Recently I saw a cartoon that featured a father and his son gazing at a broken lamp. In the caption, the father said to his son, “What do you mean it just happened? Didn’t we discuss the laws of cause and effect?”

That got me to thinking about the difference between law and grace when it comes to cause and effect. Under the law, the Jews were told,

“Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you, that ye may live…” (Deut. 5:33).

This was the law in a nutshell. Under the law, God said, “keep My statutes, and My judgments: which if a man do, he shall live” (Lev. 18:5). We know that He meant they would live eternally if they kept His statutes, because when the Lord was asked what to do to inherit eternal life, He quoted Leviticus 18:5 (Luke 10:25,28). You see, under the law, men were saved by faith plus works, the specific works of observing the statutes and judgments of the law. That included being circumcised, keeping the Leviticus 23 feasts, bringing animal sacrifices, and so forth.

But while the law said “walk…that ye may live” (Deut. 5:33), grace presents a different cause and effect, as we can see from the words of Paul, the apostle of grace:

“If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25).

See the difference? Under the law, walking in God’s statutes caused the effect of eternal life, but under grace, the eternal life that we are given by faith without works (Eph. 2:8,9) should cause the effect of walking in God’s ways!

So how about it? Are you walking in the Spirit? Can it be said of you what Paul said to the Thessalonians?

“For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the Word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe” (I Thes. 2:13).

The words of men can come and go without having any effect in your life, but if you truly believe God when He says you have eternal life in the Spirit, why not determine to walk in the Spirit? You’ll be eternally glad you did.

“Someone is telling me that Galatians 1:23 proves that Paul didn’t get a new message.”

When we teach that Paul had a unique new message, people sometimes respond by pointing out that this cannot be, since it was said of Paul, right after he got saved, that he “preacheth the faith which once he destroyed.” They insist that this means that the message he preached existed before he preached it. However, you’ll notice that Galatians 1:23 says that they “heard” this. Have you ever heard something spoken that turned out later to be untrue? That could easily be the case here.

Remember, Paul’s gospel and the kingdom gospel were both centered in Christ, and so when Paul got saved and began preaching Christ, that could easily explain how “the churches of Judaea” (Gal. 1:22) “heard” that Paul preached their faith. They would have had to have heard this second hand, from easily confused unbelievers, since believers were afraid to go near Saul in those early days (cf. Acts 9:26).

If there was any truth to the rumor, then the phrase “the faith” was being used in the generic sense. When this phrase is used by Paul, it refers to the body of truth that was given to him (Acts 14:22; 16:5; Rom. 1:5; Gal. 3:23; Eph. 4:13; Col. 1:23; I Tim. 3:9; I Tim. 4:1; II Tim. 3:8; Titus 1:13). When this phrase is used by Bible writers other than Paul, however, it refers to the body of truth of the kingdom message (Acts 6:7; I Pet. 5:9; Jude 1:3).

Recently, Fox News told of a 13-year-old girl who got in trouble at school for wearing a shirt that said, “Virginity Rocks!” The back of her shirt was equally delightful and showed that she was one very forward-thinking young lady. It read, “I’m loving my husband, and I haven’t even met him yet!”

This sweet girl’s wonderful testimony reminded me of how the Lord Jesus showed that He was one very forward-thinking Man when He prayed to God about His eleven disciples:

“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word” (John 17:20).

Most Bible commentaries maintain that the Lord was talking about you and me, and all of the other members of the Body of Christ who had not yet believed on Him at that time. The problem with this view is that you and I didn’t believe on Christ through the words of the twelve apostles. We believed on Him through the words of the Apostle Paul! Paul is the only biblical writer who presents salvation by grace through faith in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:25). If someone introduced you to Christ using the words of the twelve apostles, they had to read Paul’s gospel into their words, for he is the only biblical writer to preach the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ as the gospel that must be believed in order to be saved (I Cor. 15:1-4).

So who were those who were saved through the word of the apostles? Well, the twelve preached their word at Pentecost, which tells us that those who believed through their word were all Jews, for they were the only people that Peter addressed on that day (Acts 2:14,22,36). So in praying for “them also which shall believe through their word,” the Lord was praying for future Jewish believers. Of course, this means that He had only Jewish believers in mind when He went on to pray for these future saints.

“That they all may be one…that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me” (John 17:21).

Here again, the commentaries all contend that the Lord was talking about us. After all, didn’t Paul say of Christ, “He is our peace, who hath made both one” (Eph. 2:14), speaking of how Jews and Gentiles were all “baptized into one body” (I Cor. 12:13). The commentaries insist that this is what the Lord had in mind when He prayed “that they all may be one.”

