77 - Law vs. Spirit [B]

Law vs. Spirit
Romans 7, Galatians 3
Romans Lesson #077
October 18, 2012
www.deanbibleministries.org

We are going to start in Galatians this evening. We’re still studying Romans 7. I want to contextualize things for you just a little bit. In Romans 6, 7, and 8 we have, I think, the greatest passage in the New Testament dealing with the spiritual life. Romans 6 focuses on the fact that we are dead to sin; Romans 7 focuses on the fact that we are dead to the Law.

There are some important things brought out here. I think that we don’t always grab their significance. They don’t shake us quite as much for a number of reasons. Number one: we’ve been taught many times about the significance of the spiritual life in the Church Age. I’ve emphasized this again and again. So in many ways and in many aspects, this isn’t new truth.

For Jews and Christians in the early church, this was just phenomenal. This was revolutionary in a tremendous way. It was a radical shift and a major paradigm shift so that they had to think about their relationship with God and their ongoing walk with God in a way that they had never thought about it before. The whole dynamic of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit was new to them. I used that word because I’m including both the indwelling aspects and the filling aspects of God the Holy Spirit. These were something they truly wrestled with, especially those who came from a Jewish background because they had been drilled to honor and respect the Law so much. In fact, it puts us to shame because as Gentile members of the church we don’t seem to have the same respect in terms of knowledge and in terms of memory and in terms of our thorough going understanding of what God has revealed to us.

We don’t emphasize memory like the Jewish community has over the centuries, especially in many circles. A young man was expected to have the entire Pentateuch memorized before he had bar mitzvahed. He memorized the entire Torah. If I just ask some Christians to memorize ten verses in a year, they scream as if I’m a legalist. That wasn’t done out of legalism, which is a common misconception of many Christians who want to avoid responsibility in the Christian life.

Legalism is thinking that what God commands us to do somehow gets us approval from God, and we get blessing. That’s legalism. The difference between legalism and grace in the life of an individual in relationship to Divine commandments often won’t look any different. The difference is the motivation and how it is appreciated by the individual. One person prays, memorizes Scripture, goes to Bible class and they think they’re getting brownie points with God for doing all that. The other Christian knows that God already gave him everything and they need to learn about it. They’re there as a response but in terms of watching what they do on a day-to-day basis they’re doing pretty much the same thing. That’s the difference between legalism and grace. We’re going to get into that a little later in one of the passages we’re studying here.

Legalism is not just a matter of obeying the Law. Otherwise, God would be a legalist because God expected the Jews in the Old Testament to obey the Law. That wasn’t legalism. In the same way God expects believers in the Church Age to obey all the commands and prohibitions that are in the New Testament. It is an expectation of conforming our thinking to His thinking [Romans 12:2].

This has been a problem ever since the beginning of the Church to understand the relationship, first of all, of the believer to sin, and second, the believer to the Law. In relation to sin, it’s because we have problems with [I use ‘we’ as a broad term for Christians in general] understanding how someone after they claim to be a Christian, after conversion, continues to sin in certain ways just like an unbeliever, and continues to live and act like an unbeliever in many ways. Usually these are defined in overt terms rather than mental attitude sins. Nobody sees our mental attitude sins so there’s a lot of covert activity going on there and we think we’re fooling somebody, but spiritually it doesn’t fool anybody.

We have to understand that relationship to sin, that there’s forgiveness because sin was paid for on the Cross, but we have to think now in the sense that we are dead to sin. Nobody prior to the Cross and the day of Pentecost could think of themselves as dead to sin. Couldn’t do it. That’s based on the Baptism by the Holy Spirit and because that didn’t take place until the day of Pentecost, that identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, sometimes called retroactive positional truth, because of that action, we’re dead to sin. That’s a hard concept to get our mental fingers around. We’re also dead to the Law and we have to understand what that means.

((CHART)) I put up this little chart. The left hand part talks about Romans 6. The top part talks about before we’re saved. We’re alive to sin and a slave to sin and we’re free in regard to righteousness. There’s no righteousness in our life. The unbeliever, the fallen, condemned “in Adam” individual, an unbeliever, can’t perform anything perfectly righteous. There’s no positive righteousness in his life.

