Galatians 3:1-14

J.B. Phillips New Testament

What has happened to your life of faith?

3 ^1-5 O you dear idiots of Galatia, who saw Jesus Christ the crucified so plainly, who has been casting a spell over you? I will ask you one simple question: did you receive the Spirit of God by trying to keep the Law or by believing the message of the Gospel? Surely you can’t be so idiotic as to think that a man begins his spiritual life in the Spirit and then completes it by reverting to outward observances? Has all your painful experience brought you nowhere? I simply cannot believe it of you! Does God, who gives you his Spirit and works miracles among you, do these things because you have obeyed the Law or because you have believed the Gospel? Ask yourselves that.

The futility of trying to be justified by the Law: the promises to men of faith

⁶ You can go right back to Abraham to see the principle of faith in God. He, we are told, ‘believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.’

^7-8 Can you not see, then, that all those who “believe God” are the real “sons of Abraham”? The scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles “by faith”, really proclaimed the Gospel centuries ago in the words spoken to Abraham, ‘In you all the nations shall be blessed.’

⁹ All men of faith share the blessing of Abraham who “believed God”.

¹⁰ Everyone, however, who is involved in trying to keep the Law’s demands falls under a 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.’

¹¹ It is made still plainer that no one is justified in God’s sight by obeying the Law, for: ‘The just shall live by faith.’

¹² And the Law is not a matter of faith at all but of doing, as, for example, in the scripture: ‘The man who does them shall live by them.’

¹³ Now Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law’s condemnation, by himself becoming a curse for us when he was crucified. For the scripture is plain: ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.’

¹⁴ God’s purpose is therefore plain: that the blessing promised to Abraham might reach the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, and the Spirit might become available to us all by faith.