What "Justification" Means to You

This morning, we're moving on a little bit in Galatians chapter two. Paul is still talking about some of his testimony, his story of how he has developed or how he has, I guess, pursued the gospel message. And so this morning, we're going to be looking at Galatians 2:11-21. And just before we get there, we'll just reflect once again that we're following on from Paul talking about a meeting that he had in Jerusalem, the head capital, I guess, of the Christian movement in the early church. And we saw that this meeting led to a confirmation that Paul's message that he was declaring to the Gentiles was indeed in line with Scripture.

It was indeed the message that Jesus Christ Himself had proclaimed. We saw that the gospel was a uniting truth and that truth was that we are all saved through faith in Jesus Christ alone. Nothing more and nothing less. We now come to another event in Paul's story. And here he recounts some of the trials that he had to go through in preserving this gospel message.

So let's turn to Galatians 2:11-21. Galatians 2:11. When Peter came to Antioch, Paul continues, I opposed him to his face because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he, Peter, used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group.

The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy, even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, you are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it then that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? We who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law.

Because by observing the law, no one will be justified. If while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not. If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a law breaker. For through the law, I died to the law so that I might live for God.

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing. So far our reading. The opening statement that Paul makes here when he moves on from this meeting in Jerusalem to the next stage in his testimony is astounding.

It's an astounding opening statement. He shows that we have two apostles disagreeing. The great leaders of the church, Paul and Peter, have a disagreement. One of them, Paul, recalls that he opposed the other one, Peter, to his face, it says in verse 11, because he was clearly in the wrong. Now what had caused this?

What happened? Paul explains that the apostle Peter had, in fact, changed something about himself. He had changed his eating habits. In verse 12, he says, he used to eat with the Gentiles, then he began to draw back and separated himself from the Gentiles. Now Paul saw this as a very fundamental flaw in the true outworking of the gospel.

For us, this seems petty. It's just eating. It's just a ceremonial thing. But you see, for a first century Jew, the fact that someone like Peter, a Jew, had started eating with Gentiles in the first place would have been heart stopping. It wasn't heart stopping for Peter to withdraw, it was the very fact that he had done it in the first place that was huge.

Now again, let's put on our Jewish context caps, if that makes sense. And imagine we were first century Jews. The combination in that day of traditional laws that the Pharisees promoted, the Pharisees were the religious leaders of that time, the Jewish leaders. The combination of their laws plus the Old Testament laws had all sorts of complicated regulations for worshippers of God to follow in order to be good enough or clean enough to meet with God, to worship God. In fact, if you were a first century Jew right now, we'd have a little trough at the front there, and you would have to come in and dip yourself and wash yourself before coming into this church. Everyone would have really nice clean hands and feet coming into this church.

So you see there were a lot of these sort of regulations on how we have to be clean before meeting with God. People, for example, couldn't come close to God if they had eaten certain unclean foods. So no pork, no shrimp, no oysters. For some of us, that would be really hard. I know for me, I love a good pork chop.

People couldn't come close to God if they had some sort of skin disease, acne perhaps, or obviously leprosy, you may have heard of those stories in the Bible. You couldn't even come to God if you had touched someone that had that. If you were a nurse, Audrey, that had helped someone with that, you couldn't come to God. You couldn't come to God if you had seen or touched a dead person. You had to go and go through a ritual of cleansing yourself.

And if you are really keen, and if you're like me, a bit of a Bible nerd, you'll go to Leviticus 11 and 15 and 20 and you can read all those sort of regulations for yourself. There's lots of them in there. But the amazing thing is, in the New Testament, Jesus comes and He says that these laws have passed with His arrival. Jesus and His triumphant return to humanity has meant a new age has begun. Not only this, but Peter himself in the book of Acts saw a vision in Acts 11 of a giant white picnic blanket, you could call it, full of animals unclean traditionally, that came down from heaven and a voice from heaven saying, Peter, get up, kill and eat.

Because God has made this pure. Do not call anything impure that God has made clean. Peter then immediately after this vision meets a repentant Gentile named Cornelius who receives Christ, the very first Gentile convert in the Christian church, who receives Christ and is born again. And the penny drops for Peter then. And he says, wow.

God doesn't show any favouritism, but accepts men and women from every nation who fear Him. It says that in Acts 10. Acts 11 shows then later that Peter actually eats with Gentiles. So this is Peter. This is the journey that God has taken him on.

But then I'm assuming years later, Peter forgets this or he gets scared. And he starts withdrawing from Gentiles because of pressure from the inside of the Christian community. And so Paul accuses him again in this letter of hypocrisy. You hypocrite, Peter. How could you say and believe one thing and do the other thing?

So Paul calls him out. Again, what caused this hypocrisy that went so far as to influence Barnabas, Paul's travelling companion? Barnabas who was there with Paul when he preached the gospel to these Gentiles, who ate with Gentiles. Paul makes clear that Peter's decision wasn't simply rudeness. It wasn't simply some sort of bad etiquette.

