Before you were saved, you might have paid little attention even to your self-made laws. But after you were saved and especially after you began to seek the Lord in the church life, your self-made laws began to exert a very strong influence on your daily living. You can say truly that you love the Lord and seek Him, but can you honestly say that you live Christ day by day? Instead of living Christ, you may live your kind of law. When you break one of your self-made laws, you repent and make confession to the Lord. But have you ever repented and confessed for not living Christ? I do not believe that many Christians have made this kind of confession.
In recent months my confession to the Lord has mainly been related to my failures in living Christ. In the morning I may have an excellent time to pray and enjoy the Lord. During my prayer, I am one spirit with the Lord and live Him. But afterward I may go to the breakfast table, begin to eat, and completely forget about Christ and living Him. Sometime later I may suddenly realize what has happened and come back to Christ and say, “O Lord, forgive me. Lord, I want to be one spirit with You.” For a few minutes, I may again be with the Lord. However, I soon become occupied with something else and forget Him again. Is this not your experience also? We cannot say that we live Christ. Instead of living Him, we live our laws, culture, religion, and tradition.
We have pointed out that the book of Galatians covers God’s two economies. His first economy, the economy in the Old Testament, involves law, our ethical laws as well as the God-given law. Whenever a person is regenerated, he continues to live according to the ethical laws he has assimilated from his culture. Very few, if any, live Christ. Even though we may seek Christ, we still live our own cultural laws and, thereby, in our actual experience, keep ourselves in God’s first economy.
The second economy of God, His New Testament economy, is wholly related to Christ. Before Paul was converted, he was altogether in God’s first economy. In 1:14 Paul tells us that he “advanced in Judaism beyond many contemporaries in my race, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.” So zealous was he for the Jewish religion that he resolved to persecute all those who were living in God’s second economy. For this reason, he “persecuted the church of God excessively and ravaged it” (1:13). We are all familiar with the fact that when Paul was on the road to Damascus, the Lord intervened and revealed Himself to Paul, causing him to fall to the ground. Paul experienced a genuine conversion, a real turn from God’s old economy of the law to His new economy of Christ. He refers to this turn in 1:15 and 16, where he tells us that it pleased God “to reveal His Son in me.”
Christ was revealed not only to Paul, but also into him. When Paul was a leading religionist, a “top dog” in Judaism, the Son of God entered into him. This was the reason Paul says in 1:16 that the Son of God was revealed in him, not merely to him. Because he had such a revelation of Christ, Paul could testify to the believers, “Dear saints, I want to tell you that I have the living Person of the Son of God within me. There is utterly no comparison between this Person and the law. The law is good, but it is inferior to this living Person. For years, I tried to keep the law. But one day the living Person of the Son of God was revealed into me. What a wonder! What a miracle! Even now as I am writing to you, this living Person is one with me. When I write, He writes, for He writes in my writing.”
What we see in chapter one of Galatians is a change of economy, a shift from the old economy to the new in which the Old Testament economy is replaced by the New Testament economy. This change is not a matter of theory, philosophy, or culture. It is an actual shift related to the economy of God. Formerly, Paul was absolutely given to God’s Old Testament economy. But after Christ was revealed into him, he was wholly in God’s new economy.
In 2:19 Paul says, “For I through law have died to law that I might live to God.” Paul wanted the Galatians to realize that he was dead to the law. No matter how good the law may be, Paul had died to it and had nothing more to do with it. Death had separated him from the law. This made it possible for him to live to God.