What kind of person loves rules?
Well, me, sort of.
I like rules that keep things orderly and functioning. I like general or broad rules that assume people have common decency and common sense to function without a heavy, detailed explanation of what is required. I like such rules to be followed. I like cultural norms and rules that create high-trust societies.
But rules are like rabbits. Where there are a few, there will be many.
The saying is that if you will not follow the Ten Commandments, you will follow the Ten Thousand Commandments, and isn’t that the truth? When people—and their cultures, personalities, and demands for individual rights—get involved, we start to add more rules and laws.
We do it because people lack self-control, and laws must be put into place to force or restrain behavior. We do it if we want to control other people and make them adhere to our preferences. We do it if we want to control our environment and want to avoid the sloppy possibilities of human creativity (see also: homeowner’s associations). We do it in an attempt to keep up with ever-growing degenerate behavior, agonizing over the tiny details we must include to hamper the evil, greedy, and harmful inclinations of other people. We do it to exclude others or to elevate a particular group above other groups.
Maybe we do it because we know our own nature, aren’t too impressed, and project rules on others to make ourselves feel better about dealing with a problem externally that we should deal with internally.
Imagine being Paul, having poured truth and love into the churches of Galatia, and then discovering some false teachers had come along, bad-mouthed him and his teaching, and tried to put new rules on those very people?
This is the book of Galatians, likely written somewhere around AD 49, in which Paul defends himself by saying yes, he was an apostle of Jesus, arguing that yes, salvation was by faith alone without a bunch of other rules, and then goes on to explain how beautiful and challenging it is to live freely.
Yes, challenging.
Slavery is unbearable, but freedom is hard.
Not just fighting for freedom and obtaining freedom, in our human understanding, but living in freedom without becoming absolute monsters.
The human version of freedom is lawlessness, debauchery, and all sorts of nonsense in which our thoughts and motivations are always about self. What I need. What I want. What I think would be fun. What I think is right.
“I’m just being my true self!” people say, which is a terrible thing, really.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul slaps down the false teachers who try to add rules and requirements to salvation and warns us about how to identify them. He explains the proper understanding of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ from every angle. And then he does what seems impossible: he shows us how freedom from the law only works when we have the Holy Spirit in us. Freedom from external restraint only comes with internal restraint.
Freedom is lost in legalism, he warns.
Freedom is not an excuse to sin, he reminds us, counteracting those who want to use rules and law to keep people from sinning.
Freedom is best understood and expressed by serving others in love with the help of the Holy Spirit, he points out, laying out what life in the Spirit really is (and isn’t).
If you’re serving others, you’re not serving yourself, and that stops a lot of the nonsense behavior we tend to get from a purely human understanding of what freedom is. The United States is a nation that values freedom, but daily, we see what happens when immoral, amoral, and ungodly people exercise it.
It’s ugly.
But not as ugly, in a spiritual sense, as someone trying to use works and rules and constraints to hammer people into their preferred image. At best, they create well-behaved people (good) who may never know saving faith in Christ (bad) because they think behaving a certain way is enough. We’re trying, in our own strength and understanding, to create morality and conscience.
We shouldn’t try to do the job of the Holy Spirit, and it’s a surprising lack of faith in God to assume He needs our help to control sin in others, and that He can’t use even the bad outcomes from sin for His ultimate glory.
Galatians is the perfect book to study as we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday because it’s all about real freedom, rooted in faith in Christ.
If you’d like a worksheet for this lesson, you can get a copy here.