OCTOBER 28 but God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world (Gal. 6:14). In Verses 12 through 15, Paul sums up all the import of his Letter. Those who desire to display their zeal for outward ceremonies sought to make them necessary to Salvation, but their real object was to please self and escape persecution. They gloried in these ceremonies applied to men’s bodies. On the contrary, the Apostle gloried in the Cross, upon which the religious world of sacraments, shadows, outward ceremonies, and good works had been crucified, a Cross upon which he himself by Faith had been crucified, so that he was dead to them, and they were dead to him. Outward physical sacraments, good works, and ceremonies are unimportant. What is important is the New Birth, and the victory and life that it brings, or at least which it will bring if the Believer steadfastly looks to Christ and the Cross. Most certainly the irreligious world has been judged and ended in the Cross of Christ, but so also has the religious world; and it is the abolition of that world which is the subject of this Epistle. If Paul gloried in anything physical, it was not in the sign of circumcision, but in the marks of man’s brutality, which, in the triumph of faith, he called “the marks of the Lord Jesus” (6:17). The whole thing is summed up in the fact that, in contrast to the Judaizers who gloried in human attainment and self-effort as a means of Salvation, Paul boasted in the Cross of Christ. The world of which Paul here speaks is the world Paul knew before he was saved, the world of Philippians 3:4–6, his Hebrew ancestry, his Pharisaic traditions, his zeal for the Law, in short, the world in which he had lived. To all this was he now dead. He had been separated from it by the Cross of the Lord Jesus. It had no more appeal to him, nor influence upon him. In Galatians 6:15, Paul gives his reason for glorying in the Cross: While circumcision is of no avail to the Jew, nor the lack of circumcision of any avail to the Gentile, yet the Cross has power to make both a believing Jew and a believing Gentile a new creation, which results in a radical transformation of character. The Cross, in fact, carries the only power which can effect such a transformation. Swaggart, J. (2005). The Expositors Word For Every Day (713). Baton Rouge, LA: World Evangelism Press.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 12:21:08 +0000
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