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Rev Graham Harrison           Sunday August 29th p.m. 1999

Galatians 6:14

There is an interesting background that lies behind this whole epistle. It was not an uncommon background as far as many of the churches of the New Testament were concerned but it comes to the fore with peculiar force in this letter to the Galatians. It seems that what used to happen after the apostle Paul went round preaching the gospel was that there were those, and they probably thought that they were serving God in doing what they did, who came after him and who tried in effect to correct, as they thought, the deficiencies, if not the errors, of the apostle and his sermons. Many of them would have come from a background of Judaism and probably in many cases they would have been Jews. They faced the fact that the majority of Christians in most of these New Testament churches, did not come from a Jewish background. These converts came instead from an ordinary Gentile background - Greek, Roman, whatever was the particular land in which they had been converted - and the fear was that these poor people were losing out.

They were losing out because they had not become Jews. So what had happened in these Galatian churches was that there was a group of people who wanted them to be 'Christians', as we would call them, but first of all, or partly as a means of becoming even better Christians, they wanted them to be Jews as well. So as far as the men were concerned that meant that they tried to have them circumcised. There would be various laws concerning food and other detailed regulations, that you can find in the Old Testament and that were part and parcel of what it was to be a Jew. So they would put it to these people, 'You ought to start practising these things!'

Of all the letters in the New Testament, it is this letter to the Galatians that deals most directly with that issue. Somebody has actually called this letter Truth on Fire. I would not be disposed to argue with anybody that described this letter as the most angry letter in the New Testament. Paul was angry - not simply because some people had the temerity to disagree with what he was saying. He was very used to that! But why he was angry was because he knew that what these people were saying really was undermining and contradicting the gospel. What in effect they were doing was to say that what Jesus Christ did - in living here amongst men for those thirty three years in which he was on earth, and then supremely in dying the death that He died upon the cross - although it was good, it was not good enough! It really needed to be supplemented, to have something added to it. In this case it needed to have added to it this work of circumcision and obedience to the Jewish law and the rules and regulations that were part of that.

That was what made Paul angry. That is why as you read right through this letter, you find at several points his anger really blazes to the surface and he deal quite furiously with the error of these people. But now he has almost come to the end of the letter and he has taken up the pen himself. You might notice verse eleven: 'Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand.' He probably means 'with how large letters I have written'. It seems probable that he suffered from eye problems and very often his letters would have been dictated to a scribe who would have written them down for him. But usually as he came to the end of his letter he would take the pen himself and he would add a little bit in his own handwriting to give a mark of authentication to the letter. He does that here: 'Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand.'

Then he begins to speak about these people: 'As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ. For neither they themselves who are circumcised keep the law; but desire to have you circumcised, that they may glory in your flesh' [Galatians 6:12-13]. The sort of thing that he has in mind is this. There would have been these Judaizers, who after they had gone to the churches of Galatia, would have gone back to the places from which they had come and said: 'You know when we went to those churches in Galatia, we were able to persuade so many people to become Jews instead of just being Gentiles. Yes, they are Christians but the men were willing to be circumcised; the women are doing all their cooking in the Jewish manner.' And they were boasting about this. So Paul says: 'But God forbid that I should glory,' that I should boast, 'save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified unto me, and I to the world.'

I am sure that we all know something about boasting. I do not think that I insult anybody when I say that I am quite confident that every person here in this chapel this evening at some time or other in his or her life, has boasted. Perhaps some of you do it more than others, but there is not one of us who is ignorant of what it means to boast; and there is not one of us who is innocent of the sin - for that is what it very often is - of boasting. It is almost part and parcel of the world, is it not? I expect some of you, especially the young people perhaps, will have have been watching the World Athletic Championships during these last few days. The pride that the winners have - they do their laps of honour. They stand up on the podium and receive all the plaudits of the crowd, and it is quite obvious as far as some of them are concerned that they are absolutely over the moon with their achievement. Some of them are very contemptuous about the people that they have managed to beat. Or it may not be something in the realm of athletics and the physical achievements; it may be something of an intellectual nature that one boasts of - that you are cleverer than others. You have had a better result in your examination; you have a more high flying job than somebody else. Perhaps you expect people to recognise that and in a sense almost to kow-tow to you when you come into the room, or come into the office. You expect to be treated as somebody who is worthy of respect. Really it all comes down to boasting. So much of the pomp and ceremony that one often sees in the world is simply a refined form of boasting. People very confident of themselves, very assured of the accomplishments that they have managed to achieve in this life, boast of it. Perhaps if you are one of the ones that they are putting down it gets under your skin a little bit. It irritates you, it makes you angry - it probably makes you a bit envious of them and makes you wish that you were in their position and you were able to have all the plaudits and all the praise that they seem to be enjoying.

