Today I'll pick up on the topic
that I started a couple weeks ago, and that is, who are the
people of God? For my text today, I'll use as
my base Galatians chapter 3, verse 26 through 29, which says,
For in Christ Jesus, You are all sons of God through faith.
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female. For you are all one in Christ
Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then
you are Abraham's seed. Heirs according to the promise. That will be my base text. Let's
keep that in mind as I take us through this sermon today. Also,
as an extra reading, please read this later. We'll not go into
it, but it's a very, very important passage addressing this subject
in part, and that is John chapter 8, verses 31 through 59. And in this place, as you read
through the text, note that Jesus makes a distinction as He addresses
the crowd. He makes a distinction between
the physical offspring of Abraham and the true children of God.
That's an important concept. We'll see that develop as we
go through this today. As a review of the last sermon,
let me quickly just state a few things. The question of who are
the people of God is a very, very pertinent topic. Every religious
group that you can think of, every religious person that you
know, be they a Christian, some Christian denomination, a Jew,
a Hindu, an Islamic, whatever, every religious person reckons
themselves to be part of the people of God. And all of us,
if we are religious, hold the idea in our minds and our hearts
of who God's people are, and certainly we would include ourselves
as one of those persons. And whether we know it or not,
that as a core idea in our heart affects all of the rest of our
ideas, be they religious, be they secular, be they political. What led me to this thought and
discussion lately was a talk I had with a friend of mine in
a parking lot at work. I discussed this just briefly
last time. I'll review it again. We were
talking about politics, not about religion. That wasn't the purpose
of the discussion. And in it, my friend voiced the
opinion that America is in a perilous position now because it seems
we're turning our back on Israel, which can do nothing but bring
us into a very dangerous situation. I said, well, why is that? Well,
of course, that is because Israel is God's people. And we know
that if we turn our back on God's people, that we will suffer for
that greatly. Because all who bless the seed
of Abraham will be blessed and all who curse the seed of Abraham
will be cursed. Well, the Scripture does say
that. And that leads to the question then, who are the people of God? In an instant, religious theology
and politics came together. Right there. It wasn't the purpose
of the discussion, but it came together. And it does that always
in our lives. And the question, who are the
people of God, is an important question to think about and settle
in our own minds and hearts. And I hope today that we'll look
at some verses and some Scripture and come to a conclusion. We
need to understand who God's people are. Now, we limit our
discussion to two groups of people that claim to be God's people.
And I do this for a reason. We will talk about Christians
and Jews today. Certainly, Hindus claim to be
God's people. Certainly, pagan tribes in Africa
claim to be God's people. But that's not our focus. I will
limit it strictly to those groups, that being Christians and Jews,
that are claiming to be the people of the real God. Judaism and Christianity are
linked. We can't separate them from history. So the claims that Jews are God's
people and Christians are God's people must be looked at and
taken seriously. Christianity came out of Judaism. We know that. That is a historical
fact. That is a religious fact. So
there is a link between Judaism and Christianity. And both groups
claim to be the people of God. Now, of course, the Jews claim
that Christians are not the people of God. And on the other side,
Christians, some Christians are willing to say that the Jews
are also the people of God. Because of the historic and religious
lengths of Judaism and Christianity, there seems to be in Christian
circles a confusion about the identity of the people of God.
This, in our day and age, has been furthered by dispensational
end-time theology. That is the current popular and
most prevalent end-time theology there is. And we'll not go into
a big discussion of end-time theology here except to say that
dispensational theology definitely, definitely focuses on the Jews
as God's people. And in fact, as you listen to
dispensationalists, you will find out that they have one salvation
for Christians, and that is in Christ, and then another salvation
for the Jews as God's chosen people. And you will hear them
as they speak and preach and in their writings oftentimes
make the distinction between God's people and Christians. Think about that. A distinction
between God's people and Christians. In dispensational theology, if
you will take it right to its logical conclusion, Christians
are indeed second-class citizens of heaven. Some dispensationalists
will go so far as to say that Jews do not even need to accept
Christ to be saved. There is a special salvation
for the Jews that is apart from Christ. Now, I would ask, is
such an idea even a Christian idea? Can we claim to be Christians
and say that there is salvation apart and outside of Christ?
