Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. As we start in Galatians chapter 1, Paul is enraged and doesn’t mince words as he calls out the members of the newly formed church for listening to false teachers who perverted the gospel that Paul and Barnabas brought to them. You can hear the irritation in Paul’s writing, but I don’t want to spoil the whole thing. Let’s listen in on the fireworks. Galatians chapter 1: In Defense of the Gospel. Welcome back to Share the Word.

We appreciate you tuning in and hope you’re enjoying learning the big ideas in the New Testament chapter by chapter. If you’ve been with us for a while, you should have the background in place now to understand where we are heading next, which is to some of the New Testament’s epistles. Epistles just means letters. Most of the writings in the New Testament after the Gospels and the history book of Acts are actually letters. Thirteen of these letters were written by the Apostle Paul to churches he planted in cities he visited on his missionary journeys, or to leaders he had trained to oversee those churches.

Just so you know, the order of the writings in our New Testaments is not chronological, but we are going to take a couple epistles next, which were letters written to tackle serious questions that came up early in the rapidly growing Christian movement, questions which needed to be resolved in order for Christianity to stay on the right path, true to the teachings of Jesus. The first one we’re going to take a look at is called Galatians. Written by the Apostle Paul around 49 or 50 A.D., this letter was sent to early Christians in a Roman province located in what is today central Turkey. You might recall from our episode in Acts chapter 14 how Paul and Barnabas were in that area on their first missionary journey. They visited the cities of Pisidian Antioch and Iconium, and also nearby smaller towns called Lystra and Derbe. Lystra was where Paul was stoned, remember?

It was the young believers in this province of Galatia who were the original recipients of this New Testament letter. Paul understood that his calling was not only to go to these places and share the gospel, but to plant churches there and then train gifted teachers who could lead them. After he left these places, he kept in touch with them by means of letters like this one we call Galatians. He wrote to encourage them, to guide their progress, to answer questions that came up, and often to address problems that he had learned about. And addressing a big problem that arose is what takes up most of the epistle to the Galatians. Try to picture this.

I live close to the ocean on the Mid-Atlantic shore. Imagine I took my four-year-old grandson, his name’s Theo, to the beach one summer day. Don’t try to picture me in a bathing suit. Just try and imagine this situation, please. We’re not going there just to play in the surf, but also to build sandcastles. So we have buckets with us and shovels and some toy trucks and some little toy soldiers of his, and we’re going to build something truly spectacular.

When we get to the beach, we find a good spot near the water, just far enough away so the incoming surf won’t destroy what we’re going to build. As soon as we get situated, we go to work on it. Theo brings me water from the ocean. We wet down the sand, and we start to build sandcastles with walls and turrets and a big moat surrounding it all. About a half an hour after we’ve started this, it’s starting to take shape, and I’m pretty proud of what we’re building. Actually, nearby sunbathers and people walking down the beach are pointing at it admiringly and enjoying how into it my little grandson seems to be.

We place his toy soldiers in just the right spots, and we keep filling up the moat with plenty of water. But after a while, Theo starts to get bored, as he calls it, bored, and he wants to play in the water now. Of course, I can’t leave him down at the shore by himself. I got to go with him to be sure he’s safe. We’re only gone for about 10 or 15 minutes. But in that span of time, some bigger kids come along and decide to wreck everything we built.

They kick it down. They trample all through it. And when we return and find that, what do you think our reaction would be? Theo would be beside himself, so upset. And me, I’d be angry. I’d be looking up and down the beach to see any kids that look like the likely culprits.

And if I spotted someone, they better hope they can run faster than me. Wouldn’t you feel the same way? If you can imagine that scenario, you may have a little bit of the feeling the Apostle Paul did as he wrote this letter to the members of the young Galatian churches. Whatever you felt toward the punks I was just telling you about who destroyed our sandcastles, ramp that up maybe 10 times, and maybe you’re at the emotional decibel level Paul was at after hearing what had gone on in Galatia. He responded by firing off this letter. Paul wrote many letters to churches that he helped plant over the years.