But we’ve already seen that this couldn’t be what the Lord had in mind, since those who believed on Him through the word of the apostles were all Jews. So why was He praying that the Jews might be made one?

Well, if you know your Bible, you know that there came a time in Israel’s history when the ten northern tribes broke away from the two southern tribes and formed their own kingdom (I Kings 12). While God allowed this, He had no intention of letting His people be divided forever! To illustrate this, God instructed Ezekiel to take a stick and write “Israel” on it to represent the ten northern tribes, and then to take another stick and write “Judah” on it to represent the two southern tribes, then to join them together and “make them one stick” (Ezek. 37:15-19). He was told to do all this to illustrate God’s plan to take Israel and Judah and “make them one nation” (v. 22). This, then, is the oneness for which the Lord prayed in our text.

Was His prayer answered? You know it was! At Pentecost, “there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews…out of every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). “And all that believed…were together…continuing daily with one accord…with…singleness of heart” (Acts 2:41-46).

Of course, the Lord had a purpose in mind for praying for the reunion of Israel’s two houses. It was, as He said, “that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me”; and when the reuniting of Israel’s two houses continues in the millennial kingdom, their oneness will cause the world to believe on Christ.

Do you think this will work today? That is, when the world sees the oneness that we have in Christ, do you think maybe they might want in on it? I know for sure that it works the other way! When we bite and devour one another, the world about us finds this most UNattractive. Brethren, do you know who does the most to keep people from believing on Christ? It is not murderers, rapists, and thieves; nothing that men like that do keeps men from believing. No, it is Christians who can’t get along with one another, and who present a poor testimony to the world in other ways, that keep men from believing on Christ. Why not determine right now that as a Christian you are going to “walk worthy of this calling…that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you” (II Thes. 1:11,12).

Did you ever wonder why nominal Christians give you grief when you insist that salvation is by grace through faith alone apart from any good works (Eph. 2:8,9)? The Apostle Paul understood the reason that men troubled him for proclaiming this message, and he came up with the perfect illustration to help the Galatians understand it. Speaking of the two sons of Abraham, he observed:

“But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now” (Gal. 4:29).

When we look up the passage that Paul is quoting here, we learn that Ishmael “persecuted” Isaac by “mocking” him (Gen. 21:9). And, if you know the story, you know why Ishmael was giving his younger brother grief. When Abraham got tired of waiting for God to give him the son He had promised, he took matters into his own hands and fathered a child by his wife’s servant, intending to make Ishmael the heir that God had promised (Gen. 17:18). God rejected this notion (Gen. 17:20,21) and eventually gave Abraham the son that He promised through the miraculous birth that Abraham’s wife Sarah gave to Isaac.

Ishmael was thirteen years old (Gen. 17:25) when Isaac was weaned (21:8), and based on his father’s assurance that he would be his heir, he had doubtless worked very hard to be worthy of his inheritance. Then suddenly there appeared this interloper, this young child Isaac, whom Sarah rightly declared would be her husband’s heir (Gen. 21:10), and God agreed (v. 12). That meant that after all Ishmael’s hard work his inheritance was now going to be just handed to this infant who hadn’t done a thing to earn it other than to be born the child of promise.

Now, if you can’t relate to the anger that Ishmael felt toward the newly-declared heir, I certainly can! When I was twelve, I asked my father to buy me a Schwinn Fastback Stingray bicycle. He informed me that I was old enough to work for the money that would be needed to make such an expensive purchase. He then reminded me that I could work as many hours as I wanted at his tool and die shop. To help me out, he graciously bumped my salary up to 50 cents an hour (he had started me out at 15 cents an hour!). But while I was working and saving for my $75 bike, my younger brother learned to ride a bike, and was given—a Stingray bicycle! I remember feeling angered that he had just been handed something for which I was having to work so long and hard!

That explains how Ishmael felt about Isaac, which in turn explains how professing Christians feel about those of us that champion the cause of salvation by grace through faith apart from works. Such “Christians” are angered at the notion that the salvation for which they themselves are working so long and so hard is being offered so freely to men and women who haven’t done a thing to earn it other than to be born again a child of God’s promise (Gal. 4:28).

How should we respond to such religious animosity? Paul answers in the opening words of the very next chapter in Galatians: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (5:1)! It has never been easy to stand for the pure, unadulterated gospel of the grace of God, but as the old hymn of the faith expresses so very well, “it will be worth it all when we see Jesus”!

“If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin” (John 15:22).

What on earth did the Lord mean here when He said that if He hadn’t come, the unbelieving Jews He had mentioned in the previous verse “had not sin”? Surely they had sinned, whether He had come or not!