He can do good things. Jesus is the one who said to His disciples, “You, being evil [fallen, condemned, corrupt] know how to give good gifts to your children.” You can do good things, you can do wonderful things, you can do altruistic things but they’re just not the basis for your standing before God. So the top three are our situation before we’re saved. After we’re saved, we’re not alive to sin anymore. We’re dead to sin. We are justified from sin, Romans 6:7, translated in most English translations as ‘freed from sin’ but it is justified, DIKAIOO, the same Greek verb, used all through the justification passages. We are free from sin, ELEUTHEROO, in Romans 6:19 and now we’re to consider ourselves a slave to God and a slave to righteousness. That’s all Romans 6.

Then Paul advances what he’s explaining to help us understand that we’re now dead to the Law. In Romans 6:14 beings this statement of Paul’s that “we’re no longer under the Law but under grace.” There’s been a shift. The rest of that chapter deals with this idea of being dead to sin and a slave to God and to righteousness. Now he comes back to what he means when he says we’re no longer under the Law in Romans 7, where he says we’re dead to the Law. We’re free from the Law just as we are free from sin. The tie to the Law is abolished so we can live now in the newness of the Spirit.

I want you to look at this verse very carefully because this becomes a foundation for some of the things we’re going to cover tonight; something that I hope I’ll be able to shed some light on in our thinking because this goes to a passage and a metaphor that I think has been very confusing for a lot of people. It is terribly misused culturally. The verbiage is drawn from the Scripture and you hear cultural idioms related to it. It’s misused in those idioms and it’s misused by a lot of Christians.

In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard it taught correctly. I haven’t heard it really taught that much. That comes out of the verbiage we find in Romans 7:6, “But now we have been delivered from the Law, having died [that means we’re separated completely] to what we were held by [that is, the sin nature] so that we should serve.”

See the purpose for that severing of that authority of the sin nature is for the purpose of serving. That’s the Greek verb, DIAKONIA, also translated ministry. It’s related to the noun, "deacon", and it has that idea of serving God. Hold on to that. That is really important. We’re saved for the purpose of serving or ministering in or by the newness of the Spirit. That is contrasted to the oldness of the letter. Spirit versus letter? Now what does that mean? Those of you have been around a while and read your Bible more than once or twice know that there’s a development of that idea in 2 Corinthians, chapter 3, and we’re going to go there. But I just want to point out that this passage in context is not condemning the concept of the ‘letter of the Law’. When you get over to 2 Corinthians 3 that’s how most people want to interpret that but I just want to nail that down for you because there are only three or four passages that even use this metaphor where it talks about the letter versus the Spirit. This is not a condemnation of the letter of the Law.

First of all because the letter of the Law was exactly what God expected the Jews to obey. Secondly, Paul states in this passage in verse 12 that the Law is holy, the commandment is holy, just, and good. So that means the letter of the Law has to be holy and just and good. Nothing that is said in this metaphor about the Spirit versus the letter implies that the letter is bad. Yet that’s how a lot of people want to take it. They want to interpret that phrase, the Spirit is grace and the letter is legalism. But Paul is not talking about legalism in Romans 7:1–7.

Legalism is not in the context. What’s in the context is that there’s a change. We’re not under the Mosaic Law. Being under the Mosaic Law was not legalism. The Pharisees were misusing and misapplying the Mosaic Law. That’s why Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount. All through the Sermon on the Mount he uses this pedagogical technique where he says, “You have heard it said that such and so.” What he means by that is that this is what the Pharisees have told you. “But I say to you...” What’s he’s doing is giving God’s interpretation of the Torah, in contrast to the Pharisees legalistic interpretation of the Torah. But they’re both interpreting the Law.

The Law is from God. The Law is good. Obeying the Law is not legalism. Thinking that obeying the Law is your means of salvation or your means of gaining God’s blessing or getting God’s approval is legalism; it’s excluding grace. That’s an important concept to grasp because it is not clearly understood. I think in the thirty-something years I’ve been teaching the Scriptures and in the pastoral ministry that’s something I’ve had to deal with with every group, every congregation. People get that notion in their head that legalism is “thou shalt do something”.

There are all kinds of "you shall do this": pray without ceasing, giving, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Those are all "thou shalts" which are all through the New Testament. There are 700 or 800 imperative mood verbs in the New Testament plus many other ways you can express a command other than just imperative mood verbs. I’m not including the Gospels in that number. That’s in the epistles between Romans and Jude. We see this contrast between being under Law and under grace.

