Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse nine: “So then those who are of faith”—of faith—“are blessed with believing Abraham.” Those who are faithful are blessed with faithful Abraham.

C1: Along with.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, right. They’re blessed. Meaning those blessings that were promised to Abraham, that he received because of his faithfulness, you will also receive if you are faithful. That’s the “with.”

Verse 10: “For as many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse. For it is written: Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the Law, to do them.” So now St. Paul jumps to the other end of the Torah. He’s now jumped to the end of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 27, 28, 29, 30 is where the blessings and curses are laid out. Here’s what will happen if you keep the Torah; here’s what will happen if you do not keep the Torah.

Note—note—you can read the blessings all day and all night—eternal life isn’t there. And you can read the curses all day and all night—going to hell isn’t there either. Not what the Torah’s about. So let’s talk about blessing and curse, because that’s the move St. Paul just made. He talked about the blessings of Abraham; now he’s talking about curse. Blessings and curse are not just things God says to you, like: God blesses you, that means he likes you; or God curses you, that means he’s angry with you.

C1: It doesn’t mean that?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Blessing and curse are talked about as actual things, first of all, as actual things. So what they have to do with… Obviously, I’m not going to go back and read four chapters of Deuteronomy with you right now, but we’ll loop around to it. If you look at the blessings and the curses there, they all have to do with the relationship between human persons and the rest of creation. If you keep the Torah, you’ll have rains in their season, crops. Everything will function properly; everything will work correctly where you are. You will have this connectedness with creation.  The curses are, if you violate the Torah, the sky will become like iron and the ground will become like bronze, meaning you’re not going to get any rain and you’re not going to grow any crops. This is an extension that goes all the way back to the beginning of Genesis. This is a theme throughout the Torah; it just sort of culminates there at the end of Deuteronomy, because what’s the curse that comes on Adam when he’s cast out of paradise?

C1: He has to earn, through the sweat of his brow.

Fr. Stephen: “Through the sweat of your brow,” right? “You’re going to get your food out of the soil. It’s going to bring forth thorns and thistles.” So the relationship between Adam and the rest of creation is broken, or it’s at least bent and warped; we’ll put it that way. And the reason I put it that way is because in Genesis 4, Cain murders his brother. And Cain has a worse curse, if you look at the language. He doesn’t say, “Cursed is the ground because of you”; he says, “You are cursed from the ground; the ground will no longer bring forth food for you.” So it’s broken completely with Cain. He’s literally told that creation will not cooperate with you; it’s going to be an enemy. That’s why he goes and builds the first city, because he can’t farm. He’s detached from creation, so he’s going to have to engage in commerce. That’s going to be the only way he can… right?

So that relationship is totally broken by Cain’s sin. Cain is sort of the archetypal sinner in the Old Testament and in later Judaism, all the way through the New Testament—not Adam. This is important, too. It’s Cain who is the archetypal sinner. It’s Cain who is the son of the evil one in 1 John. So he’s this example of this curse, this breaking of the relationship. So curse is something that’s out there in the world because of sin. Sin, in the story of Cain, sin is crouching at your door. Adam disobeys; sin as this entity—not sins, but sin—gets into the world. It’s crouching there, waiting for Cain. God warns him before he kills Abel: It’s going to try to master you; you need to master it. And Cain loses that fight; he gets mastered by sin.

But sin is this force. And sin as this force produces this state of curse in the world. So then blessing something is purifying it from the curse and restoring it to its proper place and relationship. We talk about justice being where everything is in its correct place and everything is functioning properly. Justification is restoring that. Blessing something is essentially justifying it; it’s putting it back into its place. So when we bless water on the Feast of Theophany, we’re not making magic water—it’s not for you to take and kill vampires—we’re taking water and restoring water for its original purpose for which it was created: to refresh, restore, heal, cleanse, purify. That’s what God created water to be.

That’s what we do when we bless a person. When God blesses a person, he’s restoring their relationship with the whole created order, St. Paul says. St. Paul is here tying the Torah to this state of curse. So everyone is under this curse, beginning with Adam. This curse is out there in the world. The Torah is given into that context, so that the Torah doesn’t all of a sudden make people accursed: the curse is already there; it’s already there in Genesis, before Abraham even. But the Torah gives this possibility of blessing.

