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Record: Gal 3 :3–14
BECAUSE none kept it perfectly, the Law cursed all under it.
So far from it being, as many Jews thought, a means whereby men could attain to life it was found to be an effective barrier to life—to be in fact something that by its cursing cut men off from life. The Law made evident man’s impotence and therefore the need for divine action if men were to be saved.
Paul has already referred to that divine action in His son “who gave himself for our sins” (Gal 1:4), “who gave himself for me” in being crucified (Gal 2:20). For Paul’s argument concerning the inefficacy of the Law as a way to life to be complete, Christ’s work must not only be shown in relation to the personal needs of men who are by conduct sinners and by nature death-stricken, but he must show that Christ has removed the curse of law—the law which not only could not give life, but which sentenced men to death. In fact, if Christ is the Redeemer he must of necessity redeem those under the curse of Law from that curse. The very contrast “Law cursed—Christ redeemed from the curse” is an absolute and final refutation of the Judaizers’ claims.
It is Christ who has done this: of course Christ is Jesus—but by saying Christ did it, Paul indicates that it is the Messiah who has removed the curse. He will say in the next breath the curse was removed by his crucifixion—by that very death which was so scandalous in the eyes of the Jew. And instead of the cross establishing, as the Jew thought, that the claims of Jesus to be the Messiah were blasphemy, the cross proved that Jesus was the Messiah. Paul here defends his teaching by a frontal attack on the Jewish position, affirming that it was required of the exalted and glorified King of Israel that he should suffer and die for men’s sins as a condition of honour and glory. The scandal of the cross becomes the occasion of glory—“I will know nothing”, says Paul, “but Messiah Jesus and him a crucified one”. This argument that Old Testament prophecy demanded that the Messiah must be one who first gave his life as an offering for sins turned the objection of the Jews into a convincing proof to all willing to weigh the evidence. The apostles were not slow to use it; of the many illustrations, Peter in Acts 2 and Paul in Heb. 2: 9, 10, are conspicuous examples—but the thought is implicit here when Paul says Christ—the Messiah—hath redeemed us from the curse of the Law.
How has the curse of the Law been “bought off”?—for so the word translated redeemed in this place literally means. Paul answers: by Messiah “being made a curse for us”; for us, not instead of us; but for us in that he has come under the curse of the Law that he might take it away for himself and for us; for us, in that we, by faith identifying ourselves with him in his submission to the curse, share with him in the results, in the removal of the curse from us.
It is clear that when Paul says Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the Law, he means those who were under the law, “us” Jews. But the principle by which this curse of law has been taken away is identical with that by which the curse of sin and death has been removed. When the principle in the latter case has been understood, the way in which the law-curse was done away is not difficult of perception. Let us now follow Paul’s thought concerning how Christ has removed the curse of the law. Christ has been made a curse; he elsewhere says that he was “made under the law”, and while this is a related thing it is yet something much more significant when he says he was “made a curse”. If we put the statement in the concrete form instead of the abstract—which Paul was led to use because he had just spoken of the curse of the law in connection with others—then it is declared that Jesus was accursed! This truly makes the statement startling, but we have in no wise altered Paul’s sense, and at once the parallel suggests itself—he was accursed for us and “he was made sin for us” (2 Cor. 5 : 21). Besides being grammatically impossible, we must reject as futile in the light of this parallel the suggestion that by “sin” Paul in this place means “sin-offering”. No, Paul means sin, but we must understand what is intended by the word. He was made sin in partaking of the nature in which sin reigns and which produces sin, and which therefore, by metonomy is called sin. We may go further and say he was made “sin” in enduring the consequences of sin—sin not his own, for he did not sin—but sin which has left its effects upon the whole race of mankind in bringing all under subjection to death. If we recognize how horrible in God’s sight sin is, then we see how the effects of it are brought to a focus as it were in His own obedient son. “Him who knew no sin God made to be sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
He was made to be—we become; the difference being that he felt and endured in his own person the consequences of sin, accepting voluntarily those consequences, whereas we are forgiven our sins and so become the righteousness of God.
