I had a most surprising email last week from a 15-year-old Adventist who has begun reading about Adventism and is convinced it is wrong. This person wrote:
“A lot of people have been telling me to study Galatians, so I started this morning. There’s this one verse, Galatians 3:10, that I don’t understand. Do you think you could maybe explain it to me?”
When we first left Adventism and I was learning to understand the new covenant, I sometimes found myself bumping into New Testament passages that confused me. I admit that Galatians 3:10 would have been hard for me to explain early in my worldview shift.
In the first place, I wouldn’t have understood the significance of the Old Testament source of Paul’s quote. In the second place, I would have had to talk myself through that quote in order not to be confused and fearful that I had missed something, that maybe my no longer keeping Sabbath really did mean I was under a curse!
In context, however, Paul’s answer is helpful. He begins at the beginning and shows these new believers from the Old Testament that living by faith cannot simultaneously mean living by the law. After all, as he says in Galatians 3:12, “The law is not of faith.” Paul, the consummate Old Testament scholar, knew that the faith and righteousness of the new covenant were foretold in the Old Testament. In other words, living by faith is something separate from keeping the law. The law is not required in order to have saving faith, nor is it required of those who have saving faith on this side of the cross.
Because I believe these questions about law and faith are common to all of us who leave Adventism, I will share my answer with this writer. Before I share my answer, however, we need to read Galatians 3:10:
For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” (ESV)
In order to explain Galatians 3:10, let me back up a bit and talk about the passage from Deuteronomy 27:26 that Paul is quoting. The book of Deuteronomy has a specific function in Scripture, and I never learned this function as an Adventist. We know that the first five books of the Old Testament are called “the books of the Law”: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Most evangelical scholars agree that Moses is the author of these five books, and Jesus refers to Moses when He speaks to the Pharisees and quotes from the books of the law. In other words, we see even from Jesus that He (the Lawgiver Himself!) saw Moses as the one who gave Israel those five books in written form.
Deuteronomy restates the covenant
The book of Deuteronomy is different from the others. Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers were written to explain the Mosaic Covenant and its requirements and purposes as well as to give the story of Israel as they left Egypt and wandered 40 years in the desert. The book of Deuteronomy is the record of Moses restating the Mosaic covenant to the wilderness generation who went into Israel. When Israel grumbled and complained and God disciplined them by causing them to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, that period of time was long enough than an entire second generation was born during those years, and the first generation largely died off.
This fact meant that most of the Israelites who finally went into the land had not been born yet when God gave the law at Mt Sinai, an event that occurred about two months after leaving Egypt. So, before he died, Moses, now an old man close to 120 years old, re-stated the Mosaic Covenant to the wilderness generation before they went into the land. He wanted to be sure they knew the law (and “the law” was not just the Ten Commandments; it was the entire Mosaic Covenant including all the laws of sacrifice, feasts, the priesthood and its role, the laws of not mixing linen and wool in clothing, not cooking a kid in its mother’s milk, etc etc.).
So, in Deuteronomy, Moses restated all the terms of the Mosaic covenant to the generation who had been born after God gave it at Sinai, and in Deuteronomy 27 (from where Paul quotes in Galatians 3:10), we find the story of Moses having the tribes of Israel divide into two groups. When they finally will cross over the Jordan into the land, six of the tribes were to stand on Mt Gerazim, and the other six were to stand on Mt Ebal. They would thus face each other. The Levites would then pronounce the curses for not keeping the law (Deuteronomy 27:14–26), and the Israelites would answer “Amen” to every curse the Levites pronounced. The curses (you can read them) included things such as “Cursed is he who dishonors his father or mother” (v. 16); “Cursed is he who distorts the justice due an alien, orphan, and widow” (v. 19); and “Cursed is he who strikes his neighbor in secret” (v. 24). After each of these curses, the Israelites on Mt Ebal would respond, “Amen”…or “So be it”.
The Law brings a curse
Importantly, notice that those curses were not just for laws found in the Ten Commandments. The curses were for anyone who broke the rules of the Mosaic Covenant which included all of these items: justice for aliens, personal damages between Israelites, and so forth. In other words, Israel was responsible for THE WHOLE LAW, not just for the Ten. If they broke any detail of the law, they were guilty and deserving of God’s curse. Deuteronomy 26: 27 summarizes this fact when it says:
“‘Cursed is he who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’”
Chapter 28 shows the other half of this ceremony; after the pronouncement of curses Israel would face if they broke any detail of the law, they then received the pronouncement of the blessings they would receive if they obeyed the Lord their God (see chapter 28).
