δουλογος: You Cannot Bribe An Impartial Judge.

Wayne,

Well meaning, but doctrinally inept Judaizers began teaching Galatian converts their own confused understanding of how to be sanctified as a believer. Those Judaizers regarded Christianity as an addendum to their Jewish faith. Christ to them, was a new patch sewn into the fabric of their old religious system - their error assumed that Christianity was a new form of Judaism. Thus they acknowledged Christ as the Messiah, but He was a Jewish Messiah, and Christianity was just the new orthodox wing of Judaism.

These having not so full an understanding of the new wine, as it were, were framing their "new" faith in the wineskin of their old religion. They may have understood that Christ was the lamb of sacrifice, and that the temple system was no longer valid, that is, they may have understood that Christ replaced the temple system of sacrifice, but they still believed that after the dust settled you were now a Jew and you had to behave like a Jew and everything worked more or less like it had in the past except that you didn't have to do your sacrifices in the temple anymore.

So it was that these Judaizers, were either unable or unwilling to let go of the thought that sanctification is produced by us keeping the law. These same began to teach the Galatians that in order to be good Christians, they had to behave like good Jews.

They were wrong of course, which is why Paul is correcting them - we are not sanctified by works, that mindset is a carnal mindset - trying to bridge the distance between God and man by doing works to merit God's favor. Even if we could merit God's favor by our tainted works, it would be madness to rely on such as that since all who are in Christ have Christ as their righteousness - if we have sinned all day, we stand before God justified because Christ died for our sin, and if we have been righteous all day our righteousness counts for nothing, for we are regarded by God according to Christ's righteousness and not our own. God does not regard us according to our sin -or- our righteousness, He sees Christ and Christ only in both of these. That is what imputation is all about. Not just that our sins are imputed to Christ, but that His righteousness is imputed to us, such that being in Christ we are "right" before God at all times. Since God's relationship with us depends on Christ's finished conduct and not our own, we do not establish a relationship with God by our conduct, rather just as the relationship that was originally established by faith (the moment we were justified), so too our sanctification is established by faith as well.

The trouble in understanding this for many people is because while justification is forensic, that is, it is a spiritual truth that happens in eternity, is understood in a moment, yet remains entirely intangible - like a wedding vow, after the ceremony the couple is wed, they are in a new relationship, but nothing has really changed in the individual, yet there is a new (intangible) relationship there.

But sanctification is not forensic, it is not intangible. We measure it against a standard (Christ) and we find ourselves lacking, and desiring to bridge the gap between where we are at (obedience wise) and where we know we should be (Christ-like), we attempt to do by effort what cannot be done - that is, we attempt to change our own spots by keeping the law.

It isn't that we should toss the law out the window, which is of course the charge that Paul knew would come first when he began to teach sanctification in Romans six - it is that we are not made one bit more holy by keeping the law. That our holiness is not dependant upon what we do, but rather what we do is dependant upon the holiness God imparts to us through faith. A holy man is an obdient man because he is holy, the Judaizers believed that an obdient man became holy by his obedience, and that error we call the Galatian error.

This post was directed not at Christians attempting to sanctify themselves, but at non-Christians who imagine that they needn't be too concerned about eternal things, since they live a "better" life than others - surely God will overlook their sin simply because they are so good. In other words, the point of this topic was justification, and not sanctification.

The Galatian error is a sanctification error - trying to mimic or produce holiness by regimented obedience, rather than extending faith to God in our weaknesses, crying out in faith for Him to provide us what we need - a right love for him that motivates us to obey so that our yoke is light and our burden easy. We do the same stuff, but we don't do them in order to avoid guilt, but rather we do them because it is the joy of our heart to do them.

The greatest hindrance to sanctification is the flesh, because the flesh doesn't get any better, that is, while our Spirit is redeemed and within us becomes a new heart - yet the old man is ever present with us and he wants no part of it. That is why the cure for the old man is not more instruction or more obedience - it is death, death, death - for the greatest enemy to the process of our sanctification is our own self.

Anyway, I am off to work - I hope that helps make the distinction.