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Lord’s Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.

For the Presence of God

O  God, be present with me always, dwell within my heart. With your light and your Spirit guide my soul, my thoughts, and all my actions, that I may teach your Word, that your healing power may be in me and in all the saints of your church universal.

by Philipp Melanchthon, 1550

Because Of You

Because you picked me up, when I struggled to get through.
Because you healed my heart, when it was thrown and shattered.
Because you gave me hope, when it seemed so out of reach.
Because you filled me with peace, when chaos flowed through my veins.
Because you showed me the light, when there was only darkness.
Because you gave me comfort, when my voice cried out in pain.
Because you reassured me, when the doubts screamed in my head.
Because you kept me going, when there seemed nowhere to go.
Because you sustained me with strength, when weakness became all I knew.

Because you came and stayed, when everyone else turned around and left.
Because you gave me a purpose, when life seemed so pointless.
Because you restored my happiness, when life seemed to snatch it away.
Because you filled this emptiness, when the void echoed with loneliness.
Because you helped me let it all go, when I gripped the tightest to hold on.
Because you showed me the beauty of life, when the world showed me nothing but hate and corruption.
Because you gave me a better life, when the old one fought to come back.
Because I am nothing without you, nothing but a hopeless being.
Because only You could tear down my wall of pride, and instead build it back up with love and humbleness.

Because of all this, I give you my life Lord.
I will put all my fears and failures in Your hands, my worries that consume me, my pain that destroys me.
You were always there, even when I rejected You.
Because of all You are, my life, oh God, is yours.

~ Jacqueline Burciaga

Meditation

The phrase “be not afraid” is written in the Bible 365 times

Benediction

May the God of peace, who declared victory over death by the resurrection of His only Son, Jesus Christ, make me perfect in every thought and act through His grace, that my life might be pleasing in His sight and that I might share the perfect peace that is only possible through Him, to whom be glory for ever and ever.

Think of the day ahead in terms of God with you, and visualize health, strength, guidance, purity, calm confidence, and victory as the gifts of His presence.

Pride in Wisdom

Galatians 3:19 (BSB)

hy then was the law given? It was added because of transgressions, until the arrival of the seed to whom the promise referred. It was administered through angels by a mediator.

Note: “Because of” can just as easily be translated “on account of” or “for the sake of.” It could hardly be less precise. Does the law “restrain” sin, or “define” sin, or “deal with” sin (on an interim basis), or “increase” sin? All four meanings are possible and have been argued by eminent scholars.

Galatians 3:19 (DP Readers’ Bible)

19 Then why the Law? To increase our awareness of sin. It showed humanity what constituted transgressions in the eyes of God.

DP Parallel Bible (3-Column) - Galatians 3

Notes on the Scripture

Why the Law? (Galatians #35)

We have as our text today one of the most ambiguous statements in the Bible, because the various possible readings are not just different: they are in some respects opposite! While our DP Readers’ version — which, remember, is a paraphrase translation — reads “To increase our awareness of sin,” like all paraphrases it takes a theological stance. The literal meaning is simply “on account of transgressions.”

The most common-sense meaning (and the one that many people might immediately assume is correct) would be that God sought to decrease or restrain sin by delivering laws forbidding it. He was showing us what was right and wrong, so that we could choose to act right. This is exactly how most people look at the Ten Commandments. Why did God say, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”? So that people wouldn’t commit adultery, right?

A lot of eminent people have interpreted it exactly that way, throughout the history of the church. And the law, undoubtedly, did decrease sinful conduct. One need only look at the Jewish attitude towards, say, homosexuality or adultery, and compare it to any other major group around the first century A.D. There was less homosexuality and adultery among observant Hebrews than among, say, Greeks.

Pederasty, for example, was an integrated element of life in the most enlightened society of ancient times: Athens. In the dialogue know as the Symposium, Plato argued that homosexuality (with younger men or boys) is a higher form of love than heterosexuality! The Hebrews, on the other hand, were directed to stone to death people committing sodomy (among other deviant sexual acts).

But Paul is unlikely to be claiming that restraint of sinful behavior was the Law’s primary purpose. His sole topic in Galatians 3 is salvation, and more specifically, the inadequacy of the Law to save the human soul. His purpose is to convince the listener/reader that one cannot attain righteousness by trying not to sin.

As Lee Strobel puts it, “Jesus Christ did not come into this world to make bad people good; He came into this world to make dead people live.”

A similar reading (primarily argued by the brilliant Scottish theologian, J. D. G. Dunn) is that the Law, by its numerous forms of sacrifice as atonement for sin, was a sort of interim measure to obtain forgiveness until Christ would come to offer the final and perfect sacrifice. But while there is surely merit to the claim — the Old Testament rituals for atonement are many and frequent — it has the same problem as the first theory, only worse; it not only disconnects from Paul’s topic, but also undermines it. Paul does not say belief in Christ creates a better or longer-lasting righteousness; he says belief in Christ provides the only means of righteousness.

At the opposite extreme, and in fact more attuned to the context, is the idea that the Law was given to increase sin! Paul does call the Law a “curse.” If we read through 1 & 2 Kings, we see that Israel actually became horrendously sinful, to the point that God virtually destroyed it. But the idea of God intending to increase sin is inconsistent with one of the core attributes of God: He is purely good. Some verses indicate that God might deafen those He disfavors to truth and allow their sin to run unchecked, but never that He promotes evil.

Which leaves us with what would seem the most probably meaning, in the context of Galatians: God gave us the Law to define sin.

This is consistent with Paul’s theological emphasis, e.g., “Where there is no law, there is no transgression.” (Romans 4:15) In fact, as we have seen earlier, the Law might be said to create sin in the sense that a law creates a crime; conduct, no matter how evil or offensive to society, is not a “crime” unless and until a law prohibits it. Sin is thus, in a narrow sense, evil specifically defined. And the primary purpose of the Law, at least in the context of this Chapter, is to prove to humanity that it cannot be freed from sin by its own effort.

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