It wasn't simply just being uncivilised or unwelcoming. Fundamentally, Paul says, the problem is something deeper. Verse 14 says, Peter wasn't acting in line with the gospel. Peter's actions were not in line with the gospel. A very interesting way to say it.

Peter wasn't holding the line with the implications of the gospel. Not only is our job as Christians to understand the gospel, that Jesus alone is our saviour, that He is enough for us, but it is our job to bring everything we have in line with this gospel. We are to think out its implications in every area of our life and to seek to have it influence our thinking, our emotions, our behaviour. So Peter's hypocrisy, Peter's sin basically was the sin of nationalism. It was a sin of nationalism.

You could extrapolate that further. You could say there was a sin of racism because by removing himself from the Gentiles, he insisted that Christians couldn't truly be Christians unless they became by the culture of the Jews. Unless they culturally became Jews. Now, this of course is just another form of what is called legalism. And legalism is looking to something besides Jesus Christ in order to be acceptable to God.

Legalism is looking to something other than Christ in order to be acceptable with God. And the truth is it exists today. And it's always subtle. One way is to take for example our preferences of worship. Our preferences of worship or church structure or church governance and stress our distinctions in order to somehow feel superior to someone else or another group.

It means we take our preferences so seriously, too seriously, and we endow them somehow with a mystical power, a spiritual importance and significance, and fail to see that it is only cultural. It could be that some churches from backgrounds that are perhaps more emotionally expressive have a different style of music, could feel superior to other churches or other groups with a more reserved style or vice versa. It could be a church that sings, you know, these hymns, beautiful pipe organs that feel we have it. These old Genevan tunes are sent from God Himself. It could be a church that feels, you know, that they sing entire slabs of Scripture but have it better or superior to the others.

And we simply can't see that we are different. We have to believe that our style, our customs, our culture is somehow spiritually better. Another form of this type of legalism that Peter fell into is to be classist or nationalistic or racist. Working class Christians, for example, may have a distaste for white collar Christians. Christians from one political persuasion may be upset at the presence of others from another spectrum.

How comfortable would we be if a greenie sat next to us? Socially polished Christians, for example, may feel uncomfortable around believers who are socially awkward. I know how to act in a social setting. Why doesn't this person know how to act? And just like Peter, we may decide to respond in a similar way.

We take a step back. We distance ourselves. We don't really become friends with them. We do the pleasantries perhaps on a Sunday. But we don't socialise with them.

We don't share ourselves with them. We don't share our homes with them. We might keep our relationships formal. All of this, Paul says, comes from not living in line with the gospel. Without the gospel, you see, without the gospel, without understanding its implications, we have to manufacture self esteem.

We have to manufacture esteem by comparing ourselves with other groups so that we can feel better about ourselves, that we can feel closer to God. But the gospel tells us that we are all equally unclean before Christ. Without Christ, we are all on a level playing field. The gospel also tells us with Christ, we are all equally clean in Him. Can you see how that just destroys that entire philosophy and worldview?

This is why Paul corrects Peter by referring to the important phrase in verses 15 and 16, justification by faith. Instead of throwing out a clichéd response to Peter without saying, you better get in line or else, Peter, Paul brings him straight back to the basics. Brings him back to the gospel as the springboard to change his behaviour. My car's clock is always running late. My car's clock is always running late and I fix it every few weeks and then see in a few weeks it's five, ten, fifteen minutes late.

That's why I'm always late. And no matter how many times I correct it, and no matter how many times I change it to the right time, it always manages to get out of kilter. And perhaps you have a clock at home or a wristwatch or something similar to that. Now let's take this watch for example. You could be continually spending your time realigning and fidgeting and adjusting that watch to the correct time by turning the adjuster to the side.

You could be spending all that time adjusting it and changing it to the right time, but ultimately, that's not what's going to make this watch a good watch. A good watch is a watch that tells the correct time all the time. The easy thing, the easy thing to do is to adjust this watch every few weeks, every few days to get it right again. But the fundamental problem lies not with the dial and changing it. The fundamental problem lies with the springs and the cogs in the watch.

It's the same for us. We can spend our whole lives living and listening to Christian clichés about how to live good, nice, moral teaching. To be good, to be nice, to be kind. We can spend our time then making adjustments and tweaking things in our lives, but the problem is going to come back because the problem lies deeper.

It lies with our springs and our cogs. In order for a watch to become a good watch that tells the right time, a watchmaker needs to wind the springs, needs to line up the cogs properly. Paul could have told Peter to change his behaviour or else. Change your behaviour or you will go to hell, Peter. Paul could have motivated Peter with fear.

Paul could have motivated him with a fear of losing his esteem or his status as a church leader. But that's not what happens here. Paul takes Peter to the only thing that can change the internal cogs of our hearts. And that is the gospel. So Paul takes him there.

And Paul's speech climaxes in verse 16 when he says, we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law because by observing the law, no one will be justified. That's where his argument reaches its crescendo. Justified by faith is central to the Christian faith. It is the nutshell summary of the gospel. In this context, Paul is talking here about clean and unclean.

