#why was the law given

[psalmonesermons]

Lessons from Galatians Part 3b

Chapter 3:19-29 What was the Law for?

19 What, then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come. The law was put into effect through angels by a mediator.

This is talking about Moses. The Law as it were coming through a middleman whereas the promise was given directly from God to Abraham.

The Law was delivered by the angels, but the Gospel by the Lord Himself.

Hence, the Gospel is superior to the Law, as the word of a Lord is superior to the word of his servant.

20 A mediator, however, does not represent just one party; but God is one.

Here the Apostle briefly compares the two mediators: Moses and Christ. "A mediator," says Paul, "is not a mediator of one." He is necessarily a mediator of two: The offender and the offended.

21 Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not! For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law.

22 But the Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe.

23 Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed.

24 So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith.

25 Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.

v19-25 So what is the purpose of the Law? The Law exposed our needs once and for all. It was given to show man what he was really like i.e. unable to keep the law and so reveal to him his great need for a Saviour.

The law showed what God’s standards of morality and conduct were and we are unable to meet them. The Law was our teacher that taught the ABC of being in right standing with God.

Was the Law a bad thing? no it has done its job for you and me by showing our need for repentance and turning to Jesus Christ. The law was given to Moses (acting as a mediator) through angels by God , but the promise was given directly to Abraham by God Himself.

Thus in some way showing the superiority of the promise to the Law.

A mediator is a friend that comes between two parties and is not to act merely with and for one of them. God is one party and sinful man is the other.

26 You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus,

27 for all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.

28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

29 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.

v26-29 The believers are no longer counted as servants but as sons of God who have an inheritance in the Father’s kingdom.

Through baptism we have identified with Jesus in His death, burial, and resurrection. so we die and rise again new creations in Christ Jesus.

The Law made a difference between the Jew and Gentile , the slave, and the freeman but the promise brings all true believers together into the one standing before God as sons of the living God.

Some people try to make this scripture try to say all sorts of things that it cannot mean. It clearly does not abolish human sexuality, male and female may be equal in value before God but not in responsibility and are certainly not interchangeable.

Jesus Christ is an equal opportunity Saviour looking only at your heart not your race or culture.

Belonging to Christ we are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise are therefore entitled to the great blessings and privileges of the promise.

Summary

It was always God’s position that man could only be justified by faith and that God accounted Abraham a righteous man who acted in faith. The Law was given to expose sin and sinfulness and was our teacher to teach the ABC of salvation that we are unable to keep the law and can only be saved through faith in the promised seed Jesus Christ.

Through him we have become sons of God and can inherit all the great and precious promises of God.

He will be our God

We will be His people

He will dwell with us

Amen

Your Prayer

[rainboneish]

the most relatable tweet i’ve seen today

[nerdytshirts]

I think something that gets lost in the discourse of whether Beren and Luthien were wrong for not giving the Silmaril to the Fëanorians is that Luthien was kidnapped and held captive by Celegorm and Curufin, whose end goal was forcing her to marry - and with how Tolkien's elf marriage=sex that would require sexual assault or coercion in the very least - and then tried to murder her fiancé. And to her knowledge, C+C were never reprimanded for it by the other brothers. The only public consequence they got from their own family was in the form of Celebrimbor leaving. I love the Fëanorians, I really do, but if I were in Luthien's shoes, I would tell the entire family (minus Celebrimbor) to get fucked. I would not be taking the moral high ground and handing over the Silmaril to the guys who imprisoned me and tried to kill my loved one for sake of property rights and family heirlooms. The expectation that she should is wild.

[i-dreamed-i-had-a-son]

“because he never accepts that it's never been about righteousness--it's about repentance.” except javert killing himself IS repentance.

well, it’s like 12 different things, because bro had gone days without sleeping and very little food and water and he already had low self-worth and kept asking the amis to kill him and just assumed he was going to die AND THEN valjean upended his understanding of the world and morality. he was really going through it & there are a lot of overlapping reasons for why he jumps into the seine.

but javert is like Number One Most Responsible guy in the whole story. taking responsibility is his Thing (forever bitter the musical doesn’t include the punish me monsieur le maire scene). how else, in his derailment, could he atone for his conceived misdeeds other than by handing in his resignation to god? in the brick he had already left a note urging his superiors to treat convicts at toulon better, which is another step in his repentance (and another crime the musical commits by not including it). jumping into the seine was another step.

honestly a lot of ppl who like the book think the musical was dead wrong to exclude him from the big heaven group sing, because it COMPLETELY undermines the themes of forgiveness and compassion threaded throughout les mis. like the musical was simply wrong lol.

This is helpful context! I am still finishing the brick, although I have fully read the abridged version, and that detail about the letter wasn't included, so I didn't know that occurred! (And thank you for the message--this is a long response but I'd love to hear more of your thoughts!)

