Today’s Scripture: Galatians 3:24

“The law was our guardian until Christ came.”

The primary purpose of the law is not to curse us but to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24). God does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23). Rather, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). The language is emphatic. Christ literally became a curse in our place as our substitute. He experienced the full fury of the curse that we should have experienced. It’s true he did it for us, but he did so by doing it in our place as our appointed substitute.

Here we see the importance of our legal union with Christ. As our God-appointed legal representative, he was legally qualified to endure the curse in our place as our substitute. There’s no adequate analogy for this union in human experience. One person may pay a financial debt for someone else, but no one can serve a prison sentence as a substitute for another. In human jurisprudence, a moral debt such as a prison sentence can be served only by the person who incurred it.

Many people who deny the substitutionary nature of Christ’s atonement claim that it’s unjust for an innocent person to suffer in place of the guilty. That’s true in a human legal system, but it’s God who established the curse for breaking his law and who ordained the remedy for the curse. Human analogies and principles, though often helpful in illustrating scriptural truths, should never be used to refute Scripture.

Above all, we should accept this wonderful truth that Jesus bore the curse in our place and paid our ransom price, not because it seems reasonable by any human standards but because God in his Word has declared it to be so.

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