We don’t have all of them. But the fact that this one was preserved in our New Testaments tells me it contains some very important ideas God wants to make sure we’re always clear about. Through the centuries, Christians always understand this. Opening to chapter 1, and I hope you do follow along in a Bible or Bible app. After a somewhat formal introduction, at verse 6, Paul writes this: I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one.

However, there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we’ve already preached to you, let him be accursed. I’ll say that again. If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received from us, let him be accursed. That’s chapter 1, verses 6 through 9. Wow.

Paul couldn’t personally consign anybody to hell, but if he could, he was angry enough to do it, it sounds like. He was shocked to learn that after he and Barnabas had left Galatia, others had come there intentionally spreading a confusing different gospel, as he calls it, to the young believers they’d led to Christ there, which Paul says is no gospel at all. They had added things to the gospel of Christ, resulting in these young Christians becoming very confused. If I could summarize their misleading teaching, it went like this. What Paul and Barnabas told you about Jesus, how he is the Messiah and Savior God sent, and how you need to put your faith in him and so on, that’s all well and good. But there’s a lot more to belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ than just that.

Jesus, remember, was a Jew. He was of God’s chosen people. The apostles in Jerusalem are all Jews, all of us. All of us there live under the law of Moses and follow the rules in the Torah. We must, in order to be holy and pleasing to God, if we want to be part of God’s people too, we must all live under the laws of God that he gave to Moses. And then these false teachers told the new Gentile believers in Jesus in Galatia about circumcising and the laws of cleanness and uncleanness and what foods they could eat and not eat and how to observe certain Jewish festivals, impressing on them all kinds of rules from Leviticus and Deuteronomy in the Old Testament.

Essentially, the Galatians were being told that if they really wanted to be saved and to be a part of Jesus Christ’s church, they needed to become de facto Jews and live under the law of Moses as faithful Jews always had tried to. We refer to this group of false teachers today as Judaizers because they added on to believing into Jesus required practices of Judaism. What Paul and Barnabas taught you was fine, but it was only part of the truth, was their message. We are here to tell you the whole story, the rest of the story of how to be sure you’re saved and holy in God’s eyes. Apparently, sadly, many of the Galatians naively accepted their false teaching. And Paul was ticked off by that.

He didn’t mince words here in his response to this, did he? He said, Listen, those guys who came there telling you something different about the gospel from what Barnabas and I shared with you, let them be accursed, meaning God should send them straight to hell. That was Paul’s blistering reaction when he heard about this. He looked at those people who he had led to Christ as his own spiritual children, and he was very protective of them. He knew for certain that the gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus is the only gospel. It’s the one message under heaven given to men by which we can be saved, as Peter had preached in the first Christian sermon on Pentecost.

For anyone to alter that, for anyone to add to that, that was a grave, grave error, and Paul would not stand for it. And this is why I believe this letter we call Galatians was preserved for us and is in our New Testaments. The sad and tragic reality is many teachers and religious groups, almost from the outset, continuing throughout history until our very day. Groups that identify as Christian have come along with essentially the same erroneous message as the Judaizers. Putting your trust in Jesus and turning toward following Him is all well and good. It’s a good starting point.

But there’s more to being right with God than that. Here are the additional religious laws and obligations that our church says you must do. You know, there’s actually one group I can think of today who classify themselves as a Christian denomination that teach pretty close to exactly what the Judaizers did. They observe the Sabbath and the Old Testament dietary laws, and they teach their members that observing these kinds of things is essential in addition to faith in Christ. Others have gone in different directions. The Roman Catholic religion, for example, which amazingly to me considers itself the first and only true Christian church, they have developed an entire list of additionals they say their members must do in order to try to be saved.