Now, back to Galatians 3:10. Deuteronomy 27 is the key to understanding Galatians 3:10. The Judaizers are attempting to sidetrack the Galatians—new gentile believers who had trusted Jesus’ finished work and had been born again WITHOUT keeping the law, and the Judaizers were attempting to put those young believers under the law, saying that they couldn’t really be God’s people unless they kept the law. (It sounds so familiar, doesn’t it? It’s the message Adventism teaches!)
So Paul quotes God’s word to Israel, spoken by Moses, in which He made it very clear that if they broke any details of the law—not the the Ten Commandments but the entire Mosaic Covenant, they were under God’s curse. That was the clear message of Deuteronomy 26:27.
Israel knew that if they broke any detail of the law, they were cursed, and Paul is reminding these Galatians that they can’t believe the Judaizers because the Judaizers are not teaching the truth about the law and about the reality of Jesus. He is reminding them that, if they keep the law, they are under a curse.
Adventists don’t understand this fact; we were taught that LAW = Ten Commandments. That is not what the Bible teaches. The LAW is a unit; the entire Mosaic covenant is THE LAW. Israel understood this fact. Paul is simply explaining to the Galatians that they, as believers, cannot go back under the law because if they try to keep the law and see it as their “authority” as born-again Christians, the law itself will place them under a curse.
What Adventism didn’t teach
Adventism did not teach us that the law contained, at its core, a CURSE. If any tiny piece of the law was broken, the person was guilty of breaking it all, and he was under the curse of the law. When Jesus came, however, He FULFILLED the law. He “became a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). He took our sin into Himself and died the death our collective sin deserved. He took the Law’s curse onto Himself, paid the price of the curse, and then BROKE THE CURSE by shattering death.
The curse of the law is death for sin. No human can escape that curse—unless he trusts Jesus and His finished work and repents before Him and believes that Jesus paid the price for His sin. The fact that Jesus rose from death is the proof that His death was sufficient to pay for our sin, because the curse of death has been eternally shattered. Death no longer has the last word about each of us. Instead, if we trust Jesus, our death was fulfilled by Him, and the life of the cancelled curse of death becomes ours.
If a person does NOT trust Jesus, though, his sin remains on him, not on Jesus. Ultimately we will die the death our sin deserves if we do not believe in the Lord Jesus and His finished work.
Jesus, though, has removed that curse from us if we have trusted Him. The law condemns every human to death and reveals every person to be a sinner. There is NO person who can perfectly keep the law—no person, that is, except God the Son who was without sin. Because He was without sin, He could fulfill all of the righteous requirements of the law. He kept it perfectly. He took its curse, and His perfection and His deity meant that His sacrifice was sufficient for us. He could pay for each person’s sin by His death because He was the sinless Lamb of God!
All to say, Galatians 3:10 is simply reviewing the fact that the law condemns Every.Single.Human to the curse of death, because no one can keep every single requirement of the law. Because everyone is under a curse if he doesn’t keep every requirement of the Mosaic covenant/law, we need God’s grace given to us through Jesus’ perfect sacrifice and His resurrection. We are justified by His blood, and we receive eternal life because of His resurrection life (Romans 5:9, 10).
Paul goes on in Galatians 3 11–12 to explain that we can’t live by the law AND by faith. The righteous, he says (quoting Habakkuk) live by FAITH. But he clearly says, “The law is not of faith.” Everyone who tries to keep the law, he explains, must live by the law (quoting Leviticus 18:5). You can’t live by FAITH in Jesus and also look back and hang onto the LAW.
Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, and if we look back and try to hold onto the law while claiming to believe in Jesus, we have not understood either the Law or what Jesus did. If we grab the law now that Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, we are actually breaking the intention of the law. The law pointed to Jesus, and we essentially reject Him if we cling to the law.
Cling to Jesus! †
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Thank you! I had never heard that explanation, tying Galatians to Deuteronomy. Why were we never taught that???? I can give 10 reasons!
Haha! Yes…I agree! Those 10 reasons—and the way they were taught to us—obscured many truths in Scripture!