Today’s Scripture Reading (November
21, 2014): Galatians 5
On January
1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The
proclamation, which in theory freed the slaves in the rebel southern States,
was a directive of the President and a move that was made under the special war
powers that had been given to the President. It was not a law passed by Congress
or a declaration that the Congress had any say in. The Proclamation was very
clearly a directive of Abraham Lincoln, and Abraham Lincoln alone. It has been
said that the Emancipation Proclamation did not set a single slave free, and to
a point that assertion is correct (although there are records of celebrations
in various parts of the South as the slaves were told that the president had
issued the Proclamation on their behalf.) The Proclamation made absolutely no
attempt to compensate slave owners for the loss of their slaves, it did not
outlaw slavery (there were still areas in the United States under Union control
where owning a slave continued to be legal), and it made no offer of
citizenship to the former slaves. What the Proclamation did was add the
eradication of slavery to the reuniting of the United States as the major goals
of the war.
Paul reminds
the Galatians that they had been set free. Their Emancipation Proclamation had
been signed, but the problem is that the Galatians had been extremely reluctant
to accept their new found status. But unlike the Proclamation signed by Lincoln,
the only one that could hold Galatians back from accepting their freedom was
the Galatians themselves. The Proclamation of God that had been spoken over
them ending the slavery of the law – no matter what it was the Judaizers were
trying to tell them. Instead, the Galatians had thrown the Proclamation away
and walked straight back into the exact slavery that Jesus had freed them from.
It is a trap that the Christian Church has been falling into ever since.
D. L. Moody illustrated
this tendency to not accept the freedom of Christ by telling a story about an
old former slave woman in the South following the American Civil War. Now is I free, or
been I not? When I go to my old master he says I ain’t free, and when I go to
my own people they say I is, and I don’t know whether I’m free or not. Some
people told me that Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation, but master says he
didn’t; he didn’t have any right to. It was exactly
on this point that the Galatians were confused. Paul stresses that Jesus Christ
had already given them the “Emancipation Proclamation,” and that it was a
declaration that Jesus had every right to proclaim. But their former master kept
telling them they were still slaves to a legal relationship with their God.
They were continuing to live in bondage not because their slavery was a reality
in the world in which they lived, but rather because they had allowed their
former masters to continue to deceive them.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading:
Galatians 6
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