Galatians 2:15-3:9 | Justification | Alex Culpepper

So I want to start this morning by saying that words are really important. Now, I know that you probably know this, but we live in a day where people are very undisciplined with their words. There's this reality that we're in fact, I think even desensitized to a certain degree with words because there are so many places and spaces that are just constantly filled up with. If you have social media, it's full of words. Everybody can put their words wherever they want, right?

And if you watch the news, right, like we switched to 24 hour news cycle something like 30 years ago. And so the reality of that is just that there's words about everything. People who don't have expertise in anything can have an opinion on everything and then they get to throw their words out there and let you know what they think. So we are both desensitized when it comes to words and undiscerning when it comes to words. And that doesn't just take away from the power of words, but it causes our relationship with words to change as well.

See, we can take, what we can do is that we can take the current cultural experience that we have with words, which just for what it's worth, we live in a time and a place where words are more abundant than they have ever been for most people, right? We can take our current cultural experience with words and then transport that onto our understanding of how the people who originally received the words of scripture would have related to words. See, the thing is though, that they didn't have that kind of relationship with words. Words were much more valuable because there were far fewer of them. They filled up far less space.

So I have up here, in fact, this is Egyptian papyrus. This is, instead of having gigabytes to write their words on, the ancient people had papyrus. Papyrus was very expensive, very difficult to come by. You had to spend a lot of money and you have very limited space here, which means that if you're going to write, if you're going to put some words down, you are going to make sure that, that every word you put down on this papyrus matters, right? That it has importance, that it's significant.

And this kind of points to God's word. God's word was written on these kinds of pages. And if it's God, in fact, who is seeking to communicate to us, that even more ups the ante on the fact that the words must be really valuable. So I'm going to give you a really big word today and you don't need to like go to college. Or anything to understand this Word.

I just want to let you know this word because it's so important to how we relate to Scripture. The word is this. The word is plenary verbal inspiration. This is our understanding of what the value of the words of Scripture. And it is that every word originally written down on these pages, every single word originally written down on papyrus, is the exact word that God chose to be there.

That's the word that God wanted to be there. He put it there because that's the word that he picked. He didn't pick a different word. He picked that particular word. Now, if you're wondering, you get to this kind of concept and you're wondering, well, how can I trust that the words that I have today in my Bible accurately communicate to me the words that were originally written in Scripture?

I just want to tell you we don't have, like, time to evaluate all that this morning. Would you come and talk to me after the service today? If you're like, I really don't know if I can trust the words written down in the Bible. I want to point you in the direction of some resources that could help you dig further in that direction. But part of what I want us to do this morning is to put our attention on the value of words, because God values words, and he is trying to accomplish something with his words.

So today we're launching a new series in the book of Galatians. We're continuing on through the book of Galatians. This series is called Grace through Faith. And in this section of Galatians, we will be considering, like the Apostle Paul, because he is so precise with his words, right? When he puts particular words down, he uses some version of the word faith.

In the section of verses that we'll be considering, he uses some version of the word faith 20 times, repeats the word faith 20 times. He uses words related to being called God's child 18 times. In this next section, he uses some version of the word justification ten times in this section that we're going to consider, and then some version of the idea of promise eight times. So principle, in Scripture, you have a limited amount of space on this piece of paper. If something gets repeated and in a limited amount of space, it must mean that it's very important, that there's something important to understand.

And so if you don't believe that every word is inspired, you just need to get get behind this concept. If you don't believe that every word is inspired, then you might as well believe that none of the words are inspired because what you can then do is you can pick and choose the words that you would prefer to be inspired.

So when it's a matter of picking and choosing, this makes it just your opinion against my opinion, right? And so as people who believe in the very words of Scripture, that when Holy Spirit through the Apostle Paul was emphasizing these particular words, we really need to pay attention to what they mean. So before we go too far, we need to look at a different word. And it's this word that makes Paul so passionate, right? He's writing down.

The book of Galatians is perhaps his most passionate book. He gets really intense in this book, and it is this word that makes him passionate. It's this word that he's expanding upon when he writes this next section that we're going to consider. And so Galatians 2, 20 and 21 say this. I have been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave him for me. Stop. New idea.

