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The Law's Purpose By Richard Wilson

On chapter 19 verse 1, the passage how the law was actually given to the people of God
and the actual annunciation of that law is also given to us.
But before we do so, I want to just take the text that we're going to be looking at from
Galatians chapter 3 and from verses 19 through to 21 and read those to you as we take this
Old Testament passage to heart.
And the Apostle Paul says to the Galatians, which were reserving the law rather than the
Lord Jesus Christ, he says, what purpose then does the law serve?
It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was
made and it was appointed through angels or messengers by the hand of a mediator.
Now a mediator does not mediate for one only, but God is one.
Is the law then against the promise of God?
And the Apostle Paul resolutely says, certainly not, okay, there's no distinction between
the law and grace, the law and the promise, they are to be regarded as not antithetical
to one another, but as one, because it was given by the one God, both the law and the
promise of grace.
For if there had been a law given, which could have given life, truly righteousness would
have been by the law, okay, you see the argument he's laying there, he's laying it down that
if there was a righteousness, a law that could have given righteousness or life, then there
would have been, it would have been through the observance of that law that life would
have come and that would have been almost the pre-fall situation, wouldn't it, under
the covenant of works, but now we're under the covenant of grace.
So let us read together this passage in Exodus, it's well known to us, but it's good to be
reminded of it.
As we have heard the law of God reiterated, we can see that the law of God is something
that is very good.
We can see that there is nothing improper about the law of God, and yet it is not something
that we are to put our faith in.
We have heard in the past several Lord's days that there are many arguments why we are not
to put our trust, even in this very good standard of the law of God.
It is beneficial to our spiritual lives, we're not suggesting anything different to that,
but it is not to be trusted for our salvation.
It is only the Lord Jesus Christ who is the one that is able to give us life.
The law could not give us life, and after all the Lord did not covenant with the law,
He covenanted with the seed, the Christ that was yet to come in the Old Testament and as
we have seen completely fulfilled His purposes upon His ministry amongst us.
And so here we find the Apostle Paul reiterating the very purpose of the law, and it says here
quite clearly that the purpose in verse 19 of chapter 3 of Galatians, that the purpose
of the law was added because of transgressions.
He asks the question, what is the purpose of the law?
What does it serve?
And he says quite irrevocably and with great clarity, without any ifs or buts, it was added
because of the transgressions, until the seed should come to whom the promise was made.
Now that is my first point.
The first point when we are looking at the law, it was added because of transgressions.
The Galatian Christians, which is also an example of many Christians throughout the
Church of Jesus Christ, throughout the whole world, even today, they were having a romance
with Jewish tradition.
There was a lot of motives for them to do this.
If they stood close to the old Jewish Church, they did not stand to be as persecuted as
a radical sect might be persecuted.
And so it was easier for them to say, maybe Paul, the Apostle who preached the Gospel
to us, concerning the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, he was right thus far.
He was right to the point where, in terms of our salvation, yes, Jesus Christ is our
only Saviour.
But, he said, do we have to form a completely new sect altogether that stands apart from
the old Jewish Church?
And if we are to be involved with this, if this is so, maybe we need to be a bit more
balanced, he says.
Maybe these Jewish rabbis, who are good essentially, should be listened to.
The difficulty is, they bore the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
And Jesus said, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.
Now the Jews, the Jewish Pharisees, were the strongest of the Evangelical and the people
who were strongest concerning the Bible.
After all, they were the ones who believed in the resurrection.
And they were the ones that were the guardians of the truth.
And they were consistent to the truth.
They took every part of the law and wanted to apply it to their lives.
Surely this is not wrong, was the kind of argument that was given to them.
For some had come into their midst and had actually turned them away from the Gospel.
So this romance that they had was well placed.
There was good motives for them to do this.
It's very hard for us as Christians to stand out and to be Christ's own people.
It's very much easier to conform to the traditions of well-established church life.
Even though it might have some kind of sensibility about it, the fact is we have to ask the question,
are we trusting in the church or are we trusting in the living Lord Jesus Christ?
As one old Chinaman said to me when I was in Rochester and I went to visit him in the
Bendigo Hospital and I came with my clerical collar into the hospital and he saw me coming
and he said, me no Christian, me no Christian, me Presbyterian.
I don't think he was right.
He wasn't going to heaven though.
Because he was like the Jews, trusting in the church, not into Christ.
This is the danger that the Galatian church was faced with.
In verse 6 of chapter 1, you have turned away, he says.
Why?
Because some have troubled you.