He was made “sin” without being a sinner; he was also “made a curse” without transgressing the law. How this came about Paul explains. He was cursed in the mode of death, and this involved no personal responsibility on his part. An edict of the law declared: “Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree”. Christ was nailed to the tree and so came under the curse.
Let us observe that it is not only in this place that emphasis is put on “the tree” in connection with Christ. All the Lord’s own references to his impending crucifixion take on an added meaning in the light of it. But the idea recurs in apostolic thought. Thus Peter told the Jewish authorities that God “raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree” (Acts 5: 30); he used the same phrase to Cornelius (Acts 10 : 39). To the Jews of Pisidian Antioch Paul declared that when “they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre” (Acts 13 : 29). In a very important passage in his first epistle Peter says that Jesus “his own self bare our sins in his own body to the tree”. From these statements it is evident that the mode of Christ’s death entered conspicuously into the thought of the first Christian teachers when they were explaining the truth to Jews or those with Jewish contacts.
We turn then to consider the passage in the Law which Paul quotes. It appears parenthetically in a commandment that if a man had committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death and hung on a tree, then his body must not remain on the tree beyond nightfall, that the land be not defiled. The reason given is that “he that is hanged is accursed of God”. Some effort has been made to confine the curse of the Law to the penal death imposed for sin, on the ground that it seems needless to add a curse for the mere exposure of the body; a view that would limit the curse to the man who had died because of transgression. But the statement which explains why the body exposed on the tree must be removed is general and not confined to the criminal. When the criminal is hung on a tree there is added to the sentence which brings him to death the curse which his exposure brings. A man innocent of transgression of which he was accused and for which he was sentenced to death, would by the hanging come under the curse. This is not hypothetical, for it is what actually happened in the case of the Lord, Paul himself being witness. Christ became a curse because he hung upon a tree.
The explanation may be found in the fact that the Law dealt with actual transgression and also with defilement that might even come upon a person innocently. This ceremonial defilement could come in many ways, but the most striking are those that came by obeying the Law itself. Thus Aaron had to wash after the offering in the Holiest of all on the Day of Atonement. The man who bore the ashes of the offering without the camp on the same day had also to wash (Lev. 18). The priest who had charge of the burning of the red heifer, the ashes of which were to be added to the water of separation for cleansing of the defilement contracted by touching anything dead, had to wash and was unclean until the evening. The man who removed the ashes was unclean until the even. Even the ministers of the rite of cleansing for this defilement were considered to be unclean (Num. 19). Thus the very operations enjoined by God for cleansing produced a ceremonial defilement. The law was rigorous, for the man who neglected the purification rites when he had contracted defilement had to be cut off. A man could be defiled by the law even in fulfilling it.
The pollution occasioned by these enactments of the law were altogether independent of moral guiltiness. But the Law does not discriminate in its operation between moral and ceremonial guilt. We cannot separate the moral code from the ceremonial in the Law of Moses: the Law is one—so much so as we have seen that a man who offended in one particular was guilty of all.
Jesus then, Paul tells us, in the mode of his death, came under the Law’s curse. In this transaction he was himself innocent, and in his case the time when the curse came upon him coincided with the accepting of the full penalty of the curse of the Law. Death was the penalty the Law imposed. Jesus was cursed in the form in which death came and the full claims of the Law were met by his death, while his sinless life ensured his resurrection. The Law could make no further claims upon him, and he passed from under its operation when he died, and thus by his death the Law which cursed him was done away.
All persons under the Law were cursed. How could the curse on them be removed? The answer is, by identification with Jesus and sharing his death, and so sharing the fruits of his victory. Only thus could the curse of the Law be removed and such become, in Paul’s phrase, “dead to the Law”.
The Law could not remove sin; it convicted of sin. Men under the Law must have a redeemer. The redemption came by Christ’s death, as Paul says: he “is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance”.
When we perceive Paul’s reasoning based upon the clause about hanging on a tree, it would seem reasonable to conclude that its insertion in the Law was a divine provision for the working out of His purpose. Under the Roman rule he met his death by crucifixion; earlier or later in time, and death would not normally have been so inflicted. The “fulness of time” brought together the man and the circumstances which fulfilled God’s purpose.