I do not nullify the grace of God. This idea, Paul, what he's doing here is he's opposing the teaching of a group of false teachers called Judaizers. We've talked a lot about those guys the last several weeks. They taught that salvation came through through Jesus, plus becoming Jewish, right? Adopting Jewish law and Jewish practices.

And in the last series, we talked extensively about what happens when the gospel advances. The gospel goes forward and takes ground. And as it takes ground, demonic agendas rise up to warp the teaching, to mislead people into believing something false about who Jesus is. And that even to the point that even, like teachers and leaders are prone to the possibility of drifting, we looked at Peter. Pastor Don led us through looking at Peter last week and how Peter drifted.

And so what. What Paul is. Is doing in this letter to Christians, he's writing to Christians in this area called Galatia, and he's seeking out to dismantle the false teaching. But this is what he's going to do now. He's going to make a positive case for what is the gospel.

He's gonna start articulating with clarity what the gospel is. And at the core of his thinking is this idea that I do not nullify the grace of God. And so what is the grace of God? What's in Paul's mind when he writes that word down? God's grace is his generous power to do what you can't.

His generous power to do what you can't. So the word grace, whenever it's used, at its core, it's about generosity. It's about kindness, right? It speaks of one who acts in kindness at their own expense for the benefit of another. So in the past, you may have heard something like this, grace is God's unmerited favor, right?

That you have done nothing to earn what God gives you, and yet he gives it to you freely. It's a kindness being expressed that I could not get on my own. And so, for what it's worth, human beings, we can express grace towards each other. We can be generous towards each other. We can freely extend acts of kindness at our own expense.

But there is something unique about God's grace. Because God is in the position that he is in, that when he acts with generosity, his generosity comes with power. When he acts with generosity, it meets us in our circumstances, meets us in power, and changes our circumstances. And so when God is generous to us, the result is, well, you get transferred out of a kingdom of darkness and into a kingdom of light, right? You get a new identity in place of your sinful identity.

You get healing in a place where there's brokenness. You get a new family. You get adopted into God's family. You get the Holy Spirit. You get spiritual gifts in order to be a part of God's kingdom and advance his kingdom of the world.

You get cleansing of sin. You get overcoming of iniquity. You get that crushing of the head of the serpent. You get all of this from God's generous power poured out towards you. And all of those things are not things you can do yourself.

God gives them to you. God's generosity meets our lives, and the result is power to accomplish things that we never could on our own. And so Paul says, I refuse to nullify the grace of God. So get this, if you will, deny God's generosity. You remove yourself from the benefit of his power.

This is why he says, I can't nullify God's grace. If I nullify God's grace, then I'm cutting myself off from the power that he's extending. The fact that God is gracious points us towards a fundamental aspect of his character and how he desires us to know Him. He. He wants us to know him as one whose persistent heart towards us is that of generosity.

So think of an infant with his mother, right? How does that infant experience the care of his mother? Does that infant go, oh, I guess today I'm really gonna have to impress mom, like, make mom, like, take care of me. I have to prove to her that I'm worth taking care of, right? And I'm gonna.

I'm going to do some tricks and maybe I'll take a few steps today or maybe I'll crawl around on the floor. Maybe she'll think I'm something special. That is in no way how an infant relates to his mother. Did you know that Jesus said, in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, you must become like little children?

There's something to this idea of, like, we just so convince ourselves that we have to make ourselves impossible, oppressive to God. That's not how his grace works. We're just his family. We're just the people that he loves. We're just the ones that he's seeking to care for.

And so really this series is set to help us explore kind of the different facets of God's grace, His generous power, right, that he makes available to those who would simply trust him. And the first facet that Paul brings to our attention in this kind of passage is the is he brings to the fore this idea of justification. So Galatians 1, 15 and 16, he says, we ourselves are Jews by birth and not gentile sinners. Yet we know that a person is justified by works, is not sorry, is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So Paul, this is what he's doing.

So he just got through talking about how he had to correct Peter because Peter was drifting, right? And so here he's talking about how, like Peter, along with the Judaism, he's explaining his thinking behind his correction of Peter. That's what he's doing. He's saying we. And when he says we, he's speaking of himself and Peter, he's saying we are Jews by birth.