Under Law is relating to the spiritual life under the dispensation of the Mosaic Law from Sinai to Pentecost. I’ve looked at some other passages here and come up with some other terminology. What we find is this phraseology "under Law" meaning that the Mosaic Law dictated through ritual and through moral mandate how a person was to live. But the Law didn’t enable the person to fulfill the command. In the Church Age we still have commands but we’re under grace and we’re given the Holy Spirit who enables us to fulfill the commands. That’s part of the difference.

Under the Law we were still slaves to the sin nature. In the Church Age we’re free from the bondage, the tyranny of the sin nature. Not free from the sin nature, still there, but free from the bondage and the tyranny of the sin nature. Under Law everything was pretty much still functioning out of the flesh, the sin nature. That raises questions for us because we think if everything comes from the sin nature, how did Old Testament believers have things like divine good? Well, you always had that problem but you just didn’t know it.

When we get into the New Testament we say the only way you can produce divine good is by walking by the Spirit. You just excluded that from a possibility in the Old Testament because if divine good, which is rewardable in Heaven at the Judgment Seat of Christ ... oh, that’s right: Old Testament saints don’t show up at the Judgment Seat of Christ, do they? No. They don’t get resurrected until the end of the Tribulation. They have a different basis for accountability.

So the issue of divine good is a Church Age issue. I just love it when I get everybody thinking like this. If we’re going to be true to our dispensational assumptions, not because of dispensations, as Dr. Waldorf used to say to me, “Because that’s what the Bible says, Mr. Dean.” We have to be consistent and that means that the basis for the spiritual life we have in the Church Age, and everything related to it, is walking by the Spirit versus walking according to the flesh. Walking by the Spirit is how you produce divine good, that which is rewardable as good, silver, and precious stones.

None of that relates to an Old Testament believer. They didn’t have that. They had a different dynamic. They were to obey God. God’s teaching different principles to them through that. God’s teaching that you really can’t do it on your own. When I don’t help you, you really can’t do it. That’s why you just have this negative trajectory all the time in the Old Testament that they cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The purpose of the Law was not to show them how they can live and be blessed by God, even though that’s the theoretical reality there, because they can’t. They never do and they never are.

As we’ll see in these passages, the purpose of the Law was to condemn them, show them they were condemned under death. They were in bondage to that sin nature and they just couldn’t do it. The Law wasn’t given to enable them to live for God but to show them they really can’t do it. You can do some things but mostly you can’t. So you’re either always in flesh under the sin nature but now under grace you’re led by the Spirit.

We’ll see that in Galatians 5 and I’m front loading this so we get into the passage in Galatians 5 and 2 Corinthians 3. In these passages you’re going to capture this, see this right away that this contrast is that we’re no longer under the Law but we’re under grace. “If you are led by the Spirit,” Paul says in Galatians 5, “you’re no longer under Law.” Well, they’re not under the Spirit at all in the Old Testament and they are under Law. It was a completely different dynamic.

For us to go back and understand that, it’s like trying to understand what it was like in the Garden of Eden before there was sin. We’ve got no frame of reference for it so we can’t do it. We can get a general idea but not a specific idea. The result of living under the flesh is hostility and deviousness which just summarizes the work of the flesh. See Galatians 5:20. Love then summarizes the fruit of the Spirit.

I pointed out Sunday morning in case you weren’t here and missed it, when it describes what the works of flesh in Galatians 5:21 are and then you have a list of the works of the flesh. Then it says but the fruit of the Spirit, a singular noun, not the fruits of the Spirit, is love. Love becomes the topic in this section in Galatians 5:13. The other characteristics that are listed there are not other fruits. They are all related to love in some way, some fashion. They are different facets of love.

So we have the deeds of the flesh versus the fruit of the Spirit. The Law is engraved on stones, and I’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but mine would go up, that that is something often depicted as negative. It’s not written on stone but now it’s written on the heart. Oh, amen, aren’t we good? But, see, in the Old Testament, they honored the fact that the Law was written on stone because it was permanent. That brought glory to God. That was a good thing. Paul is not saying that’s a bad thing. He is saying that’s characteristic of the spiritual life that was temporary, that didn’t get you life, didn’t save you, but that was characteristic of the Law in the Old Testament. But we’re not under the Law anymore. We’re under grace.