Boasting? When we see it in other people it angers us. But when we do it ourselves we probably say: 'Well, let us give credit where credit is due!' And we make excuses, do we not, for ourselves? It is something very natural, usually sinful and sometimes even people who have put on an act of modesty, are doing so just as another way of boasting. Well here the apostle Paul he deals with these people. He deals with them very clearly and he deals with them very positively.

He says, 'Yes, I boast! But there is only one thing that I boast in. 'God forbid', he says, 'that I should glory' (that I should boast) 'save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.' 'I will boast', he says. 'This is what I am going to boast in. Not what I have done, not the converts, by the grace of God, that I have been instrumental in bringing to the Saviour. Not in my intellectual achievements.' Now let me remind you that if there ever was a man who could have boasted of his intellect and his prowess, from the point of view of the mind, it was this man Saul of Tarsus. He was a genius - I would not hesitate to use that word of him. But no, he does not boast of that. 'The only thing', he says, 'that is ever worthy of boasting of is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.'

Now the trouble is that we live almost two thousand years on from when Paul wrote those words. I suspect that something of the enormity of what he is saying tends to be lost on us. Let us try and put it in another way that might make it more easily understandable, as far as we are concerned - and even then it is relatively remote. It is more than thirty years now since any murderer in this country was executed - hung. Whether or not you agree with that, it is a simple fact that nobody has been executed by hanging in our country since the nineteen sixties. I want you to imagine that one of your family was a murderer; and imagine that murderer had been tried, had been convicted and had been executed. Would you go around the place saying, 'Oh, you know our family, don't you? We are the family that had this infamous member. You read all about him in the papers the other week. You know that person that was hanged in such-and-such a gaol! He is our family!'

You would not do that, would you? You would try and crawl away and hide. You would hope that nobody would make the connection. You would try and gloss over any suggestions that they made that possibly you were related to that individual. But you see that is the sort of thing that Paul is saying here. 'God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The One of whom I am boast,' he says, 'is an executed criminal - and He was executed in that most horrible and shameful way that the perverse ingenuity of man has ever invented - death by crucifixion. Now', Paul says, 'I boast in this!'

It is interesting as you turn across to another one of his letters, 1 Corinthians; he is really doing the same thing there. And what he is doing is to confront the Jews and the Gentiles with this fact: 'For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. ... But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God' [1 Corinthians 1:18, 23,24].

You see, when the Jew heard the message of the gospel which said to him, 'Your Messiah was put to death on a Roman cross!' He said, 'Do not be so ridiculous! Not my Messiah! An impostor, a charlatan maybe. Somebody who just pretended to be the Messiah - but thank God, he was not the Messiah, otherwise he would not have ended up as he did!' Christ crucified was an abomination to the Jews.

If you moved out from a Jewish context and went over to the Gentiles, you would have found exactly the same thing. The sophisticated Greeks, the intelligentsia of the ancient world, because they were a very inquisitive people, always seeking to find out what people believed and what was their philosophy, what was the pattern on which they tried to base their lives, would give you a hearing. They would say, 'Tell me, you Christians, what is the heart of your faith? What is it that you want us to believe?' And eventually you would come to this point. You would tell them that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He died on a Roman cross, being put to death like a common criminal, on the hill Calvary just outside Jerusalem. And they would say, 'You do not expect us to believe that, do you? You call that a good message, a gospel, good news? Do you expect us who are intelligent people to believe that God's Son should have been put to death like a common criminal and that somehow, as the result of His being put to death, our sins can be forgiven? Oh, give us Plato! Give us Aristotle! Give us Socrates any time. There is sense, there is intelligence there - but this is foolishness!' Yet you see Paul says, 'But this is what we glory in. God forbid', he says, 'that we should glory save in anything else save the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.'

It is a mark of the measure by which times have changed. Nobody two thousand years ago would have thought of making a little gold cross and hanging it around a woman's neck and thinking it was an object of beauty. Nobody would have thought of painting a picture of a cross and employing all the skills of the artist, or the sculptor, in order to represent something glorious. Everybody would have said, 'You cannot do that!' It would have been regarded as the equivalent of painting a picture of a man hanging on the end of a rope, being executed, and putting something like that around your neck. But, you see, we have sentimentalised the cross. We have turned that which was an object of horror, something t hat was repugnant and repulsive, into something nice and beautiful. It is as if we have taken all the rough edges off it and no longer do we see it as they saw it there in the New Testament. So for Paul to say: 'But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ' - perhaps you now understand what a staggering thing this was.

Yet what he was saying, of course, is what all the Christians truly were saying. 'We glory in Christ crucified'. That was their great message. They did not crawl away, as it were. They did not try and obscure the message of the cross. They came out with it, they expounded it, they sought to explain to people that what had happened on the cross was the greatest thing that the world has ever known anything about. That is what Paul has been saying right through this epistle.