He's saying we're not gentile sinners, right? He's being a little facetious here, right? He's doing this to make a point. He's saying that. That even we Jews, even we people who have kept the law, even we members of God's chosen people, even we people who have performed sacrifices, and even we people who had to bring to the brazen altar the offering to the Lord, even we who have celebrated the feasts and sabbaths that God has established, even we know that we can only be justified in Christ with all that we have had to do.

We know that we still need Christ to justify us with all that we've done. We know that we are still hopeless apart from Christ. This is what he's saying. And so he's saying Jesus is the only way that we could be justified. We had no hope of justifying ourselves.

We need God to generously accomplish something for us that we could not accomplish for ourselves. He says we need to be justified. So what does the word justified mean? Justified means having a righteous status with the holy Creator of all things. So if you've not been in church a lot, the word righteous is difficult.

Or righteousness is a difficult word because we don't really use it in our normal language and discussion. So anytime you see that word righteousness in scripture, the word righteousness and the word justified are intertwined with each other. In fact, they come from the same root word, the word righteousness and the word justified. And so it's directly connected to this idea that you can be made clean and pure.

Something that is broken, right? Because we all are broken. We deal with the brokenness of sin. We're fractured into different parts. But the idea of righteousness is that you're speaking of something that is whole.

The idea of righteousness, literally, it's in the word, is to be right. Think of when we speak of somebody being just in their judgment. What we're saying is there is somebody who makes right judgments, somebody who does right things, essentially. Like, to be righteous at the end of the day is to be in full alignment with all of God's desires. That's what it means to be righteous.

And so a phrase that has kind of worked its way through the English language and through Bible teaching, the word justified, you could say that it means this. It's just as if I'd never sinned. A very simple way to relate to this word. You hear the word, you read the Word in Scripture. It's just as if I'd never sin.

And you need to know that being righteous is kind of the first key of really having any hope of a relationship with God. Psalm 34:15 says that the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The Lord listens to righteous people. Proverbs 12:28 says, in the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death. So righteousness and life are intrinsically connected.

Psalm 512 says, speaking to the Lord, for you bless the righteous, O Lord. You cover him with favor as with a shield. Psalm 11:7 says, for the Lord is righteous. He loves righteous deeds. The upright shall behold his face.

Those are the people who get to see God or the righteous. So the Lord blesses and gives his favor to righteousness. Righteousness is the means by which a person may find themselves safely in the Lord's presence and benefiting from all that he has to offer. And Paul says that even us Jews can only be made righteous through Christ.

Isaiah 53:11 speaks of this. This is. This is a prophecy that was written by the prophet Isaiah before Jesus ever came about. But it was pointing forward to Jesus. And this is what it says.

It says, out of the anguish of his soul when he was suffering for sin, and when he carried on himself the marks of, of our iniquity, out of the anguish of his soul he shall see. And even though he is hurting for what he's suffering, he shall be satisfied by his knowledge. Shall the righteous one, my servant, make many, that is you and I who believe, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. So this verse in the prophet Isaiah, it was written 700 years before Christ. And what it speaks of is the need for a great exchange to take place.

A Savior who would live perfectly and then give his perfect righteousness to broken sinners while he took on himself their sinfulness. And so this is how any person has any hope of being able to find rest and hope and joy and peace. You need in love. You need to have this relationship with God by being justified. And we are powerless to justify ourselves.

We are powerless to set right the things that we have already set wrong. We need God's generous power to change our status from that of sinner to that of righteous. So do you know that this is where all joy starts? You don't have more joy in your life, more deep wells to pull from. It starts in realizing that God has done something amazing to account you, who's desperately broken in the depths of your soul, who's wicked beyond belief.

Me too, by the way, to account us as righteous as those who are clean and pure and unblemished and spotless before the throne of God.

It is scandalous that one so perfect as the Son of God should die that I could have the freedom of being called righteous. Do you know me? A lot of you are like, oh, I think you're great. Well, I don't care. Like, I know me and I know what's in my heart and I know the selfishness that sits there.

