Are we all family? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Galatians 3 speaks about how Abraham was given a promise. Abraham is normally Exhibit A. He’s the father of the faithful and he was declared righteous in the sight of God for believing the promise.
Bates contends we have misunderstood what the promise is. It is not justification by faith. That would make sense since according to Paul, Abraham was justified by his faith in his own lifetime. Why would the promise be that Abraham would have what he already had?
In Galatians 3: 8 the gospel that Scripture announced in advance to Abraham is not justification by faith but expressly all nations will be blessed in you. The gospel here pertains to the arrival of the Messiah as a fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham regarding his singular seed (3: 16).
Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 1557-1559). Kindle Edition.
So what does this have to do with being in the same family?
We often talk about Jesus is the only way to God, but we really don’t talk a lot about what’s the way to Jesus. How does one come to be in the community of believers? If it is done in multiple ways, then there is not a common bond between us. You can be justified by faith or justified by the Law.
What Peter is doing in Galatians 2 then is creating a rift in the family by saying that if you were a Gentile, you had to live like a Jew. That was the way to show you were a part of the covenant people. Of course, pre-Christ, that would have been entirely correct. After Christ, you show you are a part of the covenant people by allegiance to Jesus.
Through the king’s loyalty to God and to God’s people the gospel creates one worldwide family out of the many nations. That is, the gospel does this when people give their allegiance to the king as a response to it. In Galatia, table-fellowship rules that reinstituted distinctively Jewish “works of the law” practices were splitting that one people into Jew and gentile factions, denying the truth of the gospel in its one-family purpose and result. In other words, justification by pistis is not the gospel (nor part of it) but rather is a key doctrine that safeguards the unity of the one true church. It shows that those who create false dividing walls, such as Jew and gentile, within the one true Jesus-is-king church are massively and dangerously in the wrong.
Matthew W. Bates. Beyond the Salvation Wars (Kindle Locations 1568-1574). Kindle Edition.
Side topic on this from me personally, this is my problem with many people on the dispensational side of things. There is often seen as being that God has a plan for the Jews and then God has a plan for the Gentiles, but if Romans 11 is true, God has one covenant people only. Christians do not replace the Jewish tree. We are grafted into it.
Next time, we’ll see what Bates has to say about what he calls, the sad irony of justification.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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