Liberty In Christ - Part 2
Galatians 5:1
“1 Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”
In the book of Galatians, the apostle Paul is directed by God to address the problem of the Judaizers. The Judaizers were Jews who took some Old Testament teaching and mixed it with their traditions. There is a big push to suggest that Christians should work together with Judaizers even today because of a supposed common bond with the Word of God. However there is no common bond with the Word of God when we consider that the Judaizers reject Jesus Christ as the Saviour.
The Judaizers were very active in the days of the apostle Paul. They were also very persuasive in their arguments. This can be seen in the fact that God directed the apostle Paul to write the letter to the Galatians. There was a danger of born again Christians who were not well grounded in God’s Word, to be led to believe that there was a need to keep the law as a part of salvation. That was the teaching of the Judaizers. Law keeping was necessary to be counted as God’s children.
The Bible is very clear that law keeping never was the means of becoming a child of God. In Genesis 15:6 God says of Abraham:
Genesis 15:6
“6 And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”
Abraham believed what God was telling him. He had no son yet at this time. He simply believed what God told him. Salvation requires, indeed demands that the lost person turn to God and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ to be saved. There is nothing a person can do in order to be saved. This is abundantly clear in the Scriptures.
As noted, the Galatians were being told by the Judaizers to keep the law as a means of being right with God. We cannot truly say that they believed in salvation because they believed that because they were physical descendants of Abraham, they were never in bondage. Law keeping was necessary to the Judaizers to keep themselves in the family of God.
The apostle Paul used the example of Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4 to show the difference between true salvation, and the false religion of the Judaizers. Sarah was given a son when she was past the age of child-bearing. It was not possible (humanly speaking) for Sarah to bear a child at her age. However, what is impossible with man is possible with God.