It’s a different dynamic because the Law is written on the heart. It’s embodied in the life of people. It’s a different dynamic. He’s not contrasting one as bad and one as good. He’s contrasting one as characteristic of the old dispensation which doesn’t continue anymore and the other is characteristic of the new dispensation. I know, we have to think this through a little bit. It’s really a fascinating deal. In the Old Testament the Law was a ministry of death. But the Law was good and holy and just. Don’t forget that verse.

I got into a discussion with someone one time and they said, “You know the Mosaic Law was terrible.” That’s not what the Word of God says. The Pharisees distorted it and made it terrible but it wasn’t terrible. It had a purpose in the overall progressive revelation of God. Under grace we have life so that’s what we’re going to look at here. I think it’s great to study this because it really opens things up and helps us to see things more clearly. Not that we’re seeing things we haven’t seen before. It’s just that we’re going to connect the dots a little more consistently.

Last time I took us through Galatians 3. I want to go back there to touch on that as we begin and continue our progression through these passages. Galatians was Paul’s first epistle and he lays out in sort of a seed form a lot of the main doctrines that are in Romans. So these two different epistles help illuminate one another. In Galatians 3:21, Paul says, “Is the Law then against the promises of God?” Of course not. The way he forms the question, the answer would be no, it’s not against the promises of God. “For if there had been a law given that could have given life [the protasis], truly righteousness would have been by the law.”

What he’s saying is that if it was at all possible that people could get life by obeying commandments, they could have done it by the Law. That means it’s the highest and best, you couldn’t improve upon it in any way, shape or form to have given someone a law code that would have gotten them life. It was the best it could possibly be.

“If there had been a law given which could have given life [if that were possible] truly righteousness would have been by the Law, but the Scripture has confined under judgment that all sin that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe but before faith came, we were kept under guard; we were confined by the Law.” Was that bad? No. See, we have a tendency to think that was bad. There was a purpose for the Law. It was holy and just and good. It was designed to be a teacher, a divine teaching mechanism in the flow of progressive revelation, the flow of history.

Paul uses the analogy of the teacher, the pedagogue, in a Roman household. The pedagogue was a slave who had a dictatorial type of authority over a child until the child reached the age of manhood, at which point the pedagogue had no authority over the child anymore. The analogy is to the Law. The Law had complete authority and it was good. The Law’s purpose was to teach us something, not teach us how to be saved, but teach that you can’t do it yourself. Your sufficiency comes from God, not from your own ability.

This is what Paul starts off with when he goes into this ‘letter versus the Spirit’ in 2 Corinthians 3. The first part of his argument is that his sufficiency is in Christ. So that’s the point of the Law, to teach that it’s not in us, it’s in Christ. Now we’re going to go over to Galatians 5:18. Paul says, “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law.” The "if" there in Greek is a first class condition. That’s one of three different ways the Greek language can express a condition, and here it has the sense “if and it’s true”. “If you’re led by the Spirit, you’re not under the Law.” Now since those Galatians are just like us; they’re Church Age believers and they are led by the Spirit because when you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you’re led by the Spirit. So we’re led by the Spirit; therefore, we are not under the Law.

I want to take you back to pick up the context of this. As I pointed out last time in Galatians 3:3, Paul lays out the basic question, the basic issue that he’s addressing in talking to the Galatians. The problem was that they had these Jewish non-Christian Jews who kept following Paul. They would come in and say, “Oh, it’s great that Jesus is the Messiah. It’s great to think that you’re going to get to heaven by believing in Jesus. But you still have to obey the Law. The Law isn’t over yet. Men have to be circumcised. You have to obey the Law and it’s still important. You can’t do away with the Law; you still have to obey it.” So they were called Judiazers.

That idea of the Law was a legalistic use of the Law: that you had to apply the Law in order to really be saved. It was ‘believe in Jesus and obey the Law’ to be saved. You had to obey the Law to be sanctified. So Paul has already addressed the confusion and the distortion of the gospel in the first two chapters saying in very harsh terms that this was not the true gospel. This was another gospel of a different kind and therefore those who proclaimed it are accursed.

Now he’s going to shift talking about post-salvation growth. He says, “Are you so foolish, having begun by means of the Spirit [that is, you were regenerated, you were born again by means of the Holy Spirit] are you now being made perfect, TELEIOO, being brought to completion or matured by the flesh, or the sin nature?” I pointed out last time that there are three key words here … spirit, perfect, and flesh...which are not used again until we get to Galatians 5:18. Everything between Galatians 3:3 and 5:18 help us to understand his answer.

