by Kent Leslie ✉️
In verse 16 “justified,”
I mentioned last week that Pharisees totally knew this, and taught they weren’t saved by following the Law, but by trusting God. Paul actually tweaks that idea a little and specifically says we gotta trust Jesus. ’Cause we do. Who explains God and his will better than Jesus? Not the Pharisees!
There’s a really popular Christian teaching, called dispensationalism. It was invented by a Plymouth Brethren pastor named John Nelson Darby in the 1830s. He wanted to explain why God doesn’t do miracles anymore, so he pitched the theory God divides history into dispensations, time periods where God changes the rules for how he deals with humanity, and how he saves us. So during bible times, there are miracles!—and now there aren’t. If you’ve got a Scofield Reference Bible, or a Dake Annotated Reference Bible, or MacArthur Study Bible, they’ve got dispensationalism all over ’em.
Dispensationalists claim back in Old Testament times, God did justify people by works, back during what they call the “dispensation of Law.” If you broke the Law, and didn’t ritually sacrifice an animal to atone for your sin, you went to hell. But now humanity is justified by faith. (Although some dispensationalists teach that Jews are still justified by the Law. Seriously!)
Dispensationalism is not biblical at all. It’s based on a lot of out-of-context verses. But it’s super popular, because dispensationalists write nearly all the End Times books on the market. They claim to have the End Times all figured out. Timelines and everything! And for those timelines they’re also using a lot of out-of-context verses. Plus its foundation is the belief God doesn’t do miracles; therefore nothing End Times related can happen till he turns them back on, which he won’t do till the seven-year tribulation. (Of all the crazy things, there are End Times teachers who correctly believe God never turned off the miracles… yet they still preach dispensationalist End Times teachings! Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee are among them.)
I bring up dispensationalists because they claim in these verses, Paul was trying to inaugurate a new dispensation—the “dispensation of Grace.” And no he’s not. Because if he were, he wouldn’t quote Old Testament!—it’s the wrong dispensation. And Paul’s gonna quote the OT seven times in chapter 3.
But here Paul says something Pharisees firmly believed, and taught, and he probably taught it to the Galatians himself: “By the works of the law no human being will be justified.” [