I think not. The idea that Jews are a special
people is not new to Christian circles. It's not new in the
religious history of Christianity. Jesus, as he walked on this earth,
as he addressed the people, as he spoke to the masses, spoke
of the true kingdom of God and the true people of God And that
kingdom and those people were much more grand and glorious
than the temple on the hill. The Jews of his day could not
tolerate that teaching. They were bound in the law in
legalistic ritual and in tradition and they would not see a grander
and more glorious kingdom and a brighter people than what they
could see on this earthly level. They hated the message that Christ
preached. They railed against it. They
mocked it. And ultimately, they killed Christ. After the ascension of Christ,
the church is brought into being, birthed by the Holy Spirit And
the early church also struggled to define the identity of the
people of God because they were there in the midst of the Jews
who were saying, no, we are the people of God. And there is the
house of God on the hill, the temple. You may have a valid
message to a point, they would say, and Christ is a good beginning. He's a good beginning, but let
us complete your faith. Let us bring you to a fuller
understanding of the faith in the temple and in the law. Paul, the apostle, defended the
Christian message against the Judaizers, those who would bring
the Jewish law back in to focus. He spoke loudly and long against
Judaism and its encroachments into the church. Now it's important
for us to remember our history. The New Testament was written
in a day and a time And it was written to real people in real
places, addressing real issues of their day. The New Testament
was written largely by Paul, but the others too, to address
heresies, false teachings in the early church, to correct
the church's view of Christ and what salvation is. The major message that was addressed
in the New Testament in the letters, the heresies they wrote against
the apostles that is, the heresies they wrote against was the encroachment
of Judaism back into Christianity. That's important to remember.
We talk about and in discussion oftentimes glorify the persecutions
and the martyrdom of the early Christians. But let us understand
that the persecutions we read of in the New Testament in those
days and the false teachers that Paul and the others wrote about
were not the world at large. the false teaching of Judaism
and the Jews that would rail and persecute Christians. That's
important to remember as we read the New Testament. And I do realize
that to say this makes me sound anti-Semitic, and that's not
the point. But to grasp the proper principle
that the Scripture would have us to understand that God would
have us to understand through the Scripture, we must understand
the Scripture in its time and its place that we may grasp and
understand the principle, the true principle, and then make
application now. Paul wrote against the encroachment
of Judaism into Christianity. There was and is a division between
Judaism and Christianity. And we must remember that. We
must remember that. And again, I'm not trying to
sound anti-Semitic or against the Jews or anti-Jew. I am not
in saying that. But that is the context of the
New Testament. Paul is not writing against the
encroachment of belief in Greek gods and mythology into the early
church. He's not writing because he's
afraid that some of his church members will be worshiping Zeus
or Aphrodite or Hermes or any of those other pantheon of Greek
gods. That's not his point at all.
He was writing against the introduction, reintroduction of Jewish law
into the Christian message. That's important for us to remember.
Paul addressed this many places in his letters, but the place
that I chose to look at today is his letter to the Galatian
church. Galatia was a region in what
is now east and central Turkey, if that helps you place it on
a map, north of Israel, but in what would be now central and
eastern Turkey. The church there was a mix of
Jewish and Gentile believers, but the primary people he's writing
to in the church are Jewish, I believe. And I think the context
of the letter says that. These people came to faith, a
strong faith in the work of Jesus Christ apart from the law. Paul
says that as he addresses the church in the beginning. You
started so strong in the faith. You believed in Christ by faith. But there were some who had come
into the body and now were preaching the law. The message was, yes,
Christ was a good beginning place. And Christ pointed you where
you need to go. But now understand that there
is the law. These people were coming in and
they were bringing some in the congregation back to the law. Back to the law. And Paul writes
to address this issue. Now, Paul didn't just take this
willy-nilly. This was not a light issue for
him because Paul made a strong distinction between salvation
by faith or by law. And you can't mix the two. It's
one or the other. One or the other. And Paul says,
but Christ is faith. This is the truth. It's faith.
It's faith. It's faith. He did not just reckon
this as bad teaching. this incorporation of the law.
He reckoned this to be a very dangerous thing. Pulling the
people away from God. Not bringing them back to God,
but pulling them away from God. He says that this message they're
preaching is another gospel. Another gospel. And he says,
but it's really not a gospel. It is a perversion of the gospel. And he said that these people
who preach this are accursed. They're accursed. These people
say they're men of God. They say this is the message
of God. But indeed, he said, this is
a perversion. And these people are not men
of God. They're accursed. They're accursed. Now, why would
these people come in? Why would they have any credibility
in the congregation? This is important for us to understand.
These were people that came in and in time they're now preaching
a message that is contrary to what these men, these people,
these believers had learned from Paul. Preaching a different message. Why did they have any credibility? Well, it's all tied together
in history and religion. These people had credibility
because, like Paul, they were Jews. And they drew from the Scripture. They drew from the Scripture.