And they had turned away to what we might call faith in the church, legalism.
Not faith in Christ.
And that legalism had diminished the faith and the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
They were trusting in something that they knew it was in their control to do.
Okay, they had to be a bit more refined, they had to be a bit more knowledgeable, they had
to be able to keep the laws a bit carefully, but the drudgery of that is safer than living
by faith in a living God, they proposed.
And so the whole of their church life had gone down into the depths of routine.
Everything would be the same tomorrow as it was yesterday.
Many people come to church thinking just this, I just have got to do my little bit and get
my little bit and do my duty.
And they never expect that they will, when they come to church, that they'll be different
when they leave church.
Because after all they're not living by faith in a living God, they're living by faith in
their knowledge, in their tradition, in their family security, or whatever else that gives
them comfort and solidity of life.
Here we find that He says that there was a covenant, as we saw last week, a covenant
made of the seed.
These promises that they would inherit, that the law which was given some 430, 430 years
after the promise that was made with Abraham, remember we looked at that last Lord's Day,
and this covenant of the seed, this covenant of Christ, was made well and truly before
the law was given.
And why was this?
Well because it was added, He says here, because of transgression.
In other words, if we look at the history of sin in the world, when sin arrives we find
the pristine beauty and the perfect modelling of the creation itself.
God said it was very good when He completed His creation.
And every day He said it was good when each day was completed.
And He said that in this ideal, untouched creation of God by His own hand, and by the
power of His word He brought it out of nothing, there was something great, a great purity
about the creation itself.
And we find that man lived in perfect harmony with creation and His God, and with His neighbour,
until the insinuation and the temptation of sin was entered into the world.
And from that point there was a degeneration of the whole creation that groaned and travailed
under sin, to the point where even the culture, the whole creation, erupted and became, at
the time of the flood, erupted into an utter decay.
But yet, because of the purposes of God, the promise that was made with Adam and Jude through
the people of God, even in the midst of those violent days of the pre-Deluvian period, we
find that God maintained His mercy and His promise.
But still it was in the form of a promise, and even right through to the days of Abraham
where culture still was maintained and still kept in place, but it became necessary at
the point of the exodus that God, where sin had deteriorated, sin had deteriorated in
society, that's the course of even God's people.
There was conquering and then there was deterioration, conquering, deterioration.
It was a general failure of even God's people until Christ came.
And at that point there was, as the apostle says, until now the earth travailed and groaned
under sin.
Until now, says the apostle Paul in Romans chapter 8.
And then when the Gospel took place, when the new creation was established, when the
Kingdom of God was inaugurated by the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords and His position
in the heavens had been established and vindicated by His own death and resurrection and His
ascension on high, and He was able to gather people from all nations and all tongues and
kindred, a whole different world order had been established, not in the whole earth,
but at least in those that were gathered who no man could number.
And we see a gradual upturn in the work of the Kingdom of God from that day until this
day.
The Kingdom of God is regarded as a seed that fell to the ground and it grew into a great
tree and its canopy enclosed over all the earth, whereas the stone that came down and
struck the earth and it became a mountain that filled the whole earth.
Now that's the idea that we find here.
The purpose of the law was to highlight in the decay of human society and humanity itself
was to reveal at a crucial time where the darkness of sin had so blinded people's minds
and hearts that some other revelation of the righteousness of God had to be given to
man so that they could see the truth about themselves, clearly in words that could not
be mistaken.
Thou shalt do these things, or thou shalt not.
So we see here that there is a necessity of the law to come at that particular period
of history so that the truth concerning the righteousness of God could be revealed concerning
our own hearts.
We were separated from God and we needed the truth that the law of God could reveal us
as being sinners of sinners so that we could then flee to the one that could save us.
Can you see the point there?
So the law came at a vital time at the Exodus that we could see the importance of our real
condition before God.
If the law had not been given to us before that stage, there was a residue of the written
law upon our hearts that was somehow deeply embedded within the consciousness of humanity.
There still was right after, but it was seared.
So they needed the law to highlight and refashion our conscience again concerning what was right
and what was wrong.
That was the purpose of the law.
So that it might increase the transgression.
Remember old Pilgrim, Pilgrim's Progress when he was in the city of destruction and he picked
up this book and the more he read the book the worse his problems became and the greater
the sin, the burden of his sin on his back became greater and greater, it almost crippled
him and he tried to go to bed and sort of get solace there.
He went out in the fields, in the quietness of the fields and get solace there.