F2F
BECAUSE none kept it perfectly, the Law cursed all under it.
So far from it being, as many Jews thought, a means whereby men could attain to life it was found to be an effective barrier to life—to be in fact something that by its cursing cut men off from life. The Law made evident man’s impotence and therefore the need for divine action if men were to be saved.
Paul has already referred to that divine action in His son “who gave himself for our sins” (Gal 1:4), “who gave himself for me” in being crucified (Gal 2:20). For Paul’s argument concerning the inefficacy of the Law as a way to life to be complete, Christ’s work must not only be shown in relation to the personal needs of men who are by conduct sinners and by nature death-stricken, but he must show that Christ has removed the curse of law—the law which not only could not give life, but which sentenced men to death. In fact, if Christ is the Redeemer he must of necessity redeem those under the curse of Law from that curse. The very contrast “Law cursed—Christ redeemed from the curse” is an absolute and final refutation of the Judaizers’ claims.
It is Christ who has done this: of course Christ is Jesus—but by saying Christ did it, Paul indicates that it is the Messiah who has removed the curse. He will say in the next breath the curse was removed by his crucifixion—by that very death which was so scandalous in the eyes of the Jew. And instead of the cross establishing, as the Jew thought, that the claims of Jesus to be the Messiah were blasphemy, the cross proved that Jesus was the Messiah. Paul here defends his teaching by a frontal attack on the Jewish position, affirming that it was required of the exalted and glorified King of Israel that he should suffer and die for men’s sins as a condition of honour and glory. The scandal of the cross becomes the occasion of glory—“I will know nothing”, says Paul, “but Messiah Jesus and him a crucified one”. This argument that Old Testament prophecy demanded that the Messiah must be one who first gave his life as an offering for sins turned the objection of the Jews into a convincing proof to all willing to weigh the evidence. The apostles were not slow to use it; of the many illustrations, Peter in Acts 2 and Paul in Heb. 2: 9, 10, are conspicuous examples—but the thought is implicit here when Paul says Christ—the Messiah—hath redeemed us from the curse of the Law.
How has the curse of the Law been “bought off”?—for so the word translated redeemed in this place literally means. Paul answers: by Messiah “being made a curse for us”; for us, not instead of us; but for us in that he has come under the curse of the Law that he might take it away for himself and for us; for us, in that we, by faith identifying ourselves with him in his submission to the curse, share with him in the results, in the removal of the curse from us.
It is clear that when Paul says Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the Law, he means those who were under the law, “us” Jews. But the principle by which this curse of law has been taken away is identical with that by which the curse of sin and death has been removed. When the principle in the latter case has been understood, the way in which the law-curse was done away is not difficult of perception. Let us now follow Paul’s thought concerning how Christ has removed the curse of the law. Christ has been made a curse; he elsewhere says that he was “made under the law”, and while this is a related thing it is yet something much more significant when he says he was “made a curse”. If we put the statement in the concrete form instead of the abstract—which Paul was led to use because he had just spoken of the curse of the law in connection with others—then it is declared that Jesus was accursed! This truly makes the statement startling, but we have in no wise altered Paul’s sense, and at once the parallel suggests itself—he was accursed for us and “he was made sin for us” (2 Cor. 5 : 21). Besides being grammatically impossible, we must reject as futile in the light of this parallel the suggestion that by “sin” Paul in this place means “sin-offering”. No, Paul means sin, but we must understand what is intended by the word. He was made sin in partaking of the nature in which sin reigns and which produces sin, and which therefore, by metonomy is called sin. We may go further and say he was made “sin” in enduring the consequences of sin—sin not his own, for he did not sin—but sin which has left its effects upon the whole race of mankind in bringing all under subjection to death. If we recognize how horrible in God’s sight sin is, then we see how the effects of it are brought to a focus as it were in His own obedient son. “Him who knew no sin God made to be sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
He was made to be—we become; the difference being that he felt and endured in his own person the consequences of sin, accepting voluntarily those consequences, whereas we are forgiven our sins and so become the righteousness of God.
