Galatians 5:1,6 English Standard Version

¹ For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

⁶ For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

We should look at the issue of circumcision as abstinence, giving up sin. It is a fasting of anything and everything that keeps us from being in Christ. Abstinence doesn’t work, only faith working through love keeps us in Christ, our “hold fast”.

One of the interesting issues of freedom is that we cannot understand or appreciate freedom until we have lost it. If we only look at freedom as having the ability to choose for ourselves, we have lost the true meaning of freedom.

What we choose defines our freedom.

Hosea 8:13 English Standard Version (ESV) As for my sacrificial offerings, they sacrifice meat and eat it, but the Lord does not accept them. Now he will remember their iniquity and punish their sins; they shall return to Egypt.

Egypt is the symbol of slavery, bondage.

Romans 7:23 English Standard Version (ESV) but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

The battlefield of sin is in our minds. If we willfully sin, we should expect the chastening of the Lord. There is a difference between sin of ignorance and willful denial of obedience of faith.

The Lord can and does call us to obey by faith but in that call, we still have the right to choose to obey or deny.

Galatians 5:13 English Standard Version (ESV) For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

Again we repeat, “faith working through love.” Gal. 5:6

Isaiah 58:6 English Standard Version (ESV) “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

Isaiah 58 is God’s Word on true and false fasting. Let us in this moment endure the Word of the Lord to change our thinking about the nature of a fast. Here is Isaiah 58:6 we find no reference to food, nor of abstinence.

Think rather of the ancient requirements of a “hold fast”. It was a place where a people under attack could withdraw and resists their oppressors. This idea is more in tune with this scripture.

Colossians 3:3 English Standard Version (ESV) For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

Christ is our “hold fast”. In Him we fend off the attacks of our oppressor. Who is our oppressor?

John 10:10 English Standard Version (ESV) The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

So often we are taught that Satan is the thief but John 10:1 does not call Satan the thief.

John 10:1 English Standard Version (ESV) “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.”

Every man who enters by any way other than by the door is a thief and our oppressor. This is what Vine’s Expository Dictionary says about every man:  “every one” of the class denoted by the noun connected with pas, e.g., Matthew 3:10, “every tree;” Mark 9:49, “every sacrifice;”

This leads us back once again to the tree of knowledge of good and evil where original sin cast us out of our original “hold fast”, Eden. It is sin that cast us out and sin that oppresses us.

Do not be deceived by the liar, Satan, his voice is nothing but a scoffer against the Word of God. He would rather have us blame himself than to accept the truth, we choose to sin, and that is our fault.