10 For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” 11 Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” 12 But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”— 14 so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. (Galatians 3:10–14, ESV)
From Curse To Blessing
How can someone enjoy and experience God? How can we become fully human as God intended? How can we be released from paralyzing guilt and shame? How can we attain abundant life? How can we be free?
Our passage today sets out two paths. One is the way of blessing; the other is described as cursed. One path gets to God by trusting him and his gospel of grace; the other by keeping a righteous standard without any error.
And what we will learn today is that when it comes to God's righteous standard, even one disobedience breaks God's law, rendering us as cursed. Paul makes this point in the opening verse of our passage today by quoting from Deuteronomy. He said:
For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” (Galatians 3:10)
God has a law. And if all things in his law are abided by at all times, then we would be righteous. But by breaking just one law, like Adam and Eve, we become guilty and put under a curse. The book of James makes the same point when it says, "Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it" (Jas. 2:10).
Imagine a cargo container dangling from a large chain attached to a crane. If one ring on that chain fails, the container will plummet. Every inch of that chain must hold its own, or else the chain is no good. This is how it is with God's law. If even one part of it is broken at one point, perfection is lost, and another route to God must be found. As the Bible says, "All have sinned and fallen short of God's glory" (Rom. 3:23).
Unless we embrace the other path to becoming acceptable in God's sight—the gospel. Through Christ, we can escape the curse of being barred from God's kingdom, a kingdom filled with goodness and joy and love and peace and selflessness and forgiveness. It cannot be enjoyed on the merit of our good works, and Paul deploys four passages in the Old Testament (two from Deuteronomy and one from Habakkuk and Leviticus) to prove it. These were likely some of the same verses Paul used when he preached about Jesus in synagogues throughout the Roman Empire.
The logic of this passage is simple. The righteous standard of the law promises a blessing to all who keep it. But no one keeps it. So anyone who relies on keeping the righteous standard as a way to God is doomed. We must instead put our faith in the promise of the cross of Christ, because on the cross, Jesus became cursed—doomed—in our place. And if we turn to trust in him, we become blessed like Abraham, recipients of the Holy Spirit.
So, a summary of this passage is that through the gospel of grace, we are no longer cursed but blessed. How so?
1. Because It Promotes The Way Of Faith (11-12)
The Righteous Shall Live By Their Faith
The first reason the gospel transfers us from curse to blessing is that it promotes the way of faith. I have already alluded to this—there are two ways to be accepted by God. The works of the law or faith in the gospel. Perfection or the borrowed righteousness of Christ. Total obedience inside and out or confessing your need for another to rescue you. The law of God or the grace of God. And the gospel presents this better way of faith to us. It tells us to believe.
Paul used two passages from the Old Testament to make this point. In the first, he said:
Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Galatians 3:11)
Last year, we took four weeks to study the book of Habakkuk, and this is its pinnacle quote. Habakkuk was a godly man who struggled with the evil he saw all around him in his home nation of Israel. God told him he saw it too and that he would judge it by sending the even more wicked Babylonians to attack them. Habakkuk objected. He was unable to understand God's process and logic. But then he waited, and God told him that the righteous live by faith (Hab. 2:4). They lean on God. They depend on him. They throw themselves upon him.
And Paul used that text as another evidence that righteousness never came through the meticulous keeping of God's law: now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law (11). No one. None. But, as Habakkuk and Abraham and many others in the Old Testament show, one who is in a right relationship with God stands before him by faith.
Faith is a needy cry for God, while works try to impress God. Faith is a hand reaching out for help, while works insist that no help is needed. Faith trusts that God alone can accomplish salvation, while works smuggle in human effort and cooperation. —Thomas Schreiner[^1]
Imagine a tall mountain that serves as a ski slope in the winter months. There is a tram—and that is one way up—but there are also hiking trails that are revealed once the snow melts. You might think there are two ways up that mountain, by trail or by tram. But now imagine that every human on earth was struck by a condition that rendered them completely paralyzed. Though there is a pathway up that mountain, no one would be able to climb it. We would all need the tram.
So it is with the pathways to God. The law is a way, but it doesn't work for anyone. We have been infected with sin. It has disabled us. But the tram of the gospel is there, ready for any who will enter its doors of grace.
