I could wish that those who trouble you would even cut themselves off! (Galatians 5:12)
(What follows is an approximate translation of a meditation[i] of Klaas Schilder – approximate because it is difficult to do justice, in a translation, to the prose style and flavour of the original, particularly as I am not as well at home in the Dutch language as I would like to be. Written in 1945, this Scripture meditation has allusions to the 1944 church liberation – when we were liberated from unscriptural bindings imposed by a hierarchical synod. But as with all Scripture, its application is for all times. JN)
We know the curse (or imprecatory) psalms of the Old Testament. They are the psalms that invoke curses or calamity upon the enemies of God. They have always been an offense to those who read the Bible, not in the light of Scripture itself but in the light of their own views. Hence, they stumble over these curse psalms, as did a prince in the Netherlands who walked out of church because the preacher had the temerity to speak, in submission to God’s Word, of a curse. The power of God and the “wisdom” of God is foolishness to those who are perishing.
However, for those who allow God’s Word to explain and reveal itself, such Scriptural curses are an edifying, healing, guiding power for faith. For in the curse psalms, God’s own Spirit alone is speaking. We may not, of course, curse on the basis of our own authority. But if God curses, who will bless? If He breaks, who will build? If He rejects, who will accept? If He excludes, who will include? There IS divine exclusion. We know its norms, its rights, its fundamental axioms from His own revelation. If the church faithfully serves God’s Word, then even as far as these norms, these rights, these axioms are concerned, the church curses where God curses, so that the cross of Christ, that great stumbling block, that great vexation-for-the-flesh, is not destroyed. Then the Judge in heaven above binds where the church on earth binds.
There are those who think the curse psalms only apply to the pagans. They apply the curses to ‘Babel’, the organised world power. But if you read the Psalms carefully you will discover that the Old Testament psalmists can also hurl curses against covenant children. Against traitors of the church. Against people who ate their bread; who ate Christ’s bread, theirs, and also the bread of his tablemates. Their table become a snare to them (Ps 69:23). Yes, the curse psalms in Scripture are also directed against former table companions who have violated faithfulness. The curses aim to see their evil destroyed and to defend the truth of the gospel.
Now that’s what Paul did. He saw those curse psalms as God’s holy Word. And the same Spirit of God who inspired the psalmists also inspired Christ’s apostle, Paul. The Spirit of God came upon him, inspiring and revealing very special contents to him, and prompting him to write his powerful letter to the Galatians. It is this Spirit of God that drives Paul to write the curse.
Who were they, who troubled the church in those days? They were the people of evil, of self-willed binding. They demanded that the faithful maintain all kinds of laws from the service of Moses. They particularly wanted Christians to circumcise themselves and their children: although the blood of Christ had been poured out, the blood of Christians still had to flow, so they thought. Feast days, dietary commandments and so on, were declared to be binding upon church members.
But even in imposing that binding requirement these Judaist Christians were not consistent. They were not bigots, not fanatics. Rather, they were diplomats: they did not demand general binding (6:13); in fact, in many cases it was possible to get exemption from bindings. They were not so much interested in their theory of binding, and in the content of what they declared binding, as in strengthening their own position of power (6:12, 13; 4:17). One man in particular was their target: the one who told them the truth and risked being called their ‘enemy’ because of it (3:1).
And that target was Paul.
He was not a poet by profession: his endlessly long sentences prove it. But upon him came the Spirit, and then he starts cursing. Swearing in prose. If only those people, who disturb the congregation of Christ’s ransomed people with their binding decrees, were now themselves cut, i.e. emasculated, eunuchs. If only they were so consistent with their binding to the requirement of blood shed-in-circumcision, that they would also put the knife in their own bodies, or have it put there! Then, in their fanaticism, they would soon be cut themselves. And then? Then, precisely in accordance with their own ‘Old Testament’ standpoint, the rule of Deut. 23:1 would apply to them: no emasculated or mutilated man may be admitted into the assembly of the Lord. Such a person is outside the temple, outside the congregation; he cannot communicate.