Being clean and unclean before God. But Paul stresses it here that it's the people, the ones who put their faith in Christ that are made clean. It's not because you are Gentile that you are unclean. It's not because you are not a Jew that you are unclean. It is because you have been justified, whether you are a Jew or a Gentile, that you are clean.

To justify, and it's a very technical term in the Bible. To justify in the Bible means to declare of a person who is on trial that they are not liable to pay any penalty that they've been accused of, but rather are entitled to all the privileges due to those who have actually kept the law. It means you do not pay the penalty that you rightly should, but you in fact receive the privileges of those who have actually kept the law. Justifying is the act of a judge pronouncing the opposite sentence of condemnation. Justification through Christ means that though we are sinners, that we are actually sinners, we are not under condemnation.

God accepts us despite ourselves. God accepts us despite our flaws. God accepts us despite our sin. We are not acceptable to God because we actually become good. That we actually become righteous being in a right relationship with God.

We don't become acceptable to God through tweaking and adjusting every few weeks, every few days, but we become actually righteous with God because we have been made acceptable by God. And that's what Paul is trying to drive at here. He tries to drive the gospel right down deep into the heart of this matter, into the heart of this problem, like an antibiotic being driven right into the wound. Peter says here, Peter says, I have removed myself from other Christians because I consider them unacceptable. But Paul says, you don't realise that you yourself were once unacceptable before God.

You don't realise that. You've forgotten that, Peter. But the great thing is you have been made acceptable through Jesus Christ. You've been justified. It's just as if I'd never sinned.

You've been made clean in the sight of God. And this hasn't come, Peter. This hasn't come from you observing the law and from you being clean and nice and proper and having a nice smile and greeting new visitors and just being a really good bloke, Peter. This hasn't come from that. And now, because you have been justified, we do not have to live under this weight, this law, these requirements anymore.

Verses 19 to 21 is Paul just expressing this joy, this life we have in Christ now. This is why Paul can say in verse 19, I have died to the law. I have died to the law. I am dead to it. It doesn't hold any more power over me.

I'm not a slave of it any longer. It doesn't hold power over me. If I'm feeling condemned, and if I have a fear that God no longer cares about me, no longer listens to me, will never listen to my prayers, then I have simply forgotten that I am dead to this law, I'm dead to it. If I feel guilt, it's because I've forgotten that it can't harm me anymore. So how does realising this change our cogs, change our springs inside of us?

How can it lead to much more than just a simple adjustment here and there that will eventually just go out of kilter again? Well, imagine you were in a house that was burning down and you managed to escape, but one of your small children was still in there. If I said to you, let me show you how much I love you, and I ran into the flames, saved your child but somehow perished myself, you would think, wow. Look how much this man loved us. Yet, if it was different and your whole family managed to run out of the house before the flames engulfed it.

If everyone was safe standing on the lawn, and if I said to you guys, look how much I love you, and ran into the flames and died, you would say, how pointless was that? Paul makes a point here. If we could save ourselves and if we could be clean enough for God, in Peter's case, ourselves from Gentiles, or for us being nice enough, or worshipping in the right way, if we could save ourselves through these things, then Christ's death is as pointless as that man running into an empty house full of fire. It's irrelevant. It means nothing.

If we could fix ourselves, if we could clean ourselves, if we could polish ourselves, then we wouldn't need a watchmaker to fix us. But if we realise that we cannot save ourselves, then Christ's death will mean everything to us. It will mean everything. And we will spend our entire lives living in joyful service to our God, to our Saviour. Does that make sense?

We will bring our whole lives into line with this gospel. Because the gospel will sink deep into us. It won't be just a surface issue anymore. It won't be something that just gives us a nice feeling when we think about it every once in a while. Is Christ's death everything to you? Do you understand the implications of what it means?

Or is there something that you're still holding on to to be better? To be to be more acceptable, to be cleaner, to make you feel worthier of being with God? Let's get rid of that. Get rid of it. Take the good news of Jesus Christ and let it sink deep into our hearts so that we can work out the amazing implications of that.

And so we can say with Paul, I have been crucified with Christ. And it's no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me, who lives through me. What an amazing truth. What an amazing reassurance. We will live for God that way.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this message, Lord, and thank you, Lord, that we can just keep focused on this recurring theme of Your gospel and understand just the breadth and the width and the depth of its significance. Thank you that we can work out the implications of it in our lives, Lord. That we cannot hold on to anything that makes us feel more worthy of You or less worthy of You because in Your sight, Lord, we have all been made equal, even equal with Jesus Christ, Your perfect holy Son. But we find ourselves in that amazing position that we have been clothed with Christ, that when You look at us, we are justified.

It is just as if I'd never sinned. And You see not us and not our brokenness, but You see Your Son Jesus in us. What an amazing truth. Help us to understand that. Help us to grab that and make that a part of our lives, our decision making, our outlook on how we treat others.

Help us to understand that. Grow us in that, O Holy Spirit. We ask You in Jesus' name. Amen.