To find out what He meant, we have to define a word that we don’t use very often, the word “cloke,” spelled cloak in our day and time. A cloak is a loose, sleeveless garment that is worn over other clothing, and about the only time that this writer hears the word even mentioned is when someone puts their coat in the cloakroom of a restaurant. If you can’t picture what a cloak would look like, but you can picture the mythical character Dracula, he is always depicted wearing a cloak.

Now the thing about a cloak is that you can easily conceal something under a loose, sleeveless garment, such as a dagger. This has given rise to the expression cloak and dagger, a figure of speech that refers to espionage. For this reason, when this word is used as a verb, to cloak something means to hide it. Star Trek fans will remember that Klingon and Romulan vessels were equipped with cloaking devices that made it so that you couldn’t see their ships coming. And no, I’m not a geek, I had to look that up!

All of this helps us understand what the Lord meant when He said that if He hadn’t come they would not have had sin. He didn’t say “they had not sin, then I came and now they have sin.” He rather said, “They had not sin, then I came and now they have no cloak for their sin.” In other words He was saying, “Now that I’ve come, they can’t hide their sin any more,” and I believe He had a specific sin in mind, an all-encompassing one that He mentions in the next verse.

“He that hateth Me hateth My Father also” (John 15:23).

The comprehensive sin that these unbelievers were cloaking so successfully before the Lord came was hatred of the Father. Since the Law commanded the Jews to love the Father (Deut. 6:5), it was a sin to hate Him, and for centuries unbelieving Jews had cloaked their hatred for God with their religion, which provided the perfect cover. Practicing Judaism made it appear that unsaved Jews loved the Father, but as the Lord said of them: “This people draweth nigh unto Me with their mouth, and honoureth Me with their lips; but their heart is far from me” (Matt. 15:8 cf. Isa. 29:13).

If you are wondering how the Lord’s coming uncloaked their hatred of the Father, remember that He represented God the Father in the flesh, and so when He showed up and they hated Him, it showed they hated the Father.

But notice in our text that it wasn’t just the Lord’s coming that uncloaked their sin. He said, “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not sin” (v. 22). How did His words uncloak their hatred? Well, remember, His words were the Father’s words (John 3:34; 8:26; 12:49). So when the Lord spoke the words of the Father and they hated His words, they were actually hating the Father’s words!

If you are not convinced that this is what the Lord had in mind, consider what He went on to say:

“If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father” (John 15:24).

This sounds a lot like what He said in our text verse, but remember that there He said that His words uncloaked their hatred, while here He affirmed that His works uncloaked it, speaking of the miraculous works that He did among them. If you are wondering how His works uncloaked their hatred of the Father, remember He said that “the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works” (John 14:10). And so when the unbelievers in Israel ascribed His miraculous works to Beelzebub (Matt. 12:24), their hatred of His works were actually hatred for the Father’s works. That’s how the Lord’s words and works uncloaked their hatred of, as He says here, “both Me and My Father.”

All this reminds us of how if you are looking for a certain book on the internet, you will usually see advertising popup ads that say something like, “If you like this book, you might also like…,” and then go on to try to sell you some other books that are similar to the one for which you had been searching and found. Similarly, if you don’t like the Lord Jesus Christ, you don’t like God the Father. You might say that you do, as the adherents of many religions do, but you really don’t! Religions that claim to love God but reject His Son are nothing more than cloaks for hatred of the Father, and you have God’s Word on it!

During their seventy years of captivity in Babylon, the people of Israel didn’t feel much like singing:

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

“We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

“For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Psa. 137:1-4).

We are told that the children of Israel were well known for their music, and we wouldn’t be surprised if this were so, for faith in our God has inspired countless great compositions down through the centuries. But when their captors demanded that they sing the songs that expressed the joy they felt in their God and their homeland, the sorrow they felt in their hearts would not allow these captives to give voice to such expressions while shackled with the chains of Babylonian bondage.

But if God’s people cannot sing outside of their Promised Land, how can Paul call on us to be “speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” (Eph. 5:19)? How can we sing the Lord’s songs in the land made strange to us by the anti-God sentiment found all around us, and the iniquity upon iniquity that we see on every hand?

We believe it is because God has already “raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6). Remember, we serve a God that “calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Rom. 4:17). In that passage, God was able to call Abraham “the father of many” before he had any children. This is because God had promised to multiply his seed, and so in the mind of God he already had a multitude of descendants! In the same way, God can use the past tense in describing how we are already “glorified” (Rom. 8:30), and since the Lord has promised that we will one day “reign with Him” (II Tim. 2:12) from thrones on which we will sit together with Christ in heavenly places, in His mind it is as good as done, we are as good as there.

And if that’s not something worth singing about, I don’t know what is!