Here we see part of what St. Paul sees the Torah is for. The Torah is a way of life, that’s a way of living, that brings back harmony with the created order. We’re going to get deeper into this, but already we see at least that level. But he says anyone who is under the Torah is under a curse by definition, because if there wasn’t this curse, you wouldn’t need the Torah; that the Torah is related to this condition of curse that prevails. So he says anyone who isn’t keeping the Torah is under that state of curse that prevails in the world at large. So the Gentiles who don’t have the Torah are all out there under the curse; they don’t have the Torah to do anything with.

Verse 11: “But that no one is justified by the Law in the sight of God is evident…” Let me retranslate. “No one is justified, no one is set right, no one is made right through the Torah in the sight of God is evident, for the just shall live by faith.” Again, the just, the righteous, live faithfully.

C1: That’s Martin Luther’s key phrase.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. The just live faithfully.

Is he contrasting people trying to do good things with people who do nothing but believe that God’s promises are true? Is there anyway you could get that out of this context?

C1: That’s in a different world.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter]

C1: As long as you don’t read the whole section…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, as long as you don’t look up any of these verse references. No, but he’s saying: Look, those who are righteous, those who have been set right, the way they get to that state, the way they become mature, perfect, holy, is through faithfulness, not through keeping the commandments of the Torah. We know that, because we’ve already had one example. Abraham is 500 years pre-Torah, and he is held up by God as: this is the righteous man, because he was faithful to the Gospel that he had received.

Verse 12: “Yet the Law is not a faith, yet the man who does them shall live by them.”

C1: That makes little sense.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so again the translator… The Torah is not about faithfulness. What does he mean by that? He means: the Torah is not the standard by which faithfulness is judged, because we just saw that Abraham was faithful. Well, the Torah wasn’t there, so that’s not the standard by which Abraham was judged to be faithful and held up as the righteous man, because it didn’t exist yet. The Torah wasn’t there, so that’s not the standard.

St. Paul is saying that’s not the standard for faithfulness, but this is a way of life within this world of curse. This isn’t the end of what he says. He’s now going to explain more what he means by that.

“Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’—that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”

Okay, so. [Laughter] The curse of the Torah. You’ve got the “of” again. Does that mean the Torah curses people? The Torah is an agent who curses people? No, because that curse was already there before the Torah. This is the curse described in the Torah, starting back there in Genesis all the way to the end of Deuteronomy, this state of curse, that curse that’s in the Torah. The Torah itself does not deliver you from that curse. Keeping the Torah doesn’t make that curse go away. That curse is still out there.

C1: It just manages it.

Fr. Stephen: That curse is still out there. Yeah, as you said, and we’re going to get there, but—spoilers: this is where St. Paul is going to go—it manages it.

C1: Aha. So…

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s fine. It manages it, but it doesn’t get rid of it. That’s why God didn’t say, “Go and get the Syrians and the Hittites and the Egyptians to follow the Torah so that we can purify the world from the curse. Go and get all the nations to follow the Torah so that we can overthrow the hostile spiritual powers. Go and get all the people in the world to follow the Torah so they can return to paradise”—none of that’s in the Torah. The Torah is just given to Israel for a specific purpose, and that purpose isn’t removing the curse from the world.

And that’s why, you have “so the blessing might come upon the Gentiles, upon the nations.” The blessings of Abraham are going to come to the nations—not through the Torah, because the Torah was not the means of getting the blessings of Abraham, ever, for anybody. Those promises to Abraham are the promises of the solution to the curse, the solution to sin, the solution to death, the solution to curse. Those are the things that are promised to Abraham; those don’t come through the Torah. So something else has to happen for those blessings to come to the Gentiles, because the Torah was never sent out to the Gentiles. And the way that St. Paul describes that happening here is that Christ… Well, first of all, he redeems us from the curse of the Law—buys back, that’s what “redeem” means. You redeem a coupon: you cash it in. So Christ comes and buys back, frees from the curse.

Christ frees them from the curse, frees us from the curse, by becoming a curse for us. “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” “Becoming a curse” is, again, bizarre English language. What does that mean? [Laughter] Right? So Christ suffers the curse, up to and including death. Because, remember, what’s the curse? Well, it ends in death…

C1: Sin.

Fr. Stephen: The curse is alienation from creation, which… the ultimate alienation from creation is death, but that culminates in death, but also his estrangement from the rest of humanity, his suffering through his whole life. Everything he suffered culminated…

C1: And he had no home…

Fr. Stephen: Right, having no home, having nowhere to [lay] his head. All of that’s a rejection, all of that betrayal culminating in his death. Christ entered this cursed world and receives that curse upon himself in order to get rid of it, in order to take it away. So it’s Christ for St. Paul that is the solution to curse. He takes away the curse so that all the nations, the whole world, can receive the blessings. You can’t plug “Torah” in there for “Christ,” where the Torah abolishes the curse for the whole world. It wasn’t given to the whole world.