They call them sacraments, and they teach that their priests actually dole out God’s grace to their members through these sacraments from cradle to grave. The more meticulous a Catholic is in observing these sacraments, the better chance they will have to be saved. But that church teaches no one can really be sure because no one knows if they’ve ever done enough. Liberal Protestant denominations, who no longer believe what the New Testament says about Christ generally, His atonement on the cross, or in His literal resurrection from the dead, they tell their dwindling memberships that following the ethical teachings attributed to Jesus is the Christian ideal. That’s how you’ll be saved, ultimately, if there is such a thing as being saved. If there is a judgment, God will judge us on a scale of good versus bad that He sees in our lives.

So strive to be a good citizen and a good neighbor and a good parent and a good person in general. That’s their message. And if there really is a heaven or hell. Our eternal destiny will hinge on whether we’ve done more of those things that God considers good than those things that God would consider bad. You know, I could go on with other religious organizations and their different takes. I bet some of you listening to me right now are thinking, My goodness, who does this guy think he is, calling out other sincerely religious groups like this?

How does he get off imagining he can speak for God in such a way? It’s a very important question. I hope you’ll stay and think about that answer for a couple moments with me, because I’m no one special, that’s for sure. My name is Paul, but I’m certainly not the Apostle Paul who wrote this letter to the Galatians. I’m just a teacher trying to do my best to explain what he wrote under the inspiration of God and why he wrote it. Paul was clearly angry here upon learning how the Judaizers had added things to the simple gospel message, isn’t he?

He wrote very sharply to condemn them and their wrong ideas. That’s obvious. It’s undeniable from this text. Those who distort the gospel of Christ, he said, should be accursed. He says that twice, in fact, in verses 8 and 9. That means damned.

So exactly why was he so angry? It’s because those false teachers were spreading a message that believing into and following Jesus was not enough. They changed the simple gospel message. That’s the answer. So if his anger was justified then, we wouldn’t have this letter in our New Testaments if it wasn’t, why would he react any differently, worry here now, seeing how current religious groups calling themselves Christian have changed and added on to the simple gospel message? That’s my point, and I feel certain he’d feel the very same way if he were here now.

We must understand that the New Testament is a written form of the faith that was once for all delivered to God’s holy people, to use a line from another inspired New Testament writing from the book of James. God had these critically important doctrines written down so we’d know the truth about them. And what could be any more critical than the content of the gospel message itself, the message telling us how we can be saved? So it is just as wrong to distort the truth about the gospel message today as it was in 50 A.D. This is what I believe. The Epistle to the Galatians was inspired by the Holy Spirit and written down by the Apostle Paul, preserved in our canon of New Testament scriptures so that we would have the definitive written Word of God telling us once for all that salvation is based on Christ’s finished work at Calvary, plus nothing.

Someone once put it that stuck in my head: The religions of the world all say, Do, do, do, but true Christianity says, Done. Jesus Christ has already done all that was necessary to save us. The religions of the world say, Try, try, try, but true Christianity says, Trust, trust in the Savior God sent because He has done everything that’s necessary to save us. Remember how many times the Apostle John told us in his gospel to believe into Jesus. There’s nothing, not a thing, we can do to add to what Jesus has already done, nothing that could make God want to save us any more. The only proper response we have is to, in humility, confess we are sinners that need the Savior He sent, receive what Jesus did for us on Calvary, and turn our lives toward following Him because He’s the Lord.

That’s the gospel message that Paul and the other apostles of Christ were sharing 2,000 years ago, and the one those of us who take the Bible as God’s word today still share. I hope you clearly see this. It doesn’t really matter what any religious teachers you’ve heard say to the contrary. Remember how the apostle Paul reacted to these Judaizers who tried to add other things to the simple gospel of grace and faith in Jesus. Anyone who does what they did, turn away from them, because they are enemies of the gospel of Christ. At Share the Word, we’re not really here to prop up one religious group or another.

You won’t hear us talk about denominations that are better than others or whatever. Our goal is simply to honestly share the big ideas in the New Testament, and none is bigger than this one in Galatians 1, that salvation is in Christ alone and can in no way be earned by us. We can add nothing to what Jesus has done. All we can do is confess we’re sinners who need Him, humbly receive Him by faith, turn our lives toward following Him as our Lord. That’s the formula. And fortunately, that’s all God asks us to do.