He couldn't get solace there either because it causes the burden of his own sin upon his
shoulders and the more and more he read this book, the more and more the problem became
to him because the sin, the transgression was increased in his life so he could see
the truth of his own soul before God.
But in the fullness of time, the remedy of the measure God gave in the law to Moses was
given to us so that we could be without doubt concerning our relationship with God.
We were fallen short of the glory of God.
We were those that were condemned as guilty before the bar of God and we were those that
were transgressors of the law of God and we needed to see that if it hadn't been given
to us we would remain in our blindness, we would be deaf to the righteousness of God
because of the general deterioration of our society and of our hearts.
We would not have seen the desperate need for our soul and our alienation from God.
And so it was added because of transgression.
The whole world culture was becoming blind and darkened and deteriorated and the nation
of Israel was given the law not to be self-absorbed in themselves but to be a light on the hill
to all the nations around, here the law of God is known and so many proselytes from all
the nations came to Israel because they could see the righteousness of God and so they often
would come and become Jews because they came and saw in the sacrifices the manner of forgiveness
that was due to them although salvation was confined to the Jews for that season of the
Old Testament.
That didn't exclude other people coming to know the Lord.
After all, Nineveh all came to know the Lord in one foul swoop because the prophet was
compelled to go to Nineveh to preach the gospel.
But in the main the gospel was confined in that period to the Jewish people.
Now it was to prepare the way for the seed it says here.
It wasn't something that was to be a standard and we have some kind of fatalistic view of
our real condition.
The purpose of the law was not only to reveal transgression but also to reveal the seed
of the, sorry, to and was to lead us to the seed that should come to whom the promise
was made.
That's what it says there.
It was to lead us to the one that was able to give us life.
It was to lead us to the one that had made a last will and testament, that old ancient
of days, the pre-incarnate Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ himself, who had made his last
will and testament there on Mount Moriah, as we saw last week, when Abraham was about
to sacrifice his son and God provided in the mountain a ram, a sacrifice that as far as
his son was concerned, his son was dead.
He had his knife ready to plunge it into the chest, a fatal blow to his son, for he believed
that God was able to even raise the dead to life, it said.
It was there that the, that the Lord Jesus Christ in his pre-incarnate appearance, that
old ancient of days, spoke to Abraham and covenanted with Abraham his last will and
testament, that I will be the one that will be provided for not only your sin but also
for all your children, in all the nations, even to the end of the earth.
And that is one of the most significant passages in all the Old Testament, Genesis chapter
22, for there God had committed to Abraham and all his seed, another that would be the
seed of God, that would be the redeemer of God's people.
Now the word seed comes from that old and ancient promise that was given in Genesis
chapter 3 and verse 15, that there would be enmity between your seed and her seed.
That the seed of the woman would have, would prevail over the seed of the serpent.
And though he be bruised on the heel of that seed, the seed himself would bruise him on
the head, which would be fatal.
And of course that's what happened on the cross of Calvary.
Satan was assailed.
Satan was fatally damaged, never to rise as the prince of the power of the earth again.
And so here we find that it was appointed through angels by the hand of a mediator.
Now an angel is a messenger of God, that's the essential meaning of an angel.
We also find that the angel of the churches of Revelation, remember that one re-referring
to the pastors of the church, the one who was the mediators of the word of God to the
congregation of God's people.
Now I'm not denying there's such a thing as angelic beings, such as the great archangels
and all those sort of things, they exist there indeed.
One of the great hosts that are maybe amongst us today are the angels of God, our unseen
company of God's angels amongst the people of God.
But I think the meaning here is that this message was administered by the messengers,
the prophets of old.
A prophet was somebody who represented God to his people and spoke the word from God
to the people of God.
And they were guardians, not only of the law but also of the great gospel of Jesus Christ.
They spoke of this constantly both in their writings and their preaching and their teaching
among God's people.
And so these prophets became the very mediator or the messengers of God's word.
They spoke infallibly of what God has said because they had received from the very lips
of God and they spoke the very lips of God to the people of God.
They didn't speak of the machinations of their heart as among the prophets of the pagans.
They spoke according to the revelation, the verbal revelation of God from lip to lip.
They didn't seek to interpret it.
There was the job of the priest to interpret God's word in their teaching.
They sought only to speak the word of God.
And so the mediator being that of Moses and the prophets, Moses was very much the archetype
of all prophets.
He went up into the mountain, he received the word and he spoke the word to the people.
He was a prophet of the first order.
But he spoke of another yet to come that would be the only mediator in Deuteronomy chapter
18, where another that would be given who would be the prophet and the definite article
is put in front of the prophet there.