Again, St. Paul’s coming back to the cross: it’s Christ crucified. This is the place where you say, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” It’s not just that he died but how he died. He dies in this particularly “accursed” manner. And so takes the curse and destroys it. I’ll go a little deeper into this—well, I’ll wait. [Laughter]

So because of that—we have this causal chain. The Torah doesn’t deal with the curse. The Torah leaves you under the curse. You’re still under the curse. Farming doesn’t all of a sudden become super easy. [Laughter] The prosperity gospel is not taught by the Torah. If you just have the tassels and don’t eat pork and do this stuff then you will always have abundant crops, and all of your business deals will work in your favor. [Laughter] That’s not what the Torah’s about. You’re still under the curse, and we’re going to get into more about how that management idea works.

It’s Christ who comes, takes the curse upon himself, and abolishes it—from the world, so you don’t have just this little bubble over Israel in the curse, but it’s the whole world. And because of that, now all the nations can receive those blessings of Abraham, those promises to Abraham, of salvation—theosis, salvation, all those things—and the fruit of that—big picture, now—down to you Galatians, is that you Galatians have received the Holy Spirit. That’s the practical result. This is how you receive the Holy Spirit: promise of the Spirit through faithfulness. This is how you receive the Holy Spirit, not because of someone keeping the Torah, including Jesus keeping the Torah, by the way. That’s not here either.

C1: I have a question that may be a distraction, but… You read this in English, in this English translation.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

C1: First of all, it makes almost no sense.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

C1: Second, if you live in the Western culture that we live in, and you try to make sense of it, you’re going to come to the wrong conclusion.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

C1: What do we do about that?

C2: Well, we have a Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We need… Honestly, we need an Orthodox translation of the New Testament in the English language. And we as English-speaking Orthodox Christians have not fully appropriated the Orthodox tradition and faith yet. We just haven’t. We’re still doing that. We’re still working on that.

C1: Our language is actually a barrier.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because the English language that we’re using, terms like “justification” and things, it’s the vocabulary of Protestant theology. So it’s not just a question of how do we express the Orthodox faith in English; it’s [that] we’re trying to express the Orthodox faith in Protestant terminology, and that’s kind of not going to work. So we have to continue—mostly we’re doing that just by using borrowed Greek words like apophatic theology and cataphatic theology and theosis. We’re just taking the Greek words and using them instead of the Latin ones like justification, to try and help with that, but that’s something we’re just going to have to continue to do.

But, yeah, any New Testament you’re going to pick up, including the New King James Version that you find in the Orthodox Study Bible is translated by a Protestant committee. So, number one, they’re coming at it from a Protestant perspective, but, number two, it’s a committee, so they’re also trying not to take sides, usually, in any internecine Protestant debates. So it’s not that it’s Protestant; it’s that it’s vaguely Protestant, which is what makes it even harder to understand. Because if they just let a Calvinist translate it themselves, it would be skewed, toward Calvinism, obviously, but it would at least make sense. [Laughter] But because they’re trying not to do that, you end up with translating participles with a gerund, just “-ing,” going because we don’t want to interpret beyond that; or just putting “of”—“of faith, the hearing of faith.”

C1: So is someone working on an English translation of the Bible [Inaudible]?

Fr. Stephen: There are things.

C1: Is that something you could…? Or could we all…?

Fr. Stephen: It’s going to be a couple centuries before we’re going to have… Yeah, this is probably going to dishearten everybody. See, everybody talks about having an American Orthodox Church in terms of getting all the bishops to make nice and all come together in one big synod. That’s not going to give us an American Orthodox Church. What’s going to give us an American Orthodox Church is when English-speaking Americans have fully appropriated the Orthodox faith and expressed it in American English. And even if all the bishops became best friends tomorrow and all joined one synod with a patriarch, we still wouldn’t have a real American Orthodox Church that was stable and balanced and theologically strong.

C1: It’s sort of a parish, though, isn’t it?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So once we get the authentic expression of faith, all of this jurisdictional stuff will sort itself out.

C1: Oh, really?

Fr. Stephen: Once we’re all professing the same faith together and living the same life together, the rest of that stuff will sort itself out.

