Galatians 3:1 “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.”

What was wrong? These people whom Paul had once led to trust Jesus for everything necessary for their salvation were now basing their heavenly hope in part on their own good works. They thought they had something to contribute of their own.

Missionaries of a false Christianity known as the Judaizers had come to them and convinced them that Jesus was good and necessary. He just wasn’t enough. They needed to be circumcised. They needed to follow Old Testament ceremonies and food laws. But once you let this camel’s head into the tent, the camel’s head of keeping a few rules in addition to the work of Jesus, pretty soon the whole camel of salvation by works gets in.  The introduction of such ideas couldn’t help but turn their attention away from Jesus to the quality of their own performance. Paul writes just a few verses later, “After beginning with the Spirit, are you trying to attain your goal by human effort?” They were adopting a self-righteous salvation.

This was no small problem. Paul warns, “All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law’” (Galatians 3:10). How much of God’s law do you have to keep if you are going to avoid the curse of death based solely on your own efforts? The whole thing! There is no margin of error here. A “99″ is a failing grade. It’s not like a video game in which you have additional “lives” based upon how many points you have scored, and even if you use them all up, you can turn the power off and on and start the game over from the beginning. Relying on our own righteousness, a self-produced righteousness, always ends the same way: the curse of death.

How much explanation does the cross really require? What do we need to know to recognize that this isn’t just the lynching of a man who defied some cultural taboo or crossed some societal boundary? How much information is necessary to realize that this is more than martyrdom, like the death of so many of the prophets before Jesus and most of the apostles after him?

Is it enough to know that this man was God’s Son, the promised Messiah; to hear John the Baptist declare “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”; to hear Jesus’ own words from the cross offering forgiveness to his executioners, promising paradise to a man hanging next to him, crying out in agony as God the Father forsakes him there, finally declaring that all is finished; to see the unnatural darkness that covers the land that afternoon, feel the earthquake that follows, witness the hand of God tearing the temple curtain separating the Creator from his creatures in two?

The cross is God’s tool for removing the curse of dying for our sins from us and transferring it to Jesus instead. Here our death sentence has been served. Here the Law’s demands for our blood, and for our souls, have been satisfied.

As a result, we have been redeemed, set free. There is nothing more for us to do. The Law can make no more demands on us. We live in God’s forgiveness. In place of a self-righteousness, a counterfeit and inadequate righteousness based on our own unsteady performance, the cross brings us a real righteousness, the perfection of Jesus and the cleansing of his blood provided to you and me.

This portrayal of Jesus Christ as crucified before your very eyes, then, lays this real righteousness upon your heart and soul. Thirty years ago a former missionary wrote in Christianity Today about a Muslim student in a North African university who heard a simple explanation of Jesus’ saving, substitutionary work on the cross for the first time. “If that is true,” he blurted out, “then Jesus is my Lord.” When Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified before his very eyes, God’s power laid claim on his heart and made him his own by faith.

But this is no surprise to you. The preaching of Christ crucified has been the power of God in your life. It has laid real righteousness, the freedom of forgiveness and grace, on your heart and soul. It still gives life to your faith and keeps you his child today.