So sometimes if you think I take side trips every now and then and it takes me a long time to get to the answer of something, I’m not nearly as bad as the apostle Paul. In Galatians 5:16 he says, “I say again, walk by means of the Spirit and you shall not fulfill [make perfect or bring to completion] the lusts of the flesh.” Now he’s going to tell us how, if we began by the Spirit, we’re not going to be matured by the flesh. We’re going to be matured by the Spirit. We have to begin by the Spirit and continue by the Spirit.

Did they have the Spirit in the Old Testament? No. They couldn’t do this; it’s completely different. The precedent for the Church Age spiritual life is not in the Old Testament. It’s unique. It’s absolutely, totally new. He leads to this in this last chapter talking about the Law, the role of the pedagogue, the Law as a covenant. He uses the analogy at the end of chapter 4 about Hagar and Sarah. Sarah represented grace. Hagar represented Law. Law brings bondage. That’s the whole point at the end of chapter four. He says, “Nevertheless, what does the Scripture say? Cast out the bond woman and her son.” He clearly says he’s using this as an allegory and he can do this because he’s writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Scripture is not to be interpreted allegorically, because the way we use allegory today denies the literal meaning. What he means by allegory does not deny the literal historicity and actuality of the original events. He’s just saying I’m going to use this as an illustration to make this point by analogy that you have to completely cast out the Law in order to go forward. Otherwise, you’re going to get trapped and you’re not free. Under the Law, you’re not free.

That’s why he then says in Galatians 5:1, “Stand therefore in the liberty whereby God has made us free and do not be entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” So the Law which is holy and just and good is also a yoke of bondage. Not in its legalistic application, although it becomes that truly, but it is a yoke of bondage because it doesn’t give you the ability to do the commands of the Law.

God tells them all these things to do and not to do but he didn’t infuse them with the ability to do it, which is what He does in the New Testament. We get into this discussion about liberty. In verse 4 he says, “You have become estranged from Christ.” You believers in Galatia have become separated from Christ because you have attempted to become justified by Law. You have fallen from grace. It doesn’t mean they’ve lost their salvation; it means they’ve departed from the grace message. Verse 5, “For we, through the Spirit, eagerly await for the hope of righteousness by faith, not by Law, for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything but faith working through love.”

Love is the key word here, second to Spirit, that you have to trace down through this section. So we’re going to skip from there down to verse 13. Verse 13 says, “For you brethren have been called to liberty [liberty doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want to whenever you want to; it means now you’re free to serve Christ, to truly love one another] only do not use liberty as an opportunity to the flesh [to sin, or antinomianism or licentiousness] but through love serve one another.”

Usually when we get into this section of Galatians, no one talks about that verb but you have love mentioned in verse 6; you have love mentioned here in verse 13 where you are told through love to serve one another. He then gives an illustration of that command in verse 14 where he says, “for all the Law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Look at that verse. Is verse 14 there to tell you to love your neighbor as yourself? No. It’s an illustration of the command in verse 13, “In love serve one another.” The quote that is there in verse 14 is from Leviticus 19:18. It’s part of the Mosaic Law. Remember when Jesus is asked what’s the greatest Law, he says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” That summarized the whole Law so all of the Law related to other human beings are simply different specifics on how to love your neighbor as yourself.

The term he’s emphasizing here is “through love serve one another.” Who’s the one another? Does that include your neighbor? Only if your neighbor is a Christian. See Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.” One another in context is talking about the body of Christ. It’s not talking about outside the body of Christ. It’s a higher standard. The standard isn’t love your neighbor as you love yourself. The standard now is love one another as Christ loves you. It’s a much higher standard and it’s restricted.

Does it mean we don’t love our neighbor as our self? No. Those mandates are still there but that’s not what Paul is emphasizing here. It’s love again. Then he says, “If you bite and devour one another [which is just deviousness and nastiness in the congregation] be wary unless you be consumed by one another. What’s the solution? The solution is verse 16. “I say then walk by means of the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.”

What you’ve been trying to do, Paul is saying, is try to live the Christian life and grow up and mature as a Christian by obeying the Law. Where has that led you? It’s led you to internal squabbling and deviousness and biting and devouring one another. That’s because you’re not trying to complete or mature by the Spirit. Did you begin by the Spirit and now you’re trying to be completed by the flesh? So, he’s back to that now and he says the solution is “Walk by means of the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.”