C1: That’s a lot of work!

Fr. Stephen: We’ve got a lot of work to do. And you folks are just as responsible for doing your piece of it as I am for doing my piece of it. So that’s why it’s hard. That’s why it’s hard is that there’s this cyclical thing, where Protestantism has read these passages a certain way, and so the English translations all reflect that reading. So you could either go back and read the Greek— but even then, who put together the lexicon you’re using that tells you what the words mean? Yeah, some 19th-century German Protestant liberal. [Laughter] So that’s going to be skewed another way, too.

And again, I’m not saying any of this to bash Protestantism. It’s just we as Orthodox Christians are reading New Testaments that reflect the Protestant tradition of the people who translated it. Just like, if I translate something, it’s going to reflect my Orthodox Christian understanding of it. As humans, none of us is a robot, none of us is completely objective—there’s no way to do a completely objective translation anyway, because words in one language do not equal words in another language, so you can’t mathematically do a translation. You can’t have a computer do a… If you want to see how a computer does a translation, go use Google Translate and see how that works for you! [Laughter] I don’t want a Google translated Bible! That’s going to make a whole lot less sense than this, right? [Laughter]

C1: It also means that we have to struggle within our own minds to deal with thoughts that have been skewed in advance. I mean, you say “justification,” and my mind immediately says, “by faith,” and I know what that means. I’ve heard that in church; wait a minute.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or the word “faith.”

C1: Yeah, the word “faith” itself.

Fr. Stephen: Just, “Oh, I believe that.”

C1: Not to mention “belief.”

Fr. Stephen: “I believe Jesus died on the cross for my sins.” True. There. I am saved. [Laughter] That’s not anywhere in the Scriptures.

C1: So it’s a constant mental struggle.

C1: “Check Yes or No” by George Strait.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] But to a certain extent, that’s always been true. That’s why we have homilies and sermons. That’s why we don’t just stand up and read a text from the Bible and sit back down. It’s always required teaching and explanation and that kind of thing.

C1: But here’s Paul in the first century, and he’s already got people who are confused who needed correction.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And, you know, the prophets in the Old Testament. Confused would be the nicest thing you could say about the people [to] whom the prophets came to preach. That would be very generous to them to say they were confused, and not wicked and evil. Just a little, you know, confused. [Laughter]

This was true in Romans, but it’s even more true now in Galatians. I realize that I’m going through this verse-by-verse and basically re-reading it to you.

C1: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Because, yeah, the reading of Galatians is so calcified in the Lutheran mold that it’s in all our translations. You’ll notice in the Orthodox Study Bible how much of the page is footnotes, as we’re going through Galatians—like two-thirds of the page is footnotes—that’s why, because we’re using the New King James Version, and then you need twice as much text to explain it from an Orthodox perspective as it took to do the New King James translation. So, yeah, it’s where we are historically.

C1: Also the information is a lot.

Fr. Stephen: So verse 15: “Brethren, I speak in the manner of men: Though it is only a man’s covenant, yet if it is confirmed, no one annuls or adds to it.” So he says: Let’s just talk from a human perspective. Okay, human perspective: You make a contract with somebody. Once that contract is settled and you’ve both signed it, you can’t come back and change it, right? You can’t come back and add a bunch of stuff after it’s been signed. That’s kind of textbook illegal. Or you can’t just break it—that’s what it means by annul it: you can’t just break it, be like: Enh, whatever. So this is true, just when you and I make a contract, when you and I make an agreement: we can’t alter it, we can’t add to it, we can’t just scrap it.

Verse 16: “Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made.” St. Paul says this is true just of our human covenant; now let’s talk about God’s covenant. So God’s covenant, when he came, and the Gospel comes to Abraham. Those promises are made to Abraham and his seed. That’s a quite literal reading. You can go and flip back—St. Paul would have no problem with you going—[Laughter] You couldn’t flip, because it was scrolls, but—going to Genesis and reading this: promises made to Abraham and to his seed.

“He does not say ‘into seeds’ as of many,” not to seeds plural, “but as of one, ‘and to your Seed,’ ” singular, “who is Christ.” So something that’s not immediately noticeable about this but that’s kind of important is that St. Paul here is making an argument from the Greek. Here’s why. You literally can’t make this argument in Hebrew, because the Hebrew noun for “seed,” zerah, is a collective noun. It’s like “seed” in English or “deer” in English. So if you were going to make this argument in Hebrew, it would like me coming to you and saying, “Oh, no, see, it says that he has fish. It means one fish, not a whole bunch of fish.” You would look at me and say, “Wait a minute. He had fish for dinner; that doesn’t tell me how many fish.”

