Curses and Blessings Part 5

My goal in sharing this Bible study with you is so that as faithful men we might be able to understand how some of the crucial teachings of Scripture fit together. If we are to be the kind of leaders God wants us to be in our homes and churches, but can’t accurately interpret the Scriptures, how can we be faithful to what is handed down to us from previous generations? So we continue our study of the curses and blessings.
The point in the last post was that God had made a promise to Abraham and his seed. Nothing could cancel that promise, not even the law. But what does that have to do with us?
To answer this I’d like to put Galatians 3:26 and 29 together. Basically God is saying that we are sons of God by faith in Christ. If we are Christ’s then we are heirs according to the promise. He had summarized this earlier in verse 14. “…that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” The blessing of Abraham… That blessing is ours!
So let me summarize what we have so far. God has issued blessings and curses. Those who don’t keep every bit of the law are under a curse. God’s blessing was upon those who obeyed perfectly. There are basically two ways to live, either by faith or by law. That’s what we learned from Galatians 3:10-12. These are mutually exclusive. Living by law puts you under the curse because there is no one who can keep it perfectly. We can’t be under it and then somehow claim exceptions because we are a Christian.
The Christian answer is that God blessed Abraham and his seed unconditionally. The law that came later could not cancel that blessing otherwise God would have been a liar in making such promises to Abraham. If I’m a Christian, I am an heir of that blessing because I am part of Abraham’s seed. That means that the promise that I am a recipient of supersedes and precedes the giving of the law. There’s nothing in the keeping or the not-keeping of the law that can affect my status of blessing given by the promise of God. There is no curse hanging over the Christian. Let your mind and spirit think on this.
We’ll explore some of the repercussions of this truth next time.