He was made “sin” without being a sinner; he was also “made a curse” without transgressing the law. How this came about Paul explains. He was cursed in the mode of death, and this involved no personal responsibility on his part. An edict of the law declared: “Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree”. Christ was nailed to the tree and so came under the curse.
Let us observe that it is not only in this place that emphasis is put on “the tree” in connection with Christ. All the Lord’s own references to his impending crucifixion take on an added meaning in the light of it. But the idea recurs in apostolic thought. Thus Peter told the Jewish authorities that God “raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree” (Acts 5: 30); he used the same phrase to Cornelius (Acts 10 : 39). To the Jews of Pisidian Antioch Paul declared that when “they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre” (Acts 13 : 29). In a very important passage in his first epistle Peter says that Jesus “his own self bare our sins in his own body to the tree”. From these statements it is evident that the mode of Christ’s death entered conspicuously into the thought of the first Christian teachers when they were explaining the truth to Jews or those with Jewish contacts.
We turn then to consider the passage in the Law which Paul quotes. It appears parenthetically in a commandment that if a man had committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death and hung on a tree, then his body must not remain on the tree beyond nightfall, that the land be not defiled. The reason given is that “he that is hanged is accursed of God”. Some effort has been made to confine the curse of the Law to the penal death imposed for sin, on the ground that it seems needless to add a curse for the mere exposure of the body; a view that would limit the curse to the man who had died because of transgression. But the statement which explains why the body exposed on the tree must be removed is general and not confined to the criminal. When the criminal is hung on a tree there is added to the sentence which brings him to death the curse which his exposure brings. A man innocent of transgression of which he was accused and for which he was sentenced to death, would by the hanging come under the curse. This is not hypothetical, for it is what actually happened in the case of the Lord, Paul himself being witness. Christ became a curse because he hung upon a tree.
The explanation may be found in the fact that the Law dealt with actual transgression and also with defilement that might even come upon a person innocently. This ceremonial defilement could come in many ways, but the most striking are those that came by obeying the Law itself. Thus Aaron had to wash after the offering in the Holiest of all on the Day of Atonement. The man who bore the ashes of the offering without the camp on the same day had also to wash (Lev. 18). The priest who had charge of the burning of the red heifer, the ashes of which were to be added to the water of separation for cleansing of the defilement contracted by touching anything dead, had to wash and was unclean until the evening. The man who removed the ashes was unclean until the even. Even the ministers of the rite of cleansing for this defilement were considered to be unclean (Num. 19). Thus the very operations enjoined by God for cleansing produced a ceremonial defilement. The law was rigorous, for the man who neglected the purification rites when he had contracted defilement had to be cut off. A man could be defiled by the law even in fulfilling it.
The pollution occasioned by these enactments of the law were altogether independent of moral guiltiness. But the Law does not discriminate in its operation between moral and ceremonial guilt. We cannot separate the moral code from the ceremonial in the Law of Moses: the Law is one—so much so as we have seen that a man who offended in one particular was guilty of all.
Jesus then, Paul tells us, in the mode of his death, came under the Law’s curse. In this transaction he was himself innocent, and in his case the time when the curse came upon him coincided with the accepting of the full penalty of the curse of the Law. Death was the penalty the Law imposed. Jesus was cursed in the form in which death came and the full claims of the Law were met by his death, while his sinless life ensured his resurrection. The Law could make no further claims upon him, and he passed from under its operation when he died, and thus by his death the Law which cursed him was done away.
All persons under the Law were cursed. How could the curse on them be removed? The answer is, by identification with Jesus and sharing his death, and so sharing the fruits of his victory. Only thus could the curse of the Law be removed and such become, in Paul’s phrase, “dead to the Law”.
The Law could not remove sin; it convicted of sin. Men under the Law must have a redeemer. The redemption came by Christ’s death, as Paul says: he “is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance”.
When we perceive Paul’s reasoning based upon the clause about hanging on a tree, it would seem reasonable to conclude that its insertion in the Law was a divine provision for the working out of His purpose. Under the Roman rule he met his death by crucifixion; earlier or later in time, and death would not normally have been so inflicted. The “fulness of time” brought together the man and the circumstances which fulfilled God’s purpose.
F2F