The Law Is Not Of Faith
But Paul went on to quote another passage—this time from Leviticus—to make his point that the gospel promotes the way of faith. He said:
But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” (Galatians 3:12)
Some might have wondered if faith and works, the gospel of grace and law, were compatible. Perhaps we could emphasize justification by both faith and works? Paul said no, based on this quotation from Leviticus 18:5. The idea of the quote is that to affirm a part of the law is to be bound to the whole law. To do any of it as a way to be acceptable to God is to be bound by all of it as a way to become acceptable to God. And Paul is not only talking about Jewish people, either. In Romans, he said:
When Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. (Romans 2:14–16)
Paul presents every person on earth as having some sort of law to respond to, at least ones written on their hearts by nature and conscience. And when we follow those laws, we are demonstrating the existence of those laws and are going to be held accountable to them.
For example, I recently came across an interesting story about college students in the Philippines. Colleges there have made a major anti-cheating push, and students there have taken it to heart, inventing all sorts of creative headgear to keep them from seeing other students' answers. I saw one guy wearing a motorcycle helmet. Another wore blinders made of egg cartons attached to a sweatband. Still another taped cardboard tubes to goggles so that all he could see what his own paper. Cheating is a form of lying because you are representing the answers as yours when they are not. Cheating is also a form of theft because you are stealing answers from someone else. And cheating is a form of covetousness because you are doing whatever you can to attain a grade (and the life that comes with it) that is not yours.[^2]
So when we admit that cheating is wrong by trying not to cheat, we must live by that code all the time if we are going to be justified by our works before God. So now—if those students aren't justified because of faith in the gospel—they would have to never lie, never steal, and never covet if their works are their path to God's acceptance.
So Paul has used verses from Habakkuk and Leviticus to demonstrate that the gospel promotes another path to God, the way of faith. If no one can climb the mountain and if everyone has at least one law they are under, then the gospel of grace by faith is the only way. While we were under that curse or doom, it announced another way up the mountain, another way to pass the test. And all that is required in that other way is to trust it. And it is our next verse that shows us what we must believe, the second reason the gospel tranfers us from curse to blessing.
2. Because Christ Was Cursed For Us (13)
The second reason the gospel transfers us from curse to blessing is that Christ was cursed for us. This is what we must believe. For this point, Paul again quotes from Deuteronomy. He wrote:
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” (Galatians 3:13)
The idea is that in the Old Testament period, capital punishment was carried out by stoning. After the criminal died, they were often hung on a tree (or wooden stake or post) as a sign of their curse.[^3] Here, Paul made it clear that Jesus' cross qualified as a cursed tree. Peter joined Paul when he preached that Jesus was "hung on a tree" and wrote that Jesus "bore our sins in his body on the tree" (Acts 5:30, 1 Pet. 2:24). So while sin entered the world by eating the fruit of a tree, Jesus dealt with our sin problem on the tree of his cross so that we could one day eat of the tree of life (Gen. 2:24, Rev. 22:2).
And because Jesus was hung on a tree, Deuteronomy says he was cursed. What this means is that Jesus fulfilled the law both by carrying it out to perfection—he climbed the mountain peak none of us could climb—and he also fulfilled the law by consuming its curse for us on the cross. Paul said he became a curse for us (13). He not only took the curse, but he became the curse. This is similar to what he wrote in 2 Corinthians:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)
And because Jesus did not die for his own sins but became a curse for ours, he was able to redeem us from the curse of the law (13). This speaks clearly of the substitutionary death of Jesus on our behalf. He did not die for his own failures—he had none. He completely absorbed the curse that we were all under, a curse brought on by our guilt when he died on the cross.
We see an example of this substitutionary atonement in our very bodies. When you have an infected wound or sore, if it is opened, pus comes rolling out. What is that? It's dead, white blood cells that your body has sent to fight the infection. They have died so that you might live. So substitutionary salvation is in our very blood![^4]
So we must cling evermore to Jesus. He bore the curse of the law for us. On the cross, he took on the exclusion from God that we humans deserve. Adam might've substituted himself for God, but Jesus was God substituting himself for us!
...God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh. (Romans 8:3)
As time ticks by, we might easily begin to believe we are better than we are. It almost appears inevitable that people who began steeped in the gospel will one day look down on others. But our hope is not in our goodness—we are clinging to the righteousness of another! And every human is alike: fallen short of God's glory. God is not grading on a curve. Our good works cannot somehow outweigh the bad, at least not to be considered acceptable in God's sight. To escape the curse, we must have someone else rescue us—and Jesus is that rescuer!
