The law is like the thick walls of Fremantle prison, garnished with jagged glass, overwatched by marksmen. We are trapped within by our sin, cursed by God and under his wrath…Build a spiritual ladder: imitate Christ, cultivate a passion for Christ, “invite Jesus into your heart.” None of these will avail for the law shoots us down as hell-deserving transgressors still. But there is an open doorway, the promise of God that he would bless the world in his Seed, his Son, Jesus Christ.

The law never opposed the Abrahamic promise. But it did prove its necessity.

Fremantle Prison lies right behind our church. Convicts built its limestone walls in the 1850s.

Driving past as a child I was awed by the jagged broken glass cemented atop the walls. And by the watchtowers: stern men with high-powered rifles stood ready to shoot anyone trying to escape.

I once visited the prison with John Button, who in 1963 was locked up there aged just nineteen, wrongly convicted for the death of his girlfriend Rosemary Anderson. He showed us his grotty little cell which had no sink, heating, or cooling, and just a bucket for a toilet. He remembers the moment serial killer Eric Cooke was hanged there in 1964. For a time John himself faced that same fate.

He never really recovered from his years in Fremantle Prison.

In Galatians 3:15–22 Paul teaches us that God’s law is like an inescapable prison for the soul.

Background

Paul calls the Galatians fools. He’d preached to them Christ crucified and salvation by faith in him and they’d joyfully received this Gospel, this Good News. But false teachers arrived from Jerusalem, “the circumcision group,” preaching different news of salvation by faith in Jesus and law-keeping. This message bewitched the Galatians. Even Peter succumbed!

The Holy Spirit had authenticated the true Gospel with miracles and transformed lives. But now they were returning to fruitless “works of the flesh.”

So Paul reiterates that we are not justified—made right with God—by works but by faith (3:15). Just like Abraham, who was counted righteous when he believed God (Gen. 15:6). Our works cannot free us from God’s curse but Jesus became a curse for us and bore all its consequences, so we are saved by faith in him.

Paul now drives all this home by showing the true purpose of the law.

A. The Abrahamic Covenant is Fulfilled in Jesus

Galatians 3:15–16 Brothers and sisters, let me take an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case. 16The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say ‘and to seeds’, meaning many people, but ‘and to your seed’, meaning one person, who is Christ.

Covenant translates diathēkē (διαθηκη), “a last will and testament.” Such testaments were highly respected and immutable. So the New Testament uses this word to translate the Hebrew berit (ברית), “covenant.”

Paul refers to the covenant that God cut with Abraham—covenants are always cut, not “made.” In Genesis 15 God had Abraham slaughter a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove, and a pigeon. The animals were halved to make a kind of bloody pathway. God appeared in a vision as a fiery smoking torch. He promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation. He passed between the butchered pieces as a way of saying: “Let this happen to me if I do not keep my promise.”

This confirmed the covenant that God had cut with Abraham “and his Seed”:

Genesis 12:2, 3, 7 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” . . . The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” (Also 13:15, 17:8, 24:7.)

Paul emphasises that this unilateral and unbreakable covenant was not made with Abraham’s “seeds”, with many people, but Abraham’s “Seed”, one person.

Notice Paul hinges a vital doctrine not on a sentence of the Bible, nor even a word, but on the very letters of a word that distinguish it as either singular or plural.

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