I agree that Javert is certainly deeply distraught and remorseful; like you mentioned, his worldview is literally falling apart, and his actions reflect his mental state. But his death isn't really repentance--in the sense that it's not what God would have wanted. To me it reads like a Judas situation: a desperate realization of a huge mistake, and doing the only thing you think can make it right, namely, ending it all. That's the just punishment for someone so wrong, isn't it?

But true repentance, meaning the repentance that the Lord desires, is about changing your ways, not "paying a price." Had Javert really understood the beauty of Valjean's mercy (an image of Christ's, just as the bishop's undeserved mercy was to Valjean himself), rather than killing himself, he would have lived to also become "an honest man"--in heart. One who could forgive and understand forgiveness, for himself as well as others. One who could recognize that he is not The Law, that he can fall, but that he can also be "brought to the light." One who could accept that men like Valjean, and men like himself, CAN change, and be changed.

It's tragic to me because so much of "Stars," and his character in the book as well as the musical, is about wanting to be righteous, to rise above his birth and the sinfulness he associates it with. It's about wanting to please the Lord by his actions. But in his end, he shows he never understood what God really wanted from him, and that's where my original phrase comes in: not righteousness, but repentance. To live, and face the man you were, knowing it's no longer the man you are. That it's never been about what you've done or can do, but about what's been done for you. That's the Gospel that he could never fully accept.

To use another example you mentioned, that misunderstanding drives why he asks the Mayor (Valjean) to punish him--in his worldview, mercy is unjust, or at the very least, unfair. Evil must be punished; "those who fall like Lucifer fell" receive "the sword." But "as it is written," God "desires mercy, not sacrifice" (Matthew 9:13). God would have wanted Javert to live, and Javert couldn't see that, and that's why it's devastating to me. In his misunderstanding of the heart of God, he misses what would have set him free from the chains of sin he's always been trying to escape.

That's why he's contrasted with Valjean, who (though he carries guilt about his past till the end of his life) is eventually able to face it and confess what he had done to those he loves. He knew there was mercy to be found, if only it was asked for. Javert was too blinded by pride and shame to realize it, and so, while broken, he never was able to truly repent.

For that, you must go on.

[timeisacephalopod]

The type of Christian who asks atheists how they don't like, murder people on the reg are so funny to me because they seem to think their religion makes them the Peak of Morality when statements like "if you don't believe in God how comes you don't do X thing" all but outright state they have no idea why shit like murder and rape is bad except that God doesn't like it lmao. Like way to admit you have no intrinsic sense of morality and need to be afraid of a higher power to be a decent person, but I promise if you're not a piece of shit it's actually very natural not to want to do heinous evil shit all the time potential punishment from a higher power or not 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

[multiversal-madness]

Thinking about the Bronev family again, I hope this is coherent-

(Cw non graphic mentions of child death, Azran Legacy spoilers ahead)

Leon Bronev, a man who was likely once a good ordinary man gets kidnapped along with his wife, leaving behind their two young children because he’d found something big about the Azran (did that make it his fault? Did he blame himself?). He loses his wife while there (I’m partial to the headcanon that it wasn’t just a normal sickness) and endures who knows what other hells while stuck in that cult for decades, ending up with nothing left but the Azran.

He turns down darker and darker paths going on some twisted version of a sunk cost fallacy (he’s gone this far already, why not go further?) until he either knowingly or unknowingly orders the murder of his granddaughter and daughter in law. Then he does it, he completes his goal, he solves the last puzzle of the Azran only for all of it to have been for nothing. Then he dies for it, but is revived with the rest and thus being unable to pay with his life. He’s arrested, likely too old at this point to hold out any hope of making amends or fixing what he’s done.

Hershel Bronev, still a young child when his parents are stolen from him and he’s left with caring for his younger brother. Then they get news that he’s going to be adopted alone, that he’d have to leave Theodore behind. Instead of that, he gives up this better life and his name, giving it all to his little brother who he wouldn’t see again for decades. He becomes Desmond Sycamore

He grows up devouring his father’s archeology books, to find a way to get some kind of revenge on the ones who stole his family from him. Instead he finds peace, he finds a new family, people who love him and people he loves the same. But it doesn’t last. Targent comes again to steal his family away, this time with his own Father at the head. Desmond Sycamore dies and he becomes Jean Descole.

But despite now loathing Targent, hating his father, he follows in their footsteps. Threatening loved ones, manipulating people, even attempting to kill a child (Luke was only 10 the first time Descole had tried to kill him), all so he could be the one to uncover the Azran. He becomes like his father in more than just appearance, but does he even realise this?

He’s put on many different faces before, but he pulls Desmond from his grave to use as a mask for what should be his final trick. He meets his brother again, but he’s the only one who knows it. Throughout their journey, he almost finds that peace again, but he knows it won’t last, he won’t be tricked again. He goes forth with his plan, revealing himself attempting to claim the sanctuary for himself.