Now what happened on the cross? Well, let us think of it first of all from the physical point of view. What happened on the cross? Terrible agony - I am not even going to attempt to describe to you the physical anguish and agony that the Lord Jesus Christ must have endured as He was nailed there to the cross. It is beyond our telling, beyond our comprehension. Death by crucifixion is probably the cruellest form of death that perverse human ingenuity has ever devised. That is what they did to the Son of God! They nailed Him to the cross that He had carried, put it up there on that hill Calvary and there they waited for Him to die. From a physical point of view it is unspeakably horrible. There is nothing beautiful about it, there is nothing tender, nothing lovely - it is utterly and entirely horrific and repugnant. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. Any of these people to whom Paul was writing, were familiar with crucifixion. They were all living in the Roman Empire and this was how the Roman Empire dealt with its trouble makers. Nothing sentimental about them! No mercy or kindness, but when people caused trouble, well this is what you did to them - you put them on a cross and not only did it finish them, but it was a very good sign to the rest of society, 'Watch your step, lest you might end up that way!' You did not want that to happen to you. You saw the terrible agony that was involved. So the cross from a physical point of view is utterly, unspeakably, horrible and repugnant.

But spiritually, what happened on the cross? This of course takes us right into the heart of the gospel. What happened on the cross was something that had you been there you would not have seen. All that you would have seen was one person, or three people if you like - but that one central person - dying in agony. You would not have seen what was going on in His heart and in His soul. You would not have seen the weight that He was bearing, because it was invisible to the human eye. When He hung on the cross - well there is a verse quoted in the New Testament, from the Old Testament that describes exactly what was happening: 'he was numbered with the transgressors' [Mark 15:28]. He was identified with sinners. What actually happened, again to quote the scripture: ' the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all' [Isaiah 53:6]. All the vileness, all the filth, all the horrible sins of which each one of us is guilty, were taken by God and laid to the account - not of those two thieves dying either side of Him - but laid to the account of this man who had never sinned, who had never had an impure thought, who had never spoken an unkind word - the man who was goodness personified. It was all laid to His account.

What was happening - and this was the real agony of the cross as far as Jesus was concerned -was not the suffering of the nails, of the crown of thorns and the lashed back that He had already experienced, terrible as those things were. What was happening was that God, His own Father, was punishing Him as though He were the greatest sinner in the world. You see God does not ignore sin. God cannot ignore sin. Were God to ignore sin, you might say the whole fabric of the universe would somehow disintegrate. God is a moral God. People today do not realise that, even if they say they believe in God. They think that it is no great problem as far as God is concerned simply to say, 'Well, I forgive you! You have done terrible things, it does not matter. I will be merciful, I will forgive you.'

You do not find that God in the Bible. God is 'of purer eyes than to behold ... iniquity:' [Habakkuk 1:13]. God hates sin. 'The soul that sinneth,' says the word of God 'it shall die' [Ezekiel 18:20]. God is a God who visits vengeance and wrath and punishment upon the sinner. That was what was happening to the Lord Jesus Christ. Numbered as He was with the transgressors, bearing the weight and the guilt of our iniquity, the Lord visited Him with His anger and His wrath. There are seven sayings that are recorded in the four Gospels - you can piece them together into some sort of order - seven saying of our Lord there upon the cross. One of them interestingly is recorded for us in Aramaic and then translated into Greek and then into English for us - 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? ... My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' [Matthew 27:46] That was the agony of the cross. God the Son, separated by our sin from His own Father; God the Son bearing the iniquity of all our sin and being punished for it. Had you stood at that hill Calvary and had somehow screwed up enough courage to be able to endure observing the crucifixion - and I think that way of putting it is the only way to describe how a person could have survived looking at the crucifixion - had you been able to do that, you would not have seen what I have just described to you. Christ experienced it, the spiritual agony of Christ being the Redeemer, the Saviour of sinners. That was the great thing that was happening there on the cross of Calvary.

But that was not all; there was something else. It was as if the cross of Calvary was the centre of the most ferocious battlefield that this world has ever known. On the one side was the Lord Jesus Christ and round Him, invisible to the human eye, were ranged all the hosts of Satan and the devil himself, thinking that he had finally brought down the Son of God and had triumphed over Him. All hell, as it were, was let loose against the Son of God on Calvary. The greatest conflict that this world has ever known. Paul expresses it here in this verse: 'God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified unto me, and I unto the world'. The conflict? The Son of God against the world, the flesh, the devil.