There is a contrast between the flesh and the sin nature on the one hand and the Spirit on the other hand. That’s the contrast of “under law” and “under grace”. “For the flesh [sin nature] lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh.” That’s the warfare that constantly goes on in the believer’s life because when we’re in fellowship we’re walking by the Spirit and when we’re out of fellowship we’re walking by the sin nature or flesh. They’re contrary to one another. They’re mutually exclusive. “... so you do not do the things which you wish.” Now I’ll come back to that when we get into Romans 7. That’s what Paul says, “I tried to grow as a Christian using the Law and I did what I didn’t want to do and I didn’t do what I wanted to do.” That’s the whole frustration of Romans 7 trying to do it yourself without the Spirit is that it doesn’t work. We don’t have the capability within us to fulfill the Law.

Then Paul says in verse 18, “But if you are led by the Spirit, you’re not under the Law.” We’re not under the Law anymore because as Christians in the Church Age, the Law is no longer operational. It’s been fulfilled in Christ. And then so you can understand whether you’re walking by the flesh or by the Spirit, he gives you some manifestations. He says, “The works [plural] of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, hatred, contentiousness, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envies, murder, revelry, these and the like.” Those are all manifestations of the sin nature.

Then in verse 22 he says, “But the fruit [singular] of the Spirit is love.” What are we talking about in chapter 5? We’re talking about liberty, love, and it’s only realized by walking by means of the Spirit. This is your next dot to connect. In your Bible you can circle love in verse 6, love in verse 14, love in verse 15, and then love here. This connects the dots. He’s asking, how do you have this love that he’s talked about in all these verses? It’s the result of walking by the Spirit. That ties it together for us in those verses and connects back to Romans 6:14.

In Romans 6:14, Paul said, “For sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law but under grace.” In Galatians 5 terminology, the flesh shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law but under grace. So we’re trying to understand the dynamics of what these mean, that we are under grace. It doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want to. It doesn’t mean there are no absolutes, no mandates, that there aren’t stipulations.

It means that in this dispensation God has gone above and beyond the call of duty by giving us what Paul talks about in Ephesians 1:3: “blessing us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies”. It’s already done. He’s given us every conceivable capability and asset to obey him and to walk with him. That’s how Galatians 5 fits into this whole sort of mosaic in terms of these different patterns.

Now what I want you to do is turn to our next passage in 2 Corinthians, chapter 3. This is a great passage. 2 Corinthians is one of those books that is rarely taught. What are your five favorite books? Nobody lists 2 Corinthians. What are your ten favorite books? Nobody lists 2 Corinthians. It just seems to be overlooked. It’s overlooked in the Commentary tradition as well. There are not that many great commentaries on 2 Corinthians because it’s one of the last epistles that someone writes on. You get a commentary series that comes out on every book in the Bible. One of the last commentaries that gets published is 2 Corinthians.

Its almost like a spiritual stepchild but there are great things here. These things are hard to understand. Often when people read Peter saying that Paul wrote some things that are hard to understand they’re thinking about election and predestination. I think Peter had 2 Corinthians in mind. One of the chapters that is very difficult for people is this particular chapter. I want to go through about the first nine to eleven verses just to help us understand it. I want to do a little flyover first of all. The context here is this ongoing correction of the Corinthians. The Corinthians were the bad boys of the early church and they lived in a community of Corinth that had been a Roman colony and was settled by a lot of retired Roman soldiers. It was a seaport, not unlike Houston.

Back in the day if you hung out down by the ship channel in Houston a lot you really understood what that meant, I think. There were just so many different dives and bars. I don’t know what all was down there. It was just nasty. That was Corinth all over. Anything went in Corinth. It was proverbial in ancient Rome that if you were driven by lust, were homosexual, were licentious, a party-boy, you were a Corinthian. That’s what it meant. That’s where that idiom came from. If you felt like anything went, if you were basically a typical American college person who had no values and no absolutes, then you did whatever you wanted to do, however your sin nature drives you, then that’s what a Corinthian was. They had no moral background.

The Corinthian converts had to learn all this from scratch, as it were, because they weren’t even taught good establishment morality prior to being saved. So they were divisive and in the first part of 1 Corinthians Paul is having to correct all of these different problems that are going on inside the congregation. They’re saved but their sin natures are running away with them. After he dealt with several of those problems, there was apparently another epistle that was not going to be preserved in Scripture that is the true 2 Corinthians and then there was a response and then there’s this one. There was also some correspondence from Corinth.

