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Dalton SDA Church

Chester Clark

At The Cross

Father in heaven, we are so grateful that You have called us to be Your disciples, to follow You, to take up our cross daily and to follow You.

And today, Lord, we want to understand more about You.

We want to understand more about Your love.

We want to understand more about Your sacrifice in our behalf.

We want to understand Your Word better and Your will better.

And so, we just pray that as we've gathered today from different walks of life, different experiences, different backgrounds with different needs, that You, the all-providing God, would provide for each 1 of our individual needs.

And right now, we just open our hearts to be taught by Your Spirit, and we thank You in Jesus' name.

As Paul is writing these words, I suppose there may have been some who he had in mind.

Perhaps as we look in other parts of the book of Galatians, he's particularly addressing the Judaizers or others who are trying to take people back to the ceremonial law.

But in a sense, The law is not just the ceremonial law in the book of Galatians.

There's more than 1 sense of the word law, and you're probably familiar with this if you're familiar with the Adventist message, right?

Because we get asked these types of questions.

Well, didn't Christ do away with the law?

The law can refer to several things, can't it?

The law can refer to the first 5 books of the Bible, the books of Moses, called the law.

It can refer to the moral law, the 10 Commandment law.

It can refer also to the law contained in ordinances, and by the way, that's the 1 that specifically was nailed to the cross, right?

And the law contained in ordinances refers to the ceremonial law, those ceremonies and sacrifices, feast days, holidays that made up the Jewish economy that pointed forward to Christ.

The shadow of things to come, the real person, the real Savior, the real Lamb, the real sacrifice came in the person of Jesus Christ.

Today we look back on the sacrifice of Jesus as something that has already occurred.

We don't look forward to it as the Jews did, the believers of God did in the Old Testament.

But Paul here writes in Galatians 3 and verse 13, for Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law.

Whatever it is, it's what Jesus redeemed us from.

Whatever it is, Jesus redeemed us from it, the curse of the law.

It's what we would have experienced, what I would have experienced had it not been for Christ's redemption.

Today we want to explore what the curse of the law is and why Calvary matters.

We want to understand more about that as we explore God's Word today.

First, before we look at the curse of the law, I would like us to look at the blessing of the law.

This is a phrase that we don't have in our vocabulary very much because we tend to, well, maybe it's because Paul didn't use it in Galatians chapter 3 verse 13, that's fair, that's a good reason why we don't use this phrase a lot.

But the reality is that the same passage which Paul is going to use, which we'll see a little later to reference the curse of the law, the same passage contains the blessing of the law, and I want to look at that today as well.

So let's open our Bibles, if we could, to Romans 7 and verse 12.

This will be our first passage we're going to look at.

We're going to look at a number of them here as we look first at the blessing of the law and then later at the curse of the law.

Romans chapter 7 verse 12, when you're there can you say amen?

Romans chapter 7 verse 12 says, therefore the law is holy and the commandment holy and just and good." And by the way, what law is being talked about here?

Well, it's pretty clear in the context of this passage that Paul is talking about the 10 Commandment Law because he quotes in verse 7, the law had said, you shall not covet.

And so the law, the 10 Commandment law, the Bible says is holy, it is just, and it is good.

Now, this is in contrast to some people who don't like rules, right?

Well, come to think about it, that's all of us.

You know, for those of you…you know, you're going to get tired of hearing about children and illustrations from me from children because I'm a fairly new dad, so I'm probably gonna talk about it too much.

So if you can use 1 of those pastor's helpers, just say stop talking about kids so much.

That's sort of where I'm at in life right now, you understand.

But I had a conversation, I know she's 2 years old and I'm trying to, I keep that in mind, but I'm still, she's quite precocious, so I'm trying to teach her, I talked to her today about, or this week, about rebellion.

Because there's sometimes you ask her to do something, she does the opposite.

And you're like, okay, let's talk about this.

And the talk is not, my dear, you're rebellious.

My talk was, my dear, we're all rebellious.

And it's something that Jesus has to help us with, isn't it?

I mean, unconverted, our heart is rebellious.

I'm not trying to step on toes, but it's reality.

And so our natural heart is not subject to the things of God, neither indeed can be the way He says in the next chapter.

And there are some even theologically today that don't like the law of God.

I'm not sure exactly why, Because the law is holy and just and good.

But some have a burden, even within Christianity, to try to denigrate the law, to say the law was bad or the law was terrible, and they try to equate the law with the curse of the law.

The law is actually filled with blessings.

And I'm thankful that God did not redeem us from the law, but from the curse of the law, because had He redeemed us from the law, He would have redeemed us from being able to be blessed by the law.

So let's look at the next passage we're going to look at here this morning.

Deuteronomy, I'm sorry, Isaiah 48 and verse 18, and then we'll be going to Deuteronomy.

Isaiah chapter 48 and verse 18, another passage which reveals to us the character of the law of God, the blessing that comes from God's law.

Our Scripture today does not say that God redeemed us from the law.

The cross of Christ did not remove the moral law.

If it did, it would remove us from the blessings of the moral law, which is holy and just and good.

48 and verse 18 says this, "'Oh, that you had heeded My commandments!

Then your peace would have been like a river, and Your righteousness like the waves of the sea." Does that sound like a blessing, friends?

Obeying the law, obeying the commandments brings blessings.

God does not want to remove those blessings from us.

Our Scripture today says that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, and He's quoting today from…He's quoting there from Deuteronomy, so we're going to look at that as well today.

Let's look at Deuteronomy chapter 27, And we'll start with verses 9 and 10.

Now we're going back to the last of the books of the law, the books of Moses, the Pentateuch.

And in fact, it is Deuteronomy, the root of that title itself is the book of laws, basically.

And so it's a fitting capstone to the law of Moses.

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At The Cross

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