When I was in high school, I owned a milk cow. She was my FFA project. An elder in the church offered me a good deal on this old milk cow and it wasn't long before I found out why. She liked the grass in the neighbor's pasture better than she liked ours. There wasn't a barbed wire fence in the world that would hold her. We put a yoke on her. We thought that would keep her in. It didn't. We ended up putting a ring in her nose, to which we attached a long trace chain. That did the trick. Of course, it greatly restricted her movement. That's what a yoke is like. It's the chain in the nose attached by the legalist to keep you in line. Paul urged the Galatians to resist those kinds of efforts.

Peter taught the same thing, although he used different terminology. This same issue - the issue of Gentile obedience to Mosaic law - was discussed at Jerusalem. Here's Peter's response in Acts 15:10. "Now then, why do you try to test God, by putting on the necks of the disciples, a yoke that neither we or our fathers were able to bear."

WHY DO WE HAVE TO FIGHT FOR FREEDOM?

Sometimes we may wonder if it's really worth putting up the fight. Was it going to hurt the Gentile believer to submit to circumcision? If the Gentiles could just change their ways a little - say circumcision, maybe the dietary laws, then wouldn't that be a small price to pay for peace in the church?

Paul had three things to say in response to that kind or reasoning.

1. "If you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will not be of value to you at all." (verse 2).
2. "You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ."
3. ". . . you have fallen away from grace" (verse 4).

What was the big deal about circumcision? In verse 3, he said, "Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law."

We just read Peter's comment that neither he nor his fathers were able to do that. In the situation in Galatia, the Judiazing teachers were not attempting to restore the entire law covenant. There is no evidence that they wanted to bring back the sacrifices. There were really two things they wanted - circumcision and the Jewish holidays. Robert Shank said, they preached the gospel of "the cross, the knife and the calendar."

Paul's point was that you can't pick and choose the parts of the law you want to honor. It would be like getting stopped for running a red traffic light and you protest to the officer, "I may have run this red light, but I stopped at three other lights before I got to this one."

TWO SYSTEMS OF JUSTIFICATION

His real point is a comparison between two systems of justification. Law and grace are two mutually exclusive approaches to justification. Paul is saying that we cannot have it both ways. Either we are justified by Christ as our Savior or we are justified by our own merit. It's not a fifty-fifty proposition. If we are justified by our own merit, then we are also obligated to live sinless lives.

When you look at it from that point of view, you'd think a person would have to be brain damaged to choose legalism, but when we think that, we underestimate the attraction of legalism. Why would any one choose it? May I suggest some possible reasons.

1. Salvation by grace sounds too good to be true. One of the cardinal rules of American culture is that you get what you earn. Since that's our experience with life, we naturally think that God operates the same way.
2. Legalism offers a certain kind of security. Of course when we compare ourselves with Christ, we're always going to come up short, but we manage to put that thought out of our minds. Perhaps we think about how far we've come from where we were and there's a certain security in knowing that at least we're not as far away from God as we were at one time in our lives. Of course what we don't see is the fact that even the new, improved version of self is still governed by the flesh.
3. It appeals to our pride. We can be very secure in the knowledge that we know something that others don't know. Or we may feel secure in the knowledge that our own level of performance surpasses that of others we know. In our evangelistic zeal, we can even pray, "Lord, help others to understand the truth, so they'll be like us."

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