They, like Paul, knew the Scripture backwards and forwards. Now the
Scripture we're talking about is the Old Testament because
that was the Scripture of the day. There was no New Testament
then. But these people had the appearance
of very godly people. They were Jews, so they had that
link that took them back to the religion of God. They drew from
the Scripture. They could make their point well,
drawing from the Scripture. They had the appearance of authority,
just like Paul did. Now we understand that Paul had
a greater authority that was not based in human knowledge
at all, but in the revelation of Jesus Christ Himself. But
these people, so far as you and I, the public, could discern,
spoke with authority. And they knew their Scripture
and they presented it well. And people who were listening
and who were, I believe, sincere in their desire to please God
were led astray. They were being drawn back into
the law by these people. But let us remember that Jesus
came with a message that said that God's people are greater
and more numerous than any one nation and that true religion
of God was not limited to the temple. Jesus spoke about the Jews and
their message. Jesus spoke about false teachers and things that would come. And
Jesus was speaking specifically about these people that were
now creeping into the Galatian church. The early church had to address
this issue. This was critical. Christianity
as a people, as a movement, had moved away from the synagogue,
away from the temple, away from the synagogue, into the fields. And people who were in the past
not God's people, that being the Gentiles, were now becoming
God's people. So an understanding had to be
reached. It had to be reached. Who are
God's people? One group is in the church then
saying that it's Jews. And really, if
you want to be God's people, you will become a Jew. Basically
what they're saying. And then Paul, inspired by Christ
himself, defends the faith saying, no, it's not at all that. It is not race. It is not bloodline. It is not ritual. It is faith
in Christ. It's faith in Christ. Judaizers, those people that
would bring the law back in, as I said, spoke with authority.
And they knew their Scripture and they used the Scripture to
prove their point. They used the Scripture to prove
their point. And they say, look, who better than we should understand? Because after all, we are Jews. We are the descendants of Abraham. Couldn't argue that. We should know better than anybody
what the real message is. We are indeed the descendants
of Abraham. Now in the Galatian letter, Paul
addresses this very issue because as they point to their Jewish
religion, as they point even to Abraham, that's exactly where
Paul goes with his argument. That's exactly where Paul goes
with his argument, is to Abraham. Abraham becomes the example that
Paul uses to prove that it is not by any works that one is
brought into the family of God. Not by any works. Abraham believed,
and it was counted to him as righteousness. And it's important
to remember, as Paul points out, This is before there was a law.
So Abraham certainly could not point to the law and say, there
it is. I am the one. Abraham believed. And that's
where Paul goes with his argument. Abraham. The Jews could claim
no greater authority than Abraham. Paul goes to Abraham. Then Paul
explains. the promises given to Abraham. And this is very important because
there are promises given to Abraham and his seed in the Old Testament. Without question, without question,
God promised Abraham and his seed many things. And Paul says, but we must understand
the nature of that promise because the promise was to Abraham the
man and his seed, his offspring. But Paul points out that this
seed is not plural. It's not plural. It is to one
particular offspring that God made all His promises. One offspring. Not all the offspring. And of course, we could dig into
the languages and sort that out. And I'm no linguist, so I can't
do that. And I won't here except to say
that's exactly Paul's argument. It is in the book of Galatians.
And that is the point he makes, that the promise was made to
one seed, not all seed. And then he says that seed is
Jesus Christ. The promises were made to Abraham
the man and the seed, Jesus Christ. All the promises were made to
Christ. All of them. Then, as we realize
it now, those promises are applied by Christ and through Christ
to the many. That's Paul's point. It's not bloodline. It's by a
promise made to Jesus Christ and distributed, given out, applied
by Jesus Christ. Remember this, and it ties into
the fact that the promises were made to Christ. At one point,
Jesus himself said, all that the Father has given to me. That phrase jumps into new life
in my mind and my heart as I realize that the promises that God made
were made to Christ. And then Christ said, All the
Father has given to me. Let's read that passage again. Knowing now that the promise was made to Christ, the seed,
and then applied to us through Christ. For in Christ
Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of
you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is
neither Jew nor Greek." That's a powerful statement right there
considering the audience that Paul wrote this letter to. There
is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free.
There is no male and female. For you are all one in Christ
Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then
you are Abraham's seed. Heirs according to the promise. Paul answers the question Right there. Who are the people
of God? There are those who are in Christ
Jesus. There are those who are in Christ Jesus. Identity as
God's people, not by race. There's neither Greek nor Jew. Not by bloodlines, not at all.
It's not by national identity. You can't say that this nation
over here is God's people and this one is not. You can't say
that. It's not by social standing.
