“How then can man be in the right before God?” asked Job’s neighbor Bildad the Shuhite (Job 25:4). This question is as powerful today as when Bildad asked it some 4,000 years ago. In so many ways it is mankind’s attempts to answer this question that makes religion so difficult and divisive. One might easily make the case that in its greatest extreme religious terrorism is rooted in one particular answer to this query—so much of the religious hatred in our world today stems from some conviction that offensive and even defensive military, paramilitary or otherwise assymetrical missions are legitimate “in God’s name.” Pleasing God, or, I should say, appeasing God, drives the soul. On a simpler yet equally destructive level the pursuit of an answer to Bildad’s question is what dominated the atmosphere within the Galatian church in the decades following Christ’s ascension into Heaven. Originally, the Galatians heard the gospel of Jesus Christ through the Apostle Paul, who boldly told them that “through Jesus Christ forgiveness of sins is proclaimed” (Acts 13:38). But in the years subsequent to Paul’s time with the Galatians, troublemakers arrived who distorted the gospel message, declaring instead that being right before God required allegiance to traditional rules and rituals that were handed down millennia earlier to the Prophet Moses. “How then can man be in the right before God?” Is it through the exclusive work of Jesus Christ? Or is it through some effort of our own? The Apostle Paul is persistent that it …See Entire Article