I have, yes, experienced degrees of change through my life, but there is wickedness that is still stuck in the depths. But when I approach my Father in heaven, do you know what he sees righteous like? It is offensive that grace should be so free. But that is the only kind of grace that can actually save us.

And when you see that you have been given such a scandalous gift at such a steep price simply because your Father loves and adores you and he wants to bless you, you know what it does? You know what it does. It changes your heart. And it begins producing deep wells of joy that erupt in praise and thanksgiving to God. Because you knew how desperate you were without him.

And because he has now come near, you have hope and peace and life and, and rest. And so it changes your heart when you understand what you've been given. And increasingly so, it keeps changing you from the inside out. It takes the affections of your heart and morphs them from being towards, turned inward on yourself to being turned upward towards Him. This is what it means to be justified.

Being justified is a one time thing that initiates a process of your heart being changed. Love God. So verse 17 of Galatians, chapter 2 says this. But if. But if in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin?

Certainly not. Okay, this is a little bit complicated. Paul is speaking like a lawyer and he does this from time to time. It gets challenging to grasp. And so just go along with me here.

The word if you. Sometimes that word can be understood as since instead of if. So I just want you to take the word since and put it there. So he's saying since we Jewish law keepers, when he says we, he's talking about himself and Peter and all the Jewish law keepers. Since we Jewish law keepers need Christ to justify us, since that's our place of need.

Right? And by the way, you need to know that the Judaizers agree with him on this point. The Judaizers claim to be believers in Jesus. They claim that Jesus is the only way that they can be justified. They just said you need to become Jewish in order to also be justified.

So since we Jewish law keepers do in fact need Christ to justify us, do you know what it shows? It shows that we too are sinners. We Jewish law keepers are sinners, just like the Gentiles are sinners. That's the implication. We're sinners just like they're sinners.

And yet what do the Judaizers say? Only Jewish law keepers can be saved. And if you want to be saved, you need to become a Jewish law keeper and believe in Christ. That's how you get saved. That's what they're teaching people.

But here's the thing. Paul, he's walking through and he says, okay, but if it's only Jewish law keepers that can be saved. And it turns out that Jewish law keepers happen to be sinners, just like Gentiles are sinners. You know what that means? Well, Christ is just picking his favorite kind of sinner.

That's what Paul's thinking here. If what you say is true, then that means that Christ just has a favorite kind of sinner that he's picked. And in picking his favorite kind of sinner, do you know what he does then? He becomes a servant of one kind of sin over another kind of sin. Here's a question.

Does Jesus have a favorite kind of sin? Thank you. All sin is wickedness. All sin has at its root the same core problem. Now, don't hear what I'm saying.

Like, yes, there are certainly degrees of sin, right? But at the end of the day, it all has the same core problem. It's all wickedness. This is the problem of sin, betrayal and disconnection from our Creator who loves us. That's at the end of the day, what is happening with sin?

All sin shows that our hearts are desperately disconnected from God, right? So that the anger and judgment and ill will in the heart of the religious person who sits and church every Sunday, right? And the lust for power in the heart of the politician and the greed in the heart of the shopaholic and the hedonism and sensuality in the heart of the person without God. All of these display the same core problem. Betrayal and disconnection from God.

And here's the thing. Christ does not favor one category of betrayer over another category of betrayer.

Verse 19.

For through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God. This is what Paul says. Paul says, now the law has a use. Do you know what it is good for? It's effective to kill you.

That's what the law does. He's saying, the law showed me that in me was sin and death, right? It was a sword that cut me down and proved how reprobate I was. That's what the law did. And because the law killed me, I am hopeless like you.

Imagine being stabbed. Well, maybe don't do that if you're not good with that. But imagine that you're killed with something and then somebody tries to bring you back to life with the thing that killed you. It's not. It's impossible.

It's a backwards concept.

So because the law killed me, verse 20. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live. I died. The law laid me bare.

It killed me. And I decided, okay, in my death, I'm going to hop over to where Jesus is and I'm going to die with him instead of die without him. And by dying with him, he has now come to live in me. I don't live anymore. Christ now has a life that he is living inside of me and being worked out through me.

