creation. Everything is different after the cross. And here is where God is in fact acting on behalf of fallen humanity that is infected with this virus of sin to make right in the cross what has gone wrong because of our sin. The cross then is a watershed event in the entire cosmos. And what Paul has been saying throughout this letter is it's not the law that is the cosmic event. It's not Mt. Sinai. It's not the delivery of the law to Moses by angels on Mt. Sinai. But it is the cross of Jesus Christ that is the watershed event. And if you accent the law, if you accent what Moses did and superimpose that upon people, then you are going to dilute the cosmic character of the cross of Jesus Christ. And the third thing he's saying about the cross, and this is where we get that language of the world is crucified to me and I to the world. What the cross is is that defining moment in which the loss of one cosmos, namely, the world of the law, is lost to Paul. And there's the birth of a new cosmos. And that is the birth of the new creation. Now, remember what I said at the very beginning. There are two questions Paul is asking. What world do we live in? And what time is it? Well, the world we now live in is the world of the new creation. That is a world now that has been given birth to because of the cross of Jesus Christ. And when that cross comes, the world I used to live in before, says Paul, the world under the law, the world of keeping the law, the world that I learned in my Pharisaical training at the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, that world dies. It is crucified in the cross of Christ. And I am now living -- here is the language of Chapter 2. I am now living in a new world. And here in Chapter 6. In a world of the new creation. And that is what we've seen in a world in which faith is actively being demonstrated in love. This is where love is the normative reality. This is where we're loving our neighbors as ourselves. We're bearing each other's burdens. Fulfilling the law of Christ over and over and over again. This is the world I now live in. This is the map that he has been giving them up until this time. And it's defined, Paul says, by the cross of Jesus Christ. Now, this is an absolutely extraordinary statement for Paul. And let's look at exact language that he uses. Verse 14. And this is an expression he uses in other places. But it does stand out because it's fairly rare. And in the Greek you're kind of alerted to it. It's hard to sometimes translate. Let it not be to me to boast. Let me see how this translation does it. That is Verse 14. But far be it from me to boast. You know, I like let it be. Let it not be to me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, your Lord and mine, Gentile, Jews, through whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world. Now, usually when you boast in something, it's either -- it's usually something that's yourself. You know, you boast in your own accomplishments. You boast in your golf score, the number of fish that you've caught off a particular fly. You know, you boast in your accomplishments. You can boast in your kids. A lot of people boast in their kids or their wife's accomplishments or their husband's or whatever. But usually it's something personal. Here Paul is saying he's not going to boast in anything that he had anything to do with or anybody else had anything to do with humanly speaking. He's not going to boost in anybody's dead foreskins. He's not going to boast in his rhetorical prowess. He's not going to boast in the number of converts he's got. He's going to boast in something that he had nothing to do with. He's going to boast in a crucified man who is the Son of God. He is going to boast in an object from the world's perspective of great shame and horror. He's going to boast in something that is outside of him. And something that only comes to him by grace through faith. That is what he's going to boast in. He is going to boast in something that from the world's perspective is the ultimate scandal, the ultimate horror. Now, that's an extraordinary statement to make. And to make that statement in light of what very clearly is going on in the Galatian congregation with his opponents shows the great difference between Paul and his opponents on their way of speaking about what God is doing to bring about his salvation. Now, I do want to spend a little more time on through whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world. Paul sees that his identity now is formed through the cross. Up until the cross, his identity was as a faithful law abiding Jew who kept the law and saw that his way of salvation, his way to God, was through keeping the law. Especially with things we've been saying over and over again: Circumcision, Sabbath, food laws, purity laws, kinship laws, table fellowship laws. I could go on and on. Calendar, et cetera. That was his life before. But now the cross is where he gets his identity. And there, that law life, collided with Christ on the cross. Here this is Galatians 2 and 3. And it killed Jesus. There Jesus is cursed because he is the sinner. Cursed by the law. That is the defining moment for Paul. And it's there that the world, his former world of Judaism, is crucified in Christ. And if that's crucified in Christ, then so is Paul himself. Paul is crucified in that cross of Christ, which is just another way of talking about what happens to him in his baptism. He uses the language of co-crucifixion in Chapter 2. In Romans 6, he's going to talk about suffering, dieing, being buried and rising with Christ. Here he's talking about his union with Christ in his baptism where all that happens to Christ on the cross, all that happens to Christ in the empty tomb, is now given to him through the waters of holy baptism by Word and Spirit. Now, this is a great contrast, as I said, to his opponents. And it places the cross here -- and if this is his first letter -- it places the cross in the final words to the Galatians at the center of his preaching. You know what he's going to say to the Corinthians. I will know nothing except Christ crucified. And I've always been intrigued by that because right before that he's in Athens and he mentions nothing of Christ crucified. I think he learns something from that. That even when you're with pagans, you've got to preach Christ crucified. So when he gets with pagans in Corinth, he says: I'm going to know nothing but Christ crucified to you. Preach nothing but Christ crucified. So the crucifixion of Jesus. It is the center of his preaching. And if you just remember back, remember he says of the. Oh, foolish Galatians, before whom I've publicly portrayed Jesus as crucified. Paul is now going to show very clearly how this crucified Jesus is evident in his own body.