Well: those who sought to impose bindings on the free church, they sat at one “table” (often a rug on the floor on which the food was placed and on which they reclined to eat) with the ransomed by Christ. May their sitting at that table be such that they entangle themselves in that table. Let their table become a snare! A trap. May their church manipulations end up in the misery into which they first drove the church. May they, with their binding and their excommunication, ultimately excommunicate themselves: it would then spell the end of their disturbance of the peace of freedom, which is in Christ Jesus.
A curse?
Yes, an apostolic curse.
And it links into the false prophets’ own slogans. They claim to stand up for the Old Testament, the law of Moses. But Moses they do not know. They know him as a man-of-commitment, but not as the type of the Mediator of the covenant of grace. They tear apart law and gospel; they oppose the mission, and turn the church into a sect, bound by a number of arbitrarily chosen formulas.
If those false prophets had an eye for the fullness of Scripture, Paul would be the first to echo Isaiah: that the God of the wider church will soon grant a place in his house also to those who are cut: Isaiah 56:4, 5. For thus says the Lord: “To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths, and choose what pleases Me, and hold fast My covenant, even to them I will give in My house and within My walls a place and a name better than that of sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off”, says the comfort prophet Isaiah.
This is a promise to the mutilated, the emasculated, who yearn for mercy. Although not unconditional, it is a promise ‘introduced by a condition’ (Ridderbos, J., Korte Verklaring, p.167). The condition is faithfulness to the law, which is ‘in the deepest sense a matter of faith’ (Ridderbos); and this condition is now followed by the divine promise: that they will be given a good name in the church, a fatherhood, not physical, but nevertheless spiritual. Fathers-in-Israel they will become. They will not die in the church, even though they were afraid of it and even though they seemed to be predestined for it, because they could not have children and could not become fathers in Israel in the literal sense.
See, that is grace. That is the blessed deliverance of those who once were bound. It grants spiritual offspring to the barren, free passage along the main road to those in despair, liberty to those who were bound, freedom of movement to the chained, fresh air to those in the dungeon. If only the maniacs who troubled the Galatians with their laws had understood the gospel that sets people free: they would have been set, alongside Paul, on the Broad Road of the Freedom-that-is-in-Christ.
But now that they are steering souls away from that main road and into captivity—no, not the captivity of the law (for Moses’ real law was passage to Christ’s gospel), but the captivity of their arbitrary laws—may now the passage granted by Isaiah to proselytes as well as to exiles be cut off from them. May now the law become to them what they teach to others: a driver with a whip, a hard message, a sour look: the emasculated have no place here, period.
Condition, condition, is their catchphrase. And no promise-with-condition. For the condition of Isaiah and of Paul is a condition with a promise of grace. But the condition of those Judaizers, who bind and tear apart the church of the Galatians, that is a book-keeper condition: payment through what is ‘earned’ by yourself.
That is why the apostle can curse. This is how we too, on his authority, want to curse. We curse the binding, which is not according to Christ’s Word. We condemn such bindings to ruin. So that there may be unhindered passage for the gospel. Freedom for those who are cut. But misery for the ‘cutters’.
Even though princes walk out of the liberated church because they don’t like to hear the curse in God’s Word (as that prince in the Netherlands once did), the Word remains. That Word is the basis for unity; it’s the basis for federative blessing and federative curse. May he who turns the juices of God’s church into summer droughts wither away. So that no-one emasculated-by-violence, who wants to live from the Word of the Great Unbinder, need ever say, I am a barren tree (Isa. 56:3).
Contend with those who twist Your Word, Heavenly Lord.
[i] “Apostolisch vloekproza”, De Reformatie, XX, 17 August 1945, published in Schriftoverdenkingen 3, Oosterbaan & Le Cointre, Goes, 1958.