C1: “He caught fish.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah: “He caught fish.” How many? Right? He went deer hunting. “Deer,” it’s a collective noun. So if St. Paul said this in Hebrew, said, “See, it says zerah, not zerah.” [Laughter] “It doesn’t say zerah, like a whole bunch; it says zerah like one.” That argument makes zero sense. So he’s literally arguing from the Greek translation; he’s arguing from the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a translation of the Torah, not of the whole Old Testament, by the way.

C1: It’s only the Torah?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the Seventy translated the Torah in 250 BC.

C1: Oh, I thought it was the whole Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: No, people use it that way. Since the 17th century, they’ve been using the term that way, but it’s not correct. [Laughter]

So he’s referring to the Septuagint; he’s referring to the translation of the Torah in Greek, because in Greek it’s singular. In Greek, sperma is not a collective noun. So St. Paul is pointing at the Greek word in the Greek translation and saying, “See? It’s singular.” What this reveals—and you can find this out other ways historically—is that the way in which the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah, was viewed in Judaism of the Second Temple period, was viewed in the synagogue at this time. You could read the Torah reading in the synagogue in Greek, from the Septuagint, in the first century. In fact, there’s pretty good evidence, textual evidence, in terms of how he quotes it, that when Christ stood up in Galilee—Galilee of the Gentiles, not coincidentally—and reads from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind,” that bit about giving sight to the blind is not in the Hebrew; it’s only in the Greek. So there’s pretty good evidence there that Christ read it in Greek.

C1: And the closing the book, too.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. So Greek was used in the synagogue, by itself. Here’s why this is important. You couldn’t read the Aramaic by itself. If you read the Aramaic… You could read the Aramaic after you read the Hebrew, because almost nobody understood the Hebrew any more. In the time of Ezra already, we read in the book of Ezra, most of them didn’t understand Hebrew; they had to do an Aramaic translation. You could read the Aramaic after you read the Hebrew, but you couldn’t read the Aramaic by itself. You could read the Greek by itself.

C1: Does this mean that Christ knew Greek?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

C1: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Which we would… Well, we would expect because he’s God, but also… [Laughter] But also because: Galilee. Several of his apostles from Galilee had Greek names. Andrew is a Greek name. Philip is a Greek name. These aren’t Jewish names. Even though he’s called Kephas, Cephas, quite a bit, he’s also called Petros quite a bit, which is Greek. Why? Well, he’s in Galilee.

The Greek was viewed probably because of the traditions we see in the letter to Aristeas that talk about how the Greek translation of the Torah was produced by 70 (or 72) scholars in 70 (or 72) days. They all translated it separately and produced identical translations. There’s this tradition that that particular Greek translation was literally miraculous. So this weight was put on it. St. Paul could make this argument. He’s making this argument to people who are essentially Pharisees, his fellow Pharisees; he’s making this argument to people who are insisting upon the Torah and circumcision. He’s not just making this argument to Gentiles who wouldn’t know any better, to say, “Wait a minute. What is it in the original Hebrew?” He’s making this to people who are fully aware that this is a Greek translation, but this argument is still authoritative at this point in history.

This idea that it’s just the Hebrew “original” that’s the word of God, that shows up in Rabbinic Judaism later—Christians were using the Greek translation so it was repudiated by the Rabbinic community and then works its way again—I hate that I sound like I’m bashing on them all night tonight, but our Protestant friends get this idea that the Hebrew text is the only inspired version—that would be news to St. Paul.

C1: And apparently to Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it would be news to St. Paul if one of our Protestant friends came and said [whispered], “St. Paul, that’s the Greek. It’s not singular necessarily in the Hebrew, like the Masoretic text, the Hebrew, this is the canonical original. What are you doing?” Like that would be news to him. He’d look at them like they were crazy. He wouldn’t know what a Masoretic was anyway. [Laughter] Masoretes, you know…

C1: Hadn’t happened yet.

Fr. Stephen: Many centuries later. But that point being covered, he’s saying: Look, the Seed is Christ. Christ is the heir of all of those promises; all the promises made to Abraham, Christ is the heir.