The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. So this is it. This is the foundational hope of any who would find themselves justified. This is the source of joy in your life. You want to know where joy comes from and peace and hope and rest?

It comes from this place. You need to start by realizing your desperate need before a holy God. You need to realize then that as you are stuck in that need that you are wickedly disconnected from him, that you misunderstand him, that you have betrayed Him. And then you need to realize that in that place of desperation and God loves you so much that he would send his Son to take on himself the justice that belongs to your betrayal, that he would receive your sin and that he would give to you his pristine moral perfection in return. And so you need to have faith in him.

Not in yourself, not in your ethnic identity, not in your values system or ability to follow the rules. Not faith in a better set of circumstances, not faith in a desire for things to maybe go better for you one day. Not faith in your own ideas about what seems right. You need to have faith in the Son of God. So words are important.

And this word is so important that it's repeated more times than any other word in this passage. The word faith. What is the word faith? Faith is belief exhibited through active trust. You've probably seen this before.

If you haven't, God bless you. I get to surprise you this morning. What is this? It's a chair. Yeah.

Good. All right, good. You passed the test. Okay, so you know what? I believe that this chair is effective to hold me up from the ground.

And I could stand here all day, and I could talk to you about the way that the chair has been built. I could talk to you about the sturdiness of the legs, the metal that they're on. I could kind of grab parts of the chair. I could put it on display for you and show you all of the ways that I believe the chair is effective to hold a person up from the ground if they would choose to sit in it. But the only way that, you know, if I have faith in the chair is if I sit in the chair and here's the beautiful thing.

God has made finding life and joy and rest and hope and peace and salvation with him so simple.

We just simply gather up all our hopes and all our dreams and all our failures and all our baggage and all of the things that we wish we could have been, everything that we are. We just gather up all of that stuff with us and then we take it over and we sit down in Him.

That's it. The simplicity of faith is that we would just put all of our self in him, that we would display that we believe he is effective to do what we could not do. You know, the idea that through that kind of trust that we get made righteous means that through that kind of trust we receive cleansing for our sin. And that through that kind of trust, the cleansing that we receive for our sin creates space in us for the Holy Spirit to take up residence. And that through that kind of trust, we are now able to commune with God through prayer to him.

And we are now able to listen to the voice, voice of God and hear him speak to us. And we are now able to have deep wells of intimacy with God. In fact, we are able to come to him in his throne room in the place where he is high and lifted up in holiness. And we could just come and be with him there and not have to be afraid of what might happen to us, that in this place, that we can now open the Word of God and receive the. The Word of God as love letter written to us to be written on our hearts and to change us from the inside out.

These are the gifts of what it is to trust Him. And that's the simplicity of having access to all that he makes available. So when you understand what's been made available through that, you begin to understand why Paul gets so passionate when people come along and they're actually putting obstacles in the way of that. Because the only way that what God has to offer becomes effective for you is if you receive it as a gift.

And so that's why in verse one of chapter three, Paul issues an impassioned plea. He says, oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?

He's right here. That word bewitched. He's right here. Literally suggesting that the lies they have believed or are starting to believe are on the same level of spiritual darkness and depravity as a black magic curse that a sorcerer would cast. Right?

And by the way, you remember the context that the Galatians come from, the Druidic religion and, and the things that they invested in, right? So these people are familiar with the idea of being bewitched. He says, who has bewitched you? He goes on to say, it was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. He's essentially saying, you know what, I stood in the middle of your town, in your square, and I put a posting up for everybody to see.

He's not talking about a literal posting, but he's like, I stood out there and I proclaimed like the town crier to all of you. I told you about who Jesus was and the power of the blood of Jesus that he has made available to everyone everywhere. The power to say, set you free. And do you know what happened? You received the Holy Spirit.

God welcomed you into his family by his power. I told you that the Creator has made a way for you to be joined to him, and that everything Christ has done is fully sufficient to get you in with God as a kingdom son, and a kingdom daughter, who is loved and blessed by him.