And so here we find that now the mediator does not mediate for one only but it is God.
And so when the prophet Moses spoke of the prophet yet to come who is far greater than
he that would speak all things perfectly and completely, far greater than he, would come
then all things would be made complete in the revelation of God.
And of course that's what happened.
Once the word of God had been established in the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles
had completed the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and giving the whole word of God, we have
now got a closed canon of the word of God.
The 66 books of the Bible, verbally inspired, totally without error, completely authoritative
amongst God's people.
Now it has been complete.
And so when it says God is one at this point, he says, when he comes, this seed will be
God himself who is the only mediator between God and man.
And we are found in Christ, that very mediator, that go-between as it were.
And so the one of all these, the point of all this is that the promise of the seed is
superior because it did not need a mediator because he himself was the mediator.
There's no need for prophet, priests and kings any longer amongst God's people because Jesus
Christ himself will be amongst his people.
And that's what he is.
He dwells in our hearts.
That's what he is.
He establishes his presence among his people directly.
That's why we can talk to the Lord Jesus Christ personally and directly in prayer because
he's amongst us in a manner that he could not have been amongst God's people previous
to the coming of Christ.
And so that is a great point.
Now why are we trusting in the law then?
We should be trusting in the one who gives life, who is the mediator of, who is the mediator
himself, who is God.
And so it was delivered by God directly.
The law of God is prepared.
It prepares the heart to receive, so that we might be able to receive the things of
God.
And that's what it is.
In the New Testament times it is a heart religion.
It's not a mediated religion.
It's a heart that is communing with God directly.
And therefore we see that we're able now to take hold of our inheritance.
In the fullness of time we will be able to have the full inheritance that was promised
in the covenant of Christ.
So it brings last week's message to the floor in this week.
So therefore the law in verse 21 tells us that, is the law then against the promise
of God?
He resolutely says, certainly not.
Therefore if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness
would have been by the law.
The law is not in competition with the promise of God.
Therefore the law was given by God and so was the promise given by God.
And God is one.
See the argument is incontrovertible.
And when we hear Christians placing the law and grace in some kind of opposition, it's
a total misunderstanding of scripture.
So if we put the Old Testament as opposed to the New Testament, it's again a misunderstanding
of scripture.
And it's leading probably from a heart that is legalistically inclined when it says that
kind of thing.
Even though they would be the ones who are pushing strongest against legalism.
But they do not understand what legalism is.
It's putting your faith in something that is inadequate.
Because without the law, the promise is irrelevant too.
And without the promise, so is the law irrelevant.
One of the same thing needs to be understood together.
Because the anatomy of the law and the anatomy of salvation are needed to establish the One,
the Lord Jesus Christ.
And so the righteousness is declared by the law.
It discloses the very righteousness of Christ.
There is a sense in which the Old Testament laws is inadequate.
It's not a full expression of the full righteousness of Christ.
That's why Christ said, you heard it said of old, and referring to some of the Old Testament
laws.
But I say unto you, unless you do this, which is intensifying even the spirituality of the
law.
So somebody who is walking by the Spirit, somebody who is trusting in the promise of
the seed, is able to say with irrevocable total consistency, that now my righteousness
exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees.
Because now I am seeing the obedience of the law in my life.
Now if we are those who are genuinely walking by the Spirit, that is by faith in the Lord
Jesus Christ, then we will see a righteousness that far exceeds that of the scribes and the
Pharisees, manifest within our lives.
We will love the Lord's day, and it will grieve us if we have been interrupted in the
Lord's day.
We will worship God, not according to idols and statues and instruments of mediation that
somehow might help us to worship God in some kind of beggary way, but we will worship God
in spirit and truth according to the word of God.
We will not need the kind of props we are seeing in the church and is disguised for
what worship really is.
We will trust God in our worship and we will move with God with a full heart before God.
The thought of tearing somebody down with verbal assassination is far from our thoughts.
We will not say an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will be looking for ways of
showing mercy if we are walking by the Spirit.
We will be loving our enemies that persecute us.
Can you see, that kind of spirituality can only be derived from the supernatural work
of the resurrection of Christ within our lives.
Yes, the law is good, but it doesn't give us life.
The life that we receive is from Christ according to the covenant of the seed.
And if we have that life, then a righteousness will be manifest within our lives that will
far exceed the mere words of laws, but it will be manifested within our heart as a living
entity.
No wonder the old Psalmist could say, I love the law of God, it is like nectar for my soul,
because he is a man who is walking by the Spirit according to the promise of God.