One of the apostles, John, who was there at the crucifixion wrote three little letters. He speaks about the world in chapter two of his first epistle: 'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof:[ '1 John 2:15-17]. Then as he comes almost to the end of that same letter again he mentions these things: 'And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness' (or 'in the wicked one', the evil one, Satan) [1 John 5:19]. It is another way, of course, of speaking of what was happening there at the cross. Satan and all his hordes and all that is represented by the world, the pride of life, the lust of the flesh, all of these things were confronting the Lord Jesus Christ and seeking to prevail over him.

But they lost and He won! And Paul says that when He was victorious, I, Paul, was also. He was there for me. He said that is what I boast about. I do not boast about an y of these other things: 'God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.' You know, there was a time when you could have said of the man that wrote those words, 'he had the world at his feet'. He was a graduate of what we would have called the university of Jerusalem. A favourite pupil of probably the top professor in that university, a man by the name of Gamaliel, his prize pupil. Top of all the exam lists, a starred first and all the rest of it. And not only that, he was an exceedingly popular man, obviously a very articulate man and a highly intelligent man. He was a good man, not like so many of the great leaders of the world today. You look at their moral lives and you draw back in horror, do you not, whichever side of the Atlantic you find them on! You would not have done that with the apostle Paul. There were no skeletons in his cupboard. The Daily Mirror could have put all their investigative journalists onto his history and they would not have found any secret affairs, or anything that he would have been ashamed of. He was above reproach from that point of view.

A good, upright, moral man - and with it a religious man, a highly religious man. Always there in the synagogue; up at the temple for all the stated feasts and ceremonies. And not only that, but his religion meant this much to him that he wanted to propagate it and he wanted to deal with those who had set themselves against what he thought was the truth. Therefore he became what was really, the arch-persecutor of these Christians. This was the man. He had the world at his feet. He could have had any job that he had wanted. He could have risen in the diplomatic service or up in the highest councils of the nation. There can be no doubt about that.

But suddenly he was confronted by Jesus Christ. The Christ whom he had opposed, the Christ whom he had hated, the Christ whom he had tried to villify and whose truth he had sought to deny. But he capitulated to Jesus.

Or he would have put it in terms like this - there in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the person of the LordJesus Christ dying on the cross, the world was crucified to me. It was ended; it was slain. All that the world had to offer me, I looked upon it as - well you remember how he expresses himself when he writes to the Philippians - dung, refuse. Those things that were gain to me, he says, I looked upon them in that contemptuous way. 'The world has been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.' If the world died as far as I was concerned, I died as far as the world was concerned. All my popularity was gone. I had become a marked man, I was hated, I was vilified, I was hounded from pillar to post. They tried to kill me up in Damascus, they tried to kill me when I went back up to Jerusalem. And even as he had gone up into this part of today what we would call Turkey, he had been stoned and left for dead. That is what the world thought of this man. They did not give him three hearty cheers. They said 'He is a fool, he is an idiot! And worse than that he is a wicked fool and a wicked idiot. And the sooner the world is rid of things and people like him, the better!' The world was crucified to him, and he to the world!

He said, this is what I boast of: the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is nothing else worth boasting of. Human intelligence? What is it! Human achievement? Beauty? Appearance? Eventually they all disappear and disintegrate. You look at the great beauties, the models, and look at them in twenty years time - and for some of them you will not have to wait that long. Look at them - and where is the beauty gone? Look at the great athletes of twenty or thirty years ago, hobbling around on their sticks. All their fitness and their prowess gone. I think of a man who used to be a professor who taught me - an exceedingly intelligent man, a Fellow of the British Academy - and he spent the last few years of his life mumbling rubbish and gibberish that even his own family could not understand. Oh, you see, all these things sooner or later they go. 'But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.'

Do you know the trouble with most Christians? They do not think about the cross. They might be able, in a sense as I have been able to do this evening, they might be able to give an explanation of the cross, to explain perhaps even theologically what happened at the cross. But they never really look at the cross. That is why I like this hymn of Isaac Watts:

Then you remember how he ends that hymn. He is really saying, 'What can I do, confronted with the crucified Lord Jesus Christ. How can I repay Him? How can I come and somehow seek to make reparation to God for what He has done in the person of His Son? It is as if he says, 'Do not even attempt to do so!'

Surely the only thing that you can do when you survey the cross is to give yourself to Him. To stop arguing, to stop boasting, indeed to see perhaps for the first time how empty is all your boasting and to realise that all you must do is come as a contrite, suppliant sinner and ask this crucified Jesus to be your Lord and your Saviour. You do not bargain with Him; you come, you give yourself to Him. You put yourself at His disposal. You say that where He wants you to go, you will go. What He wants you to be, by His grace, you will be. You are not your own, you are His. You have understood the cross. When you come there, you are able to take this text and make it your own: 'But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.'

Amen
 
 

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