So then for you to question whether or not you're really in God's family, to question whether or not the cross was really sufficient for you to succumb to the lie that God's love is somehow lacking towards you, is to miss out on the blessing that the blood would speak over your life, right? And he's saying it's the equivalent of asking the village shaman to put a black magic curse on you. It's kind of like this. It's like God has. I just want you to imagine there's like a waterfall right here, it's falling down from the ceiling.

Waterfall right here. Like God has just this place of blessing, right? And the simple thing that you have to do is you just have to step under the waterfall, right? And what these people are inviting you to do is they're actually inviting you to step into of the waterfall and believe that somehow you still should be able to receive God's blessing. He says, this is not how it works.

So skip down to verse seven with me.

Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. So this whole thing about sons of Abraham, it's all about inheritance, right? It's a question about who gets to inherit the blessings that God has to give. And many Jews believe, you know what, it is only through our ethnic heritage that you receive the blessings of God. And this is why they put so much emphasis on, hey, these Gentiles, they need to become Jews like us.

And Paul says here, ethnic heritage has nothing to do with being In God's blessed family, the thing that determines who inherits God's blessings, faith. Abraham did not start with a law. Abraham started with faith in God's voice. When God called and said, hey, go to a land that I'm calling you to. God's blessing has always been about faith.

And so verse eight, the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, in you shall all the nations be blessed. So then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. So Paul is writing to these Gentiles who have started believing in Jesus. Some of them have believed in Jesus, and he's writing to say, hey, would you go and search the Hebrew scriptures, go to Genesis 12, 3, go to Genesis 22:18 and see that what you are experiencing now was God's plan the entire time. Right from the start.

God's plan was to expand his family by taking it from one people and moving it to all people. That was always God's plan. And so, church, our main point this morning is simply this. Jesus's blood is powerful to make you righteous before God. This is God's grace, right?

To speak a blessing over you, more powerful than any curse, right? This is God's power to do for you what you had no hope of being able to do for yourself. Okay, so what?

So what? Number one, God's grace is not a license to sin. I feel like it's important to clarify this because anytime you talk about grace so freely given, somebody will inevitably say, well, if it's that free, surely people will take advantage of it. Well, I would just encourage you. We all should be taking advantage of all that God has to offer.

Right? But. But what they mean by this is surely somebody will sin and think that in their sinning, they are okay because they're covered by God's grace. I prayed a prayer when I was eight, right? This is what they'll say.

Like, well, I prayed a prayer. And this is. There are some people who do think like this. And so I want to catch up with that. There are some people who think that I prayed a prayer like when I was 8.

Yeah. And I went to Bible school and I did the thing where my Bible school leader, they led me to pray that prayer. And you know what? Now sometimes I go to church twice a year, sometimes I only go once a year. And you know, Jesus grace is rich towards me.

And I treat people nicely. And then, you know, generally I just live however I want for the rest of my Life, this is what people are concerned with.

So you just need to know God's grace is not a license for you to keep being your own God.

God's grace is an invitation out of the death spiral of being your own God. And so anyone who would treat grace like a license, at the end of the day, they don't comprehend how much evil was in them and the sin and the death that it was generating in them. And simultaneously then, they don't comprehend exactly how rich in grace God has been towards them. Because when you understand the utterly generous posture of God to pay for all of your wickedness with the blood of His Son, it produces in you a great gratefulness that begins to rewire the affections of your heart and change you from the inside out. And so, yes, you will stumble and you will fall.

And do you know what, little children, I write to you so that you may not sin, but know that when you do sin, you have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.

So God's grace is not a license to sin. And then the second one is that this is the real meaning of hosanna. When the people were in the streets and they were shouting hosanna to the Son of David, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. What they thought they were saying was, save us now, Jesus, from the oppressive Roman government.

And what they didn't realize that we this morning are getting to realize is that hosanna for us is actually saying, save us now, Jesus, from the oppression of the sin and death that has wired itself into our hearts.

And so when we say hosanna, we realize the fullness of what they were saying prophetically. Right? They were giving us a shadow. We see the fullness now of what Christ has done for us. And so as we sing Hosanna, we understand that Christ has come to set us free from our most wicked enemies and our most heavy oppressors.

And so, as we sing this morning and celebrate what Christ has done, would you keep in mind the freedom that he brings as the king who rode in on a donkey.