3. Because It Brought The Spirit (14)
So the gospel shows us the way of faith and that Christ is the one to consume the curse. And the third reason the gospel transfers us from curse to blessing is that it brought the Spirit to us. Because Jesus died and rose, when we believe in him, the Bible teaches we become recipients of the Holy Spirit (cf. Eph. 1:13-14, 2 Cor. 1:22). He is God, and he makes his home in us. Paul said this truth this way here in Galatians 3:
So that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. (Galatians 3:14)
We talked about the blessing of Abraham last week, but now Paul gives it a precise definition: the promised Spirit (14). The Galatians knew this was true, and Paul had already interviewed them earlier in this chapter about it. Hadn't the Spirit come upon them when they believed? Yes, he had. And the Galatians knew it.
And now Paul labels the gift of the Spirit as the blessing of Abraham. It's an amazing title. God told Abraham that people of all nations would be blessed through him (Gen. 12:1-3). That blessing came through the gospel of Jesus, but here, Paul says the gospel brought the Spirit of God to live within us. That's the blessing of Abraham!
This was a key point for the Galatians because they might have begun thinking that the Law of the Old Testament was, at least to Paul, completely worthless. But it wasn't. Over and over again, all throughout the First Testament, God's prophets and priests and kings pleaded with God's people to obey the law. If they did, a beautiful society would emerge, and they would drink in the blessing of living in God's blessing. The law gave them just rules for how to govern daily life and worship. But, though it could govern them for good, restrain them from evil, and bless them in practical ways, it could not justify them in God's sight.
But when we believe in the gospel, the Spirit comes to live within us, and he begins to help us live for God. As Paul will say later, the Spirit helps us love, and the whole law is fulfilled in one word, to love our neighbor as ourselves (Gal. 5:13-14). So, in a sense, the Spirit comes along and helps us live according to the very law we could not keep. For me, when I read the Law of the Old Testament, I think of myself as reading principles that I am able to now adhere to only by the power of the Holy Spirit. As I abide in fellowship with Christ, his life flows into mine, and I am empowered and transformed to live in the way his law promotes. I am not justified by it. I am not approved by it. But I can now grow into doing more and more of it because of the Spirit living within me.
And life in the Spirit is wonderful. He is like a battery that energizes me for this life of faith. He is like a lamp that illuminates the path in front of me. He is like a fire that warms me from the bitter cold of life and burns of impurities. He is like a mirror that shows me where I need to change. He is like water that satisfies a deep thirst within. He is like a wind in my sails, propelling me to his destination. He is like a guide who comes along and leads me on the next leg of a long journey.
I recently noticed an Amazon Alexa plugin called "What should I do with my life?" Terrible. I think Alexa's answer if it were honest, would be to buy as much as possible on Amazon. That isn't something you should have to ask Amazon or Google or ChatGPT. But with the Spirit within, you can be led by God himself! This is a blessing the gospel gives.
Conclusion
I once heard the story of two men whose rowboat capsized above Niagara Falls. The current rapidly carried them to the falls, but people on the shore floated a rope out to them, and they both grabbed it. But one of the men saw a large log floating by and, in a panic, let go of the rope and grabbed at the log instead, leading to his demise.[^5] And there are so many other things we might grab at or trust in—our religious activity, our prayers, our good deeds—but only Christ can deliver us. Cling to his cross! Rely on him! Depend on him!
When we do, we escape the curse of the law and enter into the blessing of the gospel. It brings us into a life of faith. It shows us that Christ took on our curse by becoming a curse for us on the cross. And it allows us to partake of the blessing of Abraham, namely by receiving the Holy Spirit the prophets of old said would come.
And, with the Spirit leading and empowering our lives, we can enjoy the very life the law hoped to achieve—one where we trust in the true and living God, refuse to worship anything that would dehumanize us, are free from all forms of shameful defilement, are generous and just, keeping God's rules and acting faithfully (Ezek. 18:5-9). It is a life where God puts his laws into our minds and writes them on our hearts (Heb. 8:10). The Spirit empowers us, partly by reforming our motivations. And with this change of perspective and fresh empowerment, our lives come to describable with just one word—blessed!
[^1]:Schreiner, Thomas R. 2010. Galatians. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
[^2]:FitzGerald, James. 2022. “Philippines: Student ‘anti-Cheating’ Exam Hats Go Viral.” BBC, October 23, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63363473.
[^3]:Walvoord. 2003. The Bible Knowledge Commentary: New Testament. Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook Publishing Company.
[^4]:Keller, Timothy. 2012. Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
[^5]:Spurgeon, C. H. 1972. Around the Wicket Gate. Welwyn Garden City, England: Evangelical Press.