Not by any of that. It is by Christ. By faith in
Christ. These are the people of God. Those who believe in Jesus Christ. Any departure from this is a
departure from the truth. Paul says that any departure
from this is weak and worthless teaching. The old order, the Old Testament,
the old covenant is gone. With the death, burial, and resurrection
of Jesus Christ, there is a new covenant in place. It does not
recognize anything but Satan. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians
5.17 that there is a new creation. The old is gone. The new has
come. The new has come. The people of God are those who
believe in Jesus Christ. That's Paul's answer. Now, if
you're that dogmatic about it, If you insist that is true, in
most Christian circles, you will be scoffed at. Hey, hey, hey, what about Israel? What about the Jews? That certainly means something,
right? What about the Jews? The Jews are a lost people. They're no different at this
point in history than any other lost people. They're no different
than a pagan tribe in Africa. They're no different than Eskimos
in Alaska. They're no different than the
people that we walk past in the streets every day that don't
know Christ. The Jews are not any better or
any worse than any other lost people. The Jews need Christ. They need Christ. At the time
of Christ, they needed Christ. As Paul wrote his epistles, they
needed Christ. As we speak today, the Jews need
Christ. What about the nation of Israel?
I mean, it's a miraculous thing, isn't it? That there was no Israel,
and now there isn't Israel, and that started the time clock,
and things are spiraling, and it all hangs on Israel. Well, it is kind of strange that
after all these years there is a nation of Israel again. But
is that nation the old Israel? No. The theocratic nation of
Israel is gone. In 70 A.D. it was completely
destroyed and most of the Jews of the day were killed by the
Romans. Israel as a theocratic nation, gone. The temple was destroyed,
dismantled and is not there to this very day. The nation that exists today
is just a nation. Now they bear the name of Israel
and most of the people there are religiously, or I hate to
even say religiously, they're by social identity Jews because
the nation of Israel as it exists today is not theocratic, it is
secular. It is a secular nation. So it's
an entirely different kind of nation than existed in Old Testament
times. The nation of Israel bears the
name Israel. It is ethnically made up of people
that are socially Jews. But it is not the Old Testament
nation of Israel. It is not the theocratic nation
of Israel. And certainly, I will be so bold
as to say that it is not the true Israel. Paul identifies
the true Israel of God in Galatians 6, verse 16, where
he tells us that the true Israel of God is made up of those of
faith in Jesus Christ. We can't say that about the physical
nation of Israel now. It is not a Christian nation,
if you want to use that terminology. In fact, it is anti-Christ. And
I do realize that that is a very emotional statement to make,
but the word Antichrist is used in our New Testament, and that
is exactly what it applies to. Any message that is contrary
to salvation in Christ alone, faith in Christ alone. And in
that sense, the nation of Israel is Antichrist. It is not the
true people of God. As Christians, we should understand
that and we should take great heart and hope and it should
secure our faith to know that the true sons of God, the true
children of God, the people of God, the true Israel of God are
those who believe in Christ. That's us. Now, if we believe
that, if we hold to that in our hearts and we understand that
we are truly God's people, let us go back to the Scripture again. And let us read the promises
that God has made to His people. Reread them with eyes that see
yourself, me, us, this church as God's people. And see if those
promises don't take on new life. An invigorated understanding
that these promises mean something to me personally as a person
of God. I find that greatly encouraging.
I also find it encouraging then when you read prophecy. Because prophecy is, as we look
at it, a future promise to God's people. Read that now with the
understanding that those promises, those prophecies pertain to God's
people. Not as the dispensationalists
apply it, because they tend to apply those promises to the physical
people of Israel. But read those prophecies with
an understanding that we're talking about the Christian church, the
body of Christ. That's who those promises are
aimed at. And it builds a fresh and new
hope into prophecy. When you understand that prophecy
is a promise to God's people and that you are personally God's
people, prophecy becomes a whole lot
more positive, a whole lot more hopeful. So many people that
I know of look at the book of Revelation and they run fast
the other way because they say, oh, that's so scary and it's
all these bizarre things and, you know, yeah, it's about all
this stuff, but I don't even see any application of me in
that book. Brothers and sisters, you and
I are stamped all over that book. That book was written to the
children of God, to the people of God. And John, as he was given
the vision, promised that all who read it or hear it will be
blessed. That is a fabulous and wonderful
promise given to the people of God. That's us. That's us. Take it to heart. that the people
of God are the people of Jesus Christ, none other. And anytime
that somebody tells you that somebody is the people of
God, and yet those people deny Christ, turn them off. because they are not telling
you the truth. It is an impossibility. It is
an impossibility for the people of God to deny God. You can't do that. So when you
hear people saying that, oh, these people, whoever they may
be, are the people of God, but they don't believe in Jesus Christ.
You can write them off, write them away. Because God's people
believe in God's Son. And they claim their only hope
and salvation in Jesus Christ.