Christ redeemed us from “trying to attain our goal by human effort,” Galatians 3:3, because we can’t attain our goal by human effort. It’s a huge, humbling, and even rather embarrassing lesson, that every human eventually comes to learn, that God didn’t create us with the ability to make our lives perfect.
The only way a human being, relying on his own strength, can make his life work out perfectly both now and forever, is to obey every law governing his success absolutely perfectly. But the story of Israel proves we can’t do it. Even if God was with us like he was with them, blessing us at every turn and offering us paradise on earth if we obey him, we still couldn’t do it. That’s why the story of Israel was written: They didn’t have it in them to do what was needed, and nor do we.
It’s a terrible curse hanging over our heads, therefore, if we’re depending on our own strength alone. We may have the best of intentions, just like the Israelites, or like the Pharisees in Jesus’ day, but the flesh is weak. So Christ came to remove that curse. How? By becoming that curse for us (verse 13). He took the “depending on our own strength” curse and nailed it to the cross. No longer, then, would we ever have to think our eternity depends on anything we do, like obeying all Ten Commandments perfectly, or acting all pious and religious.
Instead, Galatians 3:11, the righteous would live by faith. Faith in what, though? The answer to that is in verse 14: “He (Christ) redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.”
It’s faith in the promise of the Spirit. It would dawn on us that thousands of years ago God made a promise to Abraham, that one day the help we’d need to enter eternity with God would be given to us. The Spirit would work the miracles in our lives that we couldn’t work in our lives ourselves. And that’s what Christ’s death released to us. He took that old self of ours, totally dependent on human strength, nailed it to the cross, and opened up the promise he made to Abraham of the Spirit doing for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves.
We could then begin a new life of dependence on the Spirit, like the Galatians did – to begin with. Unfortunately they reverted back to “trying to attain their goal by human effort,” which stirred Paul to write Galatians 3, for their sake, and for ours.
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