Why is this important? There aren’t some other promises of which people who are ethnically related to Abraham are the heirs, having to do with land or anything. Remember, the land was just a sign, a temporary sign of the greater promise of the Gospel that comes in Christ.

C1: So does it mean nothing?

Fr. Stephen: Christ is the heir. Yeah, it was the sign.

C1: So it was a sign back then.

Fr. Stephen: It was a sign back then. So it would be like going and finding the manger and saying, “See, we found the food trough where Jesus was born!” Like, that would be neat, it would be a relic, but… Christ is more important than that, than the trough. [Laughter] The same way, the Gospel is more important than the strip of land.

C1: I see. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Christ is the one who receives all these promises. He’s the heir. We talked about this a little in Romans 9, but Christ is the heir. So if someone’s going to inherit, they’re going to do it how? If Christ is the firstborn and the heir, you’re going to do it through Christ. In Romans 9, we talked about—just to talk about, briefly review—the way inheritance worked in ancient Israel: the firstborn son inherited everything. He shared it as he saw fit with the other heirs.

C1: Sometimes [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, you inherit everything, and then you share it. We see that person come up to Christ in the gospels and say, “Rabbi, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me,” because apparently his older brother had just decided to keep it all, and he was saying, “That’s not fair. Rabbi, you go tell him he should share it with me!” And Christ responds by telling him, “Why are you worried about money and inheritance. Come, follow me and be my disciple.” [Laughter]

So that’s how it worked. That’s what St. Paul is referring to here. That’s contained in this idea. If Christ is the seed, if Christ is the heir, then if you’re—and he makes this explicit in Romans 9-11—if you’re cut off from Christ, you’re cut off from the inheritance. You’re not going to receive any of those promises, you’re not going to receive any of those blessings if you’re cut off from the heir, if you’re cut off from Christ. You can’t get around Christ to get back to Abraham. Tribally, you’re… however you might want to try to do that.

Verse 17: “And this I say, that the Law, which was 430 years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect.” So he’s talking again about making alterations to a contract. Humans, you can’t just come and alter the contract. So he’s saying the Torah comes 430 years later, after this Gospel is preached to Abraham. That’s not God altering the deal. “I promised you all these things through your seed.” That’s why he says that this covenant “was confirmed before by God in Christ.” It’s in Christ that this is going to happen. This is said to Abraham. God doesn’t come along 430 years later and say, “Oh, by the way, also… you need the tassels on your garment and don’t eat any pork, and…” and add a whole bunch of stuff to it.

St. Paul is saying you don’t do that with just human contracts. God doesn’t do that either. So, again, the Torah comes; the Torah has this separate, other purpose. It’s not interposed into that original purpose. It’s not: You need to be faithful to this Gospel that’s been proclaimed and get circumcised and do this and this… Right? It’s still just, to receive those promises, you need to be faithful, and now faithful to Christ because he’s the heir of those promises.

But it’s living faithfully, not just believing it’s true, not just believing Jesus exists, but living faithfully.

C1: Is there something like test the faith of the demons or something like that?

Fr. Stephen: Right, when we get to St. James’ epistle, we’ll talk about that, but they’re like, yeah, every demon in hell gets all the correct answers on the true/false test. They all know Jesus is the Son of God. You look at the gospels when Jesus is about to cast out a demon, they call him the Son of the Most High. That’s not faith. [Laughter] Identifying Jesus as the Son of the Most High is not faith; demons do it.

C1: That’s one of the ones Luther removed.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he wasn’t real happy with that.

Verse 18: “For if the inheritance is of the Law, it is no longer of promise, but God gave it to Abraham by promise.” So it’s saying if you receive these promises through the Torah, then it’s not through the promises made by Abraham, but God made those promises to Abraham. So, logically, those promises can’t be based on the Torah. Can’t be based on the covenant that comes through Moses. As we already said, if you actually read that covenant, it doesn’t promise any of those things. It’s a whole different thing that it’s doing.

Timewise, we’re going to need to end here, I think. Next week—this is good; this is to be continued—next time on Bible study, St. Paul’s going to talk about what it is that the Torah does, then. If the Torah isn’t sort of shoved into the already-existing promises, what is it that the Torah does with reference to the curse and all that, and how did it function? And then how does it continue to function. That’s what we’re going to now— St. Paul’s going to define that. He’s been saying what it isn’t—here’s all the things it isn’t—now he’s going to talk about what it is, when we come back next time. Hopefully everybody will be on tenterhooks waiting for that. Thank you, everybody!