If you get that today, never clearly have before, I hope you will put your trust in Christ alone, the Savior that God loved you enough to send, and then turn your life toward following Him from this day forward, whatever that entails. And God has put down in the Scripture for us also what that entails, and you’ll see as we proceed through the New Testament. In the remainder of this chapter, Paul turns to a defense of his own apostleship. I’m sure what made him feel the need to do that was that he learned the Judaizers in Galatia had done their best to undercut him, to undermine him. You know, don’t you, that this Paul fellow who came here was not even one of Jesus’ original disciples. He’s not even from Israel, for heaven’s sakes.

He never even met Jesus, truth be told. Many of his ideas are his own. But we, we have come from Jerusalem, where Christianity was born, and we are the brethren of the original apostles of Jesus, so let us clarify some things for you. This is why Paul felt a need to underscore for the Galatian believers that none of what he had taught them were his own ideas. He reminds them that Jesus Christ Himself did choose him to be an apostle, and did commission him especially to be an apostle to the Gentiles like them. If there’s anyone on the planet who may have felt it necessary to tell you that you have to become a Jew first before you could be right in God’s eyes, it would be me, Paul is saying.

I was the most radically religious Jew you can imagine. But Jesus Himself confronted me and turned me 180 degrees around on all that. You know, we learned some interesting information from Paul’s early years as a Christian from this section in Galatians 1, additional to what Luke told us in the book of Acts. He reveals himself here that after his Damascus Road conversion, he didn’t go to Jerusalem to get taught and credentialed by those who were apostles before him. Instead, he says, he spent the next three years in Damascus and in Arabia, which is what they called the desert south of Damascus, Syria, at that time. And it was during that period, he says, that he came to clearly understand the gospel that he now preached.

He says he didn’t receive this from any man. He insists he received it through a revelation directly from Jesus Christ. His was not a usual conversion, and his was not a usual preparation for serving Christ as an apostle. Remember, Paul was a specially chosen instrument, as God called him. What he understood and taught about the gospel, he didn’t learn from others, not even from men who were apostles before him. He learned it directly from Jesus through revelation.

So, he was certain that the message was, what he was teaching was directly from Jesus and the truth, and he was ready to defend it against anybody who would deny or distort it. That’s not to say that what Paul taught about salvation was his own private interpretation. No, the Judaizers were lying about that. Do you know how we can be sure? Just a short time before this problem arose in Galatia, and we saw this back in Acts chapter 15, a council had been convened in Jerusalem to address this exact question. And there, Paul and Barnabas met with James and Peter and the other Jerusalem apostles and elders.

Some who held views like the Judaizers tried to make the case on that day that Gentiles coming to faith in Christ needed to live according to the Old Testament laws. But the apostles decided they were wrong. Both James and Peter, the leading apostles in Jerusalem at the time, affirmed that what Paul was preaching among the Gentiles, that is, salvation by grace through faith in Jesus alone, apart from human merit, was the only true gospel. The apostles of Jesus were united on this essential truth. So, the Judaizers were dead wrong. This is what’s important for us to remember.

So is anyone, anyone who tries to teach today that people must add religious acts or ceremonies or engage in practices that church teaches to the finished work of Jesus Christ, claiming that their add-ons are necessary for salvation. Let’s be extremely clear about this. Grace cannot be earned, and this is the difference between true Christianity and religion. True Christianity, which Jesus and his apostles taught, and every other religion in the world. Get up the podcast next time as the apostle Paul’s letter to the early Christians in Galatia continues. He will make some clear, compelling, and timeless points that we all need to hear.

This has been Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. And once again, an incredible message that is as true today as it was back then. As Christians, we should be questioning what’s being said against the standard and cornerstone, which is the written Word of God. If you’re a first-time listener, please don’t stop. I believe that God has a purpose sometimes beyond our understanding.

So since you’re here, go to sharetheword.org and check out the entire library of offerings from all of us at Share the Word. Our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.