In a sense, there is no bigger question than the one Galatians attempts to answer: How do we relate to God? Do we experience God as a reward for good works? Do we gain fuller and more complete revelation of him by keeping more of his law as revealed in nature, conscience, or Scripture? Or do we encounter God by his grace? Do we enjoy him through faith in his promises?

Your answers to these questions will impact your eternity and psyche. Much of our current joy or despair, contentment or strife, peace or unease stems from our answers to these questions.

Through this study of Galatians, you have probably begun to suspect that the answer is that we come to God by his grace, his promise, and our faith in that promise. The false teachers in Galatia had emphasized the law of Moses, telling even new non-Jewish Christians that they had to keep it. They were also bothered that Paul had told the Galatians they were free from God's law.

To them, this was problematic. They thought Paul had fused Abraham and Jesus together, forgetting Moses. Paul made it all about faith in Christ like Abraham, but they thought it was about works of the law like Moses. Paul first told them that justification could not come through keeping the law because a curse rests on anyone who fails to keep it without error (Galatians 3:10-14). Our good works before God are not enough to make us approved before God. The law cannot produce righteousness with God, and law-keeping cannot make us right in his eyes.

But God had given the law to Israel on Mt. Sinai. When they obeyed it, they flourished, and when they did not, they floundered. They were blessed when they delighted in the law of the Lord day and night (Psalm 1:2). And now Paul comes along with his seemingly low view of the Mosaic law, preaching that we can not be justified (made acceptable) before God through law-keeping.

Then what is the purpose of the law? Paul thought of the law as a divine and wonderful complement to the gospel of promise, and this passage shows us how:

1. Because It Arrived after Christ Was Promised (15-18)

15 To give a human example, brothers: even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. 16 Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. 17 This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. 18 For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise.

The law complements the gospel because it arrived after Christ was promised. Here, Paul pointed out that the law arrived over four centuries (430 years) after the promise made to Abraham and to his offspring (16). This timeline is incredibly important. The law complements the gospel of promise because it came so long after the promise.

To illustrate this, Paul gave a human example (15). In a man-made covenant, no one arbitrarily changes it once it has been ratified (15). You cannot merely decide to pay less interest on your mortgage, less money on your cell phone bill, or less tuition for your education. To start a mortgage, a mobile data plan, or college classes, you must enter into an agreement. Once ratified, you cannot change the agreement at will.

And if that is the case with a human covenant, how much more are the promises God made to Abraham and his offspring? (16). So when the law of Moses arrived 430 years after the promises God made to Abraham and his descendants, the promises were not altered in any way.

How was Abraham accepted by God? By believing God's promises, partly that from his line would come a figure who would bless the entire world. This is how we are always accepted by God: by believing the promise of that figure who would bless the whole world. And, on this side of the cross, we no longer wait for that figure to be revealed for the first time. We look back at the cross and recognize that God's promise to Abraham was fulfilled by Jesus. Jesus is the promised offspring, seed, or descendant of Abraham through whom the whole world is blessed (Genesis 12:3).

Imagine Abraham living an incredibly long life of 500 years, all the way up to the days of Israel's slavery in Egypt and their deliverance at the Red Sea. Imagine he was there when Moses climbed the mountain and received the Ten Commandments. He would have loved the law God gave.

But he would not have been accepted, saved, justified, approved, or considered righteous by God by keeping the law. He was "in" with God because he believed. No law could change that. Paul saw how that pattern of justification by faith did not die with Abraham—the law only came centuries after Abraham, and his faith set the template for all of us.

It is good for us to recognize that the law arrived many years after the coming Christ was promised to Abraham because that promise was the seedbed of the gospel. In a sense, the gospel predates the law. And since God began by relating to Abraham through promise and faith, he always relates to his people through promise and faith, not by works of the law.

This is abundantly good news because it shows us that Christ and the gospel of grace still stand. The Galatians wondered if, after they had believed in Jesus, God was now ready to relate to them by works, law, or contract. But since God's promise and Abraham's faith are much older than the law, we can know that God still relates to us by promise and faith.

In an improv comedy class, amateur students can get off track, so the instructor sometimes jumps in to recover the plot. And sometimes our hearts are like that group of amateur comedians—we get off track. We begin thinking our gospel days are over, and we now relate to God through our works. And that either fills you with despair or fills you with pride. You either become like Zacchaeus, thinking you could have nothing to do with the Lord, or like the Pharisees, thinking you are above others and do not need him. Because of this tendency, the plot must be recovered. We do not relate to God based on our goodness. No one ever has. We relate to God by responding to his promises by faith.

Rejoice! Having begun with the Spirit, by gift, grace, and faith, we are not perfected by our human effort or performance. If we were, then God's gift would have been canceled, and his promise to Abraham would be void. But God's promises cannot be altered. God still relates to us by grace, gift, and faith.

We are firmly in a gift-promise relationship with God, not a law-wage one. But so much around us preaches a law-wage way of doing things, and it’s difficult to believe. If we study hard, we earn good grades. If we work for a specific amount of time, we earn an agreed-upon wage. If we obey the laws of the land, we hope to be left alone. The law-wage way of life colors everything around us, so it feels foreign when God invites us into this grace-gift way of relating to him.

Paul is trying to help us conclude that Christianity is "the religion of Abraham and not Moses." [1] And since God dealt with Abraham in the promise/grace/faith category, he wants us to continue in that way. But this is difficult for us, and we often lose this perspective. As Matthew Harmon wrote, "We live in a world of broken promises...yet our hope as believers is grounded in the absolute faithfulness of God to keep his promises." [2] All those broken promises might make us believe God has not kept his.

But God is a promise keeper, and he has told us that by faith, he will give to us "an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven" (1 Peter 1:4). And right now, we have been given the Holy Spirit as a down payment for that inheritance, a constant reminder that the best is yet to come (Ephesians 1:14).

Next week, we will see two additional ways the law complements the gospel.

[1] Stott, John R. W. 2008. Galatians: Experiencing the Grace of Christ. Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press. [2] Harmon, Matthew S. 2021. Galatians: Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary. Lexham Academic.