God’s Word for You
Galatians 3:3 The Means of Grace
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, July 4, 2024
3 Are you so foolish? After starting with the Spirit, are you now trying to end with human effort?
A year ago, my sons and I tried to take a vacation to a place we had never been to before. Right away we had car trouble, and spent most of the trip shut up in a hotel several miles from anything of any interest. The garage working our car took longer than they expected, and we had checked out of our hotel on the last day before they even began working on the car. Finally, as the sun was going down and we had worn out our welcome sitting in the hotel lobby with all of our suitcases, we were told that the car was ready (it had been towed to its location) and we got a taxi to bring us to the garage. But the taxi driver failed miserably, and she dropped us off at the wrong street in the wrong part of the city. Having begun with her phone for directions, she tried to guess, and left us stranded nowhere near the right place.
This is what Paul said was happening to the Galatians. They began just fine, with the Holy Spirit. But now they were groping around, having given up on the Spirit, and they were just guessing about God’s plan of salvation (justification) and about God’s will for righteous living (sanctification). Can they be that foolish?
When Paul talks about these Christians “starting with the Spirit,” which was also “believing the message” in verse 2, he is describing the means of grace. The grace of God, salvation, forgiveness, is not something we take from God. We do not break into heaven to steal it, like Prometheus in the myths whole stole fire from the gods to bless mankind. If it were otherwise, then individual men could claim to be the creators and inventors of hearing, or sight, or touch, or taste. Did a man think of any of those things and decide for himself that he, who had never seen and had never heard of nor ever could imagine vision, decided in his heart that he wanted sight, and then brought it into being for himself and for all the rest of mankind? There is no such hero. Sight is part of God’s plan and design; sight is a gift. The organs that apprehend God’s other gifts are likewise part of God’s plan, part of God’s holy will. He gave us fingers and hands to touch with, eyes to see, ears to hear, tongues to taste, and a nose to smell with. God has also given us one additional organ, through which all spiritual blessings come. This is the organ of faith. It is given by God, and through this organ, God gives us the means of grace.
The means of grace is, at its simplest, the gospel. Faith receives the gospel just as the eye receives an image. The mind believes the image the eye sees. The heart believes the gospel message that faith hears and remembers. But just as the ear does not smell, nor does the eye listen, so also faith does not receive its blessings from the Law, because the Law shows us our sin, not our Savior (Romans 3:20). And just as the hand does not sing, nor does the ear speak, so also prayer is not a means of grace, since prayer is a response to God’s blessings and is possible only for someone who already has faith (John 9:31; Isaiah 59:2).
The means of grace is the gospel. “Christ offers to all men his grace in the word and holy sacraments.” This grace is what flows into the organ of faith and brings all of God’s other blessings along with it. The gospel can come in different ways.
It can come simply through preaching: “How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” (Romans 10:14). But of course, the gospel of our salvation can be declared through singing the message, such as Paul and Silas did in prison, “singing hymns to God when all the other prisoners were listening to them” (Acts 16:25). And reading the gospel can also encourage and strengthen faith (Acts 15:31), as can reciting a memorized passage of the Bible or remembering the gospel that was already preached serves in the same way, since “he has caused his wonders to be remembered; the Lord is gracious and compassionate” (Psalm 111:4).
It can come through the sacraments. Jesus said, “Make disciples of all nations by baptizing” (Matthew 28:19), and Jesus also said, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). There are those who reject the sacraments in different ways. Some (Zwingli, for one, in Luther’s time) argued that “it does not befit God to bind his revelation and operation to such external means as the Word and the Sacraments; for his work the Holy Spirit does not need a vehicle.” Others think that the two sacraments Scripture presents that were commanded and instituted by Christ for the forgiveness of sins are not enough, and they try to improve on God’s work by adding additional sacraments which only waters down the other two. And others, such as the Dorpat professors of the 1880s, rejected the idea of reading the gospel to be a means of coming to faith, insisting that the Scripture must be preached, and that God’s word by itself is insufficient.
And then again there are the Calvinists, who contradict themselves about the means of grace. On the one hand, they claim that for the unbeliever, the grace of God does not extend, and therefore there are no means of grace at all of the reprobate and the unbeliever. Yet they also claim that the unbeliever merits a double condemnation because the unbeliever despises the grace offered to him. The Calvinist cannot have it both ways. Either the unbeliever did have the grace of God offered to him and rejected it, or else the grace of God was never offered to him at all. This is an example of a church where grace is not taught as universal, but particular. It is offered only to believers, they say, but not to unbelievers. Yet the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus is enough to bring the whole theology of Calvin crumbling like the walls of Jericho.
The grace of God comes through faith, and salvation is entirely by the grace of God alone. We confess in the creed: “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” There is the means of grace summarized. But we continue with its result: “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.