Second Sunday after Pentecost: Epistle, Galatians 3:23:4-7            

Galatians 3:23-4:7

I suppose there are those who live their lives in the legal profession, who because of their devotion to calling, would characterize the law as beautiful. I’m not sure how many outside that realm would say the same. Even law abiding citizens look at the law as something we must stay on the right side of. There’s health there. But beauty in the law?

Paul the apostle writes in our epistle for the week about the proper way to see God’s law. And like everything, and I mean everything in the Bible, the law must be seen in its relationship to the Savior. Jesus is, after all, the primary lens through which the Scripture must be interpreted. Not Israel or the Church, nor covenants or anything else. Jesus is the plumb line. 

Chapter 3 and verse 24 of Galatians reads, “Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.” Luther highlights the three uses of the law of God. And at the end of the day they all serve this larger purpose which is centered in the “second” of those three uses. God’s law acts as a mirror to expose our warts. And worse. And then that same law  screams to us all, “You need rescue by another.” That’s the tutelage of the law. It teaches us we are not sufficient at all in ourselves. It exposes us to the truth that before faith comes, we do not have a free will at all in spiritual matters. We simply cannot choose God’s rescue on our own.  We are slaves to sin from conception. And unless the law has its way with us to actually point us to our Rescue, we will forever be bound by its relentless chains. There is no mercy in law. But there is One whose mercy frees us from the law’s grip. Thanks be to God!

There is beauty in the law simply because it points us to Jesus.