They tried to straighten some things up as so often happens with people who are learning and growing. They made more mistakes in trying to straighten things out. One of the mistakes they continued to make was this sort of people worship. They got focused on the messenger and not the message. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “I believe it’s the message, not the messenger.” Let me tell you one thing. Their focus is so much on the messenger it’s unbelievable, their self-denial. Ninety percent of the people I’ve heard emphasize that had their eyes on the messenger.

Paul is saying: quit following Apollos, and Cephas and me. It’s not about us; it’s all about Christ. Quit making a big deal about this but they continued to go after anybody who came along who had a winning smile, a popular personality, and a pleasing message. They would run after him sort of like Americans and their current president. They were consumed with the surface and not the content. They would have fit in very well in our television, superficial image-focused culture that cares more about what somebody looks like than their message.

This was evidenced by one of the first television debates between Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Everybody is pretty familiar with that. Nixon didn’t want to put his makeup so he came on looking like he was coming off a three-day drunk with a heavy dark beard and that made him look negative. It was just a false image. That’s why Paul’s writing. He’s got these false apostles that are coming with all their made up credentials and he says in the beginning of this third chapter, “Do we begin again to commend ourselves?” Are we puffing ourselves up? Are we blowing our own horn? Are we the ones making ourselves significant? Or do we need some others’ epistles as commendations?

Apparently they were showing up with made up credentials. Then Paul says in verse 2, “You are our epistle written in our hearts.” He says the evidence of the genuineness of our ministry, the authenticity of our ministry, the veracity of our message is that when they believed it and applied it, it changed their lives. Then in verse 3 he says, “Clearly you are an epistle of Christ administered by us.” God worked through Paul and it was on the basis of that divine work of God that the gospel was taught in Corinth and the church was founded. He says, “You are an epistle of Christ administered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh.” See, this is where we get into that stone versus flesh, which means heart. It’s not the sin nature; it’s talking about a human life.

Now skip down to verse 9 so we get the overall view here. One other thing, when he says you are an epistle of Christ administered by us, that’s DIAKONIA or service, ministry. That’s that verb which shows up several times going through here, either the noun or the verb form. We see it again in verse 9, “for if the ministry of condemnation ...” What’s the ministry of condemnation? That’s the Law; one purpose of the Law was condemnation. You didn’t get life by the Law; you learned you could not live up to God’s standards so the Law was a ministry of condemnation and a ministry of death.

He says, “For if the ministry of condemnation had glory [and it did] the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory.” It’s not that the Law didn’t have glory but we have greater glory in the age of grace. “For even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect because of the glory that excels. For if what is passing away was glorious [the Law]; what remains is much more glorious. Therefore since we have such hope ...” This isn’t hope and change; this is real Biblical hope which means a certainty, a confidence of a future reality.

Now let’s go back and just look at this a little bit. In verse 3 Paul gives four characteristics of this epistle. First, you are an epistle from Christ. An epistle is not the wife of an apostle; it’s a letter. You are an epistle from Christ. So the letter is from Christ. But it is mediated through the human writers of Scripture. Second he says, “… ministered or served by us”. In other words, God doesn’t work directly; He works indirectly through the leaders of the church and the apostles. So the word here is DIAKONIA and it should be translated “being ministered by us.”

The New King James probably has the better translation of it. Some others try to use service or other circumlocution to let it come across in English a little better but that’s the main focus there. The idea of ministry here implies that the ministry of Paul, the apostle, and his associates is crucial and foundational to producing the letter. Remember, the letter is really their life. It’s embodied in their life and the impact the gospel has had on them.

The third thing Paul says here about the letter is that it’s inscribed or written by the Spirit of the Living God. Written not with ink but by the Spirit of the Living God. Now let me ask you a question. This is a hard question. He’s contrasting writing something with ink and writing something by the Spirit of the Living God. Is there something wrong with writing with ink? No. Now the analogy of writing with ink is analogous to writing on stone. Neither one of those was wrong.

The point wasn’t that that is wrong and this is right, which is how this idiom through here is often misinterpreted. The issue here is that writing in stone is past; that was right and good but we’re not in that dispensation any more. We’re in a new dispensation. So he says, “written not with ink but by the Spirit of the Living God.”

