Feel the Freedom
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1
When he was ten years old, our son was very independent and truly did not understand why he needed parents.
We were homeschooling so I gave him an assignment. He was to write an essay explaining what he would do if we gave him one day without parents. The understanding was that I would perform no motherly duties: no hugs when hurt, no instruction on school assignments for the day, no cooking, no cleaning up.
The essay would determine whether he got a “day off.”
There was one memorable sentence in the essay. “If I had the day off I would ride my bike down Spring Street and feel the freedom.” (Spring Street was a busy street with a steep hill that was strictly off limits.)
Today, I have been studying Galatians and I can “feel the freedom!”
Paul is trying to get the Galatians to remember the teaching that he had given to them, and they had accepted, that grounded them in the faith. Since then, Paul had moved on and some false teachers had come in and were adding to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They were adding circumcision and starting to “observe days and months and seasons and years (Galatians 4:10)!”
Paul calls all these laws that were being reintroduced, “elementary principles of the world,” that they had learned as children. He reminds the Galatians that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons (Galatians 4:4-5).”
Christ subjected Himself to the law, took the punishment of the law, so that He could secure our redemption from it! This is freedom – not from keeping the law as best we can, but from having to perfectly follow it in order to be saved from Hell. No one can possibly do that, except the One who did, Jesus Christ.
In my Facebook feed and Tweets on Twitter, I see evidence that there are more Galatians around. These Christians have heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ in all its fullness, but are listening to teaching that says we must observe “this” day or “that” feast.
They are getting all tied up in the law that Christ has fulfilled and ignoring the mercy and grace of Jesus Christ in His atoning sacrifice for our sin.
My fear is that by being bound by the keeping of the “days and months and seasons and years,” precious time is being taken from our call to love and serve our neighbors.
We must love the law of God and try to keep it with the power of the Holy Spirit as it applies today. But, please enjoy the knowledge that, through faith in Jesus Christ, you, too, can feel the freedom from those elementary principles of the world.
Beth, I appreciate your concern over the observation of feasts and days, years or months. I am not sure how their observance could lead us to neglect our fellow man or which particular feasts you find objectionable. I would like to point out that the words of Paul, in Galatians, were to reassert to the Christians that salvation no longer came from the observance of Judaic law but from the complete, salvific work of Jesus Christ on the cross. He was addressing the Judaizers who would have the new Christians believe that to have salvation they must carry the mantle of purity laws, feast observance and the liturgical year if the Old Covenant. In my opinion, it is a great leap to say that the traditions and feasts that were developed in the body of believers under the New Covenant are then wrong or put there to take the place of or detract from the finished work of Christ, in fact they are there to celebrate the work of Christ! If we are to follow this line of thinking, one might object to observation of the Lord’s Day. The Bible explicitly commands the observance of the Sabbath (which was Saturday), the change to Sunday only occurred under the leadership and authority of the apostles and we (and I think you) observe Sunday as the Sabbath. Sunday is the primary Feast of the Church, it is the Feast of the Resurrection! And I am heartily thankful for this and the many other feasts and seasons of the liturgical year, not because they obtain for me salvation through their observance but because they are gifts to us, to give structure to this joyful worship that is to be our lives. I know that your interpretation will be determined by your own particular tradition but as a Christian who has, indeeed, heard and tasted the fullness of the Gospel, it is disturbing to see the faithful tradition of liturgical observance set up as a straw man and summarily knocked down. I respect you and am thankful for your friendship.
Becky, Thanks for the response. The subject has been on my mind because someone (not you) told me that by not observing the feasts days (and this was talking about the Feast of Booths and the other sacred feasts, not Sabbaths, though she did also think I am wrong to worship on the Lord’s Day), that I was jeopardizing my position in heaven. Not that I would not be there, but that it would give her a closer proximity to the Lord (which I am sure many people will be much closer). Then, I start to study Galatians and Paul is clearly teaching them that they have stepped away from his teaching by believing Jewish teachers who had added circumcision and the observance of the days, months and years to the gospel. In Chapter 1 he says that there are “some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel.” In chapter 4 he points out that the teaching that they must keep the days, months, years, is part of that complaint. I am not sure how else to read Paul’s teaching. In Galatians 2:10 Paul says that the only thing he was asked to do, outside of putting his faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, was to remember the poor. I read that as part of what Paul was reminding the Galatians, that they could not let the poor be neglected (that is my putting it together, not explicitly stated), so they could make the observances. If you see a straw man, then I did not do a good job of making my case. I, too, am grateful for our friendship. I can “hear” in your tone that this bothers you but it really is how I understand it.
Beth, thanks for the explanation. I was not familiar with the feast of booths, had to look it up. I assumed (wrongly, it seems) you were referring to the observance of all days, months, seasons, feasts as “adding to the gospel” or wrong in and of themselves. Since the specific feast you objected to has an Old Covenant origin, I can understand your reading and referencing of Paul’s exhortation to the Galatians because he was warning against the “pole position” mentality of Judaic law. Yes, the subject has great meaning for me because the understanding and observance of the liturgical year has had a great impact on my own journey of faith and holds deep meaning now. It has also markedly increased my understanding of our responsibility to the needy around us, so thinking that your argument was that it may cause us to neglect the poor had me confused. Perhaps I should have asked for clarification before accusing you of decrying all liturgical observance 🙂 thank you for your usual gracious and gentle response