But then he jumps in front of a laser for Luke, sacrificing himself for the boy he’d attempted to kill on more than one occasion (Maybe Desmond Sycamore still existed somewhere inside him…) On what would be his deathbed, he tells his rival of their connection, of them being blood. Then they leave to confront Bronev, he should have died but he couldn’t, not yet. He drags himself to final chamber, dying and being revived with the rest of them before disappearing, leaving loose ends untied. Now Descole has no reason to exist either. Who is he?

Then There’s Theodore Bronev, but that wasn’t his name anymore. He was given his brothers first name, given his new parents’ last name, he was Hershel Layton, he has been for most of his life.

He endures tragedy after tragedy, not even remembering the first, but he doesn’t let that change him. He loses his best friend (loses the rest of the Stansbury gang), his partner (then a month in a coma) and even when he remembers his lost family, he stays a good man, a true gentleman.

I don’t know how to end this, just wish I could add a section on Rachel but we know so little about her ugh

[fictionadventurer]

Help, I'm getting deeply attached to female characters written by Wilkie Collins again.

[gillianthecat]

Actually I would like to revise my response to the question of "BL characters I want carnally." There is one (1) BL character I want carnally:

His gold necklace is driving me insane. Charn, the things I want to do to you. Everything's an act and the act is working on me.

[bettyrightnow]

also unrelated but it's insane how we've decided to center activism around ...... celebrities

[carefulfears]

where would you have ended the series at? like some people say ftf, some say s7, some say it was right to go all the way through the revival.

do i have to keep it exactly as is and decide where to cut it off or can i go all the way through and change literally everything that happens? lmao

keeping everything the same, my ideal end would’ve been after s8. mulder and scully holding that baby, family restored, deciding he was the truth they had been looking for: that IS the end of this story. that is the only natural conclusion to what we’re doing here. there is literally no reason why it ever should’ve changed from that.

and i like s8!! other than the reproductive trauma nastiness and some dull episodes, i love the narrative of that season.

if you had to do s9 and for some reason we had to lose the baby, if i had my way, 2nd movie would’ve still been a MOTW (a completely different one lol) and dedicated a lot more to exploring the themes that are already present. what it means to be followed by “the darkness”, what it’s like to live in a haunted house, what the effect of missing child after missing child is on them and their relationship. the coping mechanisms that they’ve developed and the ways that it comes in-between them.

revival could’ve still happened, could’ve had a lot of the same ideas, i’ll even allow them the same motivations for trying to find the baby. but instead of killing jackson’s adoptive parents and doing…..whatever that was……it could’ve focused on mulder and scully getting back into solving x-files while getting to know him, on some level.

and on moving forward from that pathology that kept them so haunted for so many years; a lot of the growth they do have in the revival is in them talking about their child and not just avoiding it and carrying around the guilt. to actually be able to know him and form a relationship with him would’ve gone a long way to an imperfect but still satisfying resolution to their characters.

it’s wild how bad s9/IWTB/revival are when, in my opinion, it would’ve only taken such MINIMAL changes to be good?? CC clearly regrets the plot that ruined his show, and it would’ve been so easy to fix it, rather than try to erase it.

basically, i want IWTB and the revival, written by glenn and james not chris.

[the-busy-ghost]

Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class. 

Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules. 

But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point. 

I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009. 

But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end? 

Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:

And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out

[mantisgodsdomain]

We are just now realizing that still being on the short list of kitten fosterers means that we're going to be having to handle weaning five 3-4 week old kittens that need to be fed every few hours while also having university four to six hours a day and honestly, that's not going to be very fun. We'd say "maybe we should have taken on less art challenges this year" but honestly we've been having a great time with the art challenges it's just the 4-6 hours of school that's been rapidly eroding our soul

[lizhly-writes]

JMX BODYSWAP?! GASP

yeah so i was thinking about some old files and ended up musing over a "rebirth of the evil-mother-in-law" transmigrator snippet i wrote at one point. failing to find it, i figured i would sit down and write maybe 300 words about it to excise it from my brain.

the "og fl" is a character named "jiang yage", so i spent maybe two minutes contemplating character names for the original transmigrator ("surnamed jiang? these sorts of characters usually share at least a part of their name with the 'og'") before i abruptly realized i already had a character surnamed jiang and i had the chance to do the funniest thing.

[rayroseu-reblogs]

tweet

im still so sad theres no voice for Stitch on EN i wouldnt complain as well if they switch to Stitch's EN VA (as JP actually used his JP VA) but copyright issues is such an ass 😭😭😭

[spaceshipkat]

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[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

I can now officially declare that there is in fact a plot to the Fast & Furious movies, and the plot is "group of poly overdramatic morons trip and faceplant into being international special ops, probably because they're given the jobs nobody else wants. news at eleven."