Of course, how did Paul write his epistles? With ink on papyrus so we can’t say that writing with ink is wrong. He’s just using this as an analogy of the dispensational shift that is taking place, which is exactly what I’ve been emphasizing in Romans 6 and 7. Paul is saying we’re not under Law anymore; we’re under grace. We’re in a new dispensation, new realities, new dynamics, new empowerment because God is taking the human race to the next level because He can now that salvation is completed on the Cross and the authority of the sin nature is crucified. It had never happened before.

The point of this contrast, not that writing with ink is wrong but that the impact now is that the Holy Spirit drives the doctrinal truth embedded on the page to be embodied in our life. There was no Holy Spirit, no God given dynamic in the Old Testament to enable them to apply the Law. They had the standard but God didn’t give them anything to make it happen. In the Church Age we have the Spirit to make that happen.

So he goes from that point in the first part of verse 3 to the second point in verse 3, which is the contrast between what is written on stone and what is written on the heart. “Not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh.” He’s just contrasting that the Mosaic Law was written on tablets of stone and there was nothing wrong with that but it didn’t give the people the inner ability to apply it. Now it’s written on the heart. Now there’s language that comes out of this that’s related to the covenant passages in Ezekiel. We’ll get into that next time. But that’s the main idea.

Now we’ll just have a little survey of the next three verses. Verse 4 he says, “and we have such trust through Christ toward God, not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything being from ourselves but our sufficiency is from God.” What did I say the point of the Law was? To show that we had no sufficiency. That’s what he’s coming back to here, this concept of sufficiency that our sufficiency is not anything we’ve done. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility to teach and to explain the Word and the gospel but we know that everything we do, if it’s to have any success, it’s because God does it. We’re not relying on human techniques.

We’re not going to go out and learn the twenty-five points of the Purpose-Driven Church so we can build a church. We’re not going to go to any of these other churches that are exploding so we can imitate their technique. We’re going to make sure that when this church grows it’s because people come because they want to know the Word of God. A lot of people don’t want to know the Word of God today. They want to have the trappings of knowing the Word of God. They want, perhaps, to have a pastor who seems like he knows the Word of God or uses the right verbiage but they really don’t want to know the Word of God.

I, and some of you as well, have been around Christians and Christianity long enough to recognize that that is true. If you think back to the kind of people that were adults in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they had a hunger to know the Word of God, so much so that in some cases, they went to church four, five, six, seven times a week to study the Word. You don’t find young people today doing that. They’re not willing to give up all their night life and their iPads and iPods and computer games and everything else in order to come to church to learn the Scripture. They think Sunday is good enough. Well, Sunday is not good enough. Once a week never has cut it and never will cut it.

Scripture has to become embedded and embodied in our hearts, our thinking, and our souls. That doesn’t happen once a week. It doesn’t even happen once a day. It has to be part of our life, day in and day out, and everything else in life, somehow is secondary. I know that becomes challenging because we have to live and work and all those other things but we have to make the Word of God that primary passion in our life to live for the Lord Jesus Christ and to have our life changed. So Paul says the sufficiency isn’t from us, it’s from God who also made us ministers of the new covenant not of the letter but of the Spirit.

Is there something wrong with the letter? You’ve heard this for years...saying we’re not going to follow the letter but the law. Somehow they think this is legalism versus grace. Paul still wrote with letters as far as I can tell. It’s not about a style of interpretation. Often this verse is taken out of context, ever since Origen in the 3^rd century ripped it out of context to justify allegorical interpretation. We’re not going to follow the literal interpretation … we’re going to follow the spiritual interpretation. That’s not what Paul is talking about here. This is not a discussion of interpretation. This is a discussion of what changes a person from the inside out. Is it the letter which doesn’t give you the ability, or is it what happens in the New Testament era where you have the internal indwelling of God the Holy Spirit who is the one who give you the ability to fulfill the letter? That’s what he’s saying.

We’ll get into those details a little more next time. You’re going to have to hear this four or five times just as I’ve had to study it several times to grasp what it’s saying. The conclusion isn’t really anything different from what you’ve heard before. It’s just that I’m telling you this passage isn’t telling you what you’ve heard before. It’s talking about some other things you have heard before and it’s going to make a lot more sense when you understand that’s what Paul is talking about.