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Law In Galatians Explosion-1 8/17
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August 17 - Law In Galatians Explosion-1

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The law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer nuder a custodian. Gal. 3:24, 25, RSV.

It's a little easier to see how this passage could cause an Adventist explosion than the 10 horns of Daniel 7, especially if one reads the text to imply that there was no need at all for the law after the coming of Christ rather than that the law always points out our sins and beyond them to the Savior.

Butler and his friends undoubtedly feared the first option. And that would be serious if the law was the Ten Commandments. They got around that problem by interpreting the law in Galatinas as the ceremonial regulations. Thus as they saw it, the ceremonial law pointed them to Christ, but after He came we no longer needed it.

And then comes Waggoner in 1884 with his view tha tthe law in Galatinas is the Ten Commandments. THe Butler forces viewed that interpretation as a threat to the very heart of Adventist theology-the continuing sacredness of the seventh-day Sabbath embedded in the moral law. Thus the church leadership perceived Jones and Waggoner as endangering one of Adventism's central pillars.

For more than 30 years the church had held to the ceremonial law interpretation. And then in the midst of the Sunday law crisis Waggoner had to raise a teaching that, as Butler and Smith saw it, undermined the very basis of their reason for keeping the Sabbath, thus providing "great aid and comfort" to the Adventists' anti-law enemies.

Butler viewed the new teaching as "the opening wedge" by which a "deluge" of doctrinal and prophetic changes might be "let in" to the Adventist Church.

Smith was one in heart and mind with  Butler. For him, "next to the death of Brother White, the greatest calamity that ever befell our cause was when Dr. Waggoner put his articles on the book of Galatians through the Signs." If the denomination ever changed its position on Galatians, he flatly stated, "they may count me out," because "I am not yet prepared to renounce Seventh-day Adventism."

Sometimes fear drives our theology more than careful Bible reading. When it does, we overreact and lose our ability to read the text clearly.

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Father, help us to read Your Word with both eyes open and our emotions in place.
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