Dr. Rodney Plunket

Galatians 1:1-10; 4:8-20

Please open your Bible to the first chapter of the Book of Galatians, one of the earliest New Testament letters written by the apostle Paul.  While you are turning there, let me tell you that I’m especially excited this morning because of my confidence that we are entering together an incredibly rich time of Bible study and spiritual transformation.  My confident excitement is due to the fact that today and for the next five Sunday mornings I plan to preach from this great letter.  My study of Galatians has already caused doors to open wider in understanding the will of God for my life and the lives of all of God’s peo­ple.  I can hardly wait to share what I have learned and am learning.  This is a great book with a life-transforming message.  And I must give special credit to the New Testament (NT) scholar Bruce Longenecker whose 1998 book on Galatians (The Triumph of Abraham’s God [Nashville: Abingdon Press]) has enriched my understanding of this letter greatly.  Let’s begin our study at the beginning; let’s begin at Galatians (Gal) 1:1-10.  Please follow along as I read.

Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—and all the members of God’s family who are with me,

To the churches of Galatia:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever.  Amen.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel–
–not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.  But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we pro­claimed to you, let that one be accursed!  As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!

Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval?  Or am I trying to please people?  If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

This opening to Paul’s letter begins like all of his New Testament letters.  He always begins by identifying himself as the writer.  He often says something about those who are with him as he writes.  He always identifies those to whom the letter is sent, and he always extends to the letter’s recipients a greeting that includes the words “grace and peace.”  So verses (vv) 1-5 contain no big sur­prises.

Do notice in verse (v) 2 that Paul is writing this letter not to one single church but to the churches of Galatia.  Galatia was a geographical region which contained a plurality of Christian churches.

So Gal 1:1-5 forms a very conventional opening for a letter from Paul, but vv 6-10 of this opening could hardly be more different from Paul’s norm.  In every other NT letter written by Paul, he follows the type of material found in Gal 1:1-5 with a very different kind of message from the one contained in vv 6-10.  In 1 Timothy and Titus, letters written to young evangelists who worked with Paul, he gives instructions at this point––instructions that certainly do not contain any critical or biting words.  In all of his other letters, Paul has something extremely positive to say at this point.  In some of them, Paul tells his readers that he is praying for them; in others, he glorifies God.  And there is such a striking difference between what Paul says at this point in Galatians and this point in 1 Corinthians that I want you to hear the difference.  Listen to 1 Corinthians 1:4-9.

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind—just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you—so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

How could an opening to a letter be any more affirming of the recipients than that one?  And those of us who have spent sometime studying 1 Corinthians know that there were many significant problems in the Corinthian church.  And yet Paul’s opening to 1 Corinthians is extremely positive.  I think this makes clear that Paul knows that the problems affecting the Galatian churches are much more critical and dangerous even than the problems affecting the church in Corinth.  Because of the problems in the Galatian churches, Paul goes on the attack almost immediately.

Paul, in vv 6-7, reveals that what the Christians of Galatia are doing is “deserting the one who called [them] in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.”  And that different gospel is not really gospel at all; it is not really good news.  It is a message created by those who are “confusing” the Christians in Galatia and who “want to pervert the gospel of Christ.”

In vv 8-9, Paul speaks a curse against those who were perverting the gos­pel of Christ.  The language of curse and blessing is not taken seriously by as many people today, but in Paul’s day it was taken very seriously, and we should be certain that Paul was deadly earnest when he pronounced this curse.  Paul’s curse against the false teachers in Galatia was a calling down of God’s destructive anger (see R. N. Longenecker, Galatians, Word Biblical Commen­tary [Dallas: Word, 1990], 17).  Paul was holding nothing back in fighting the error that was infecting the churches that he had planted in Galatia.

So who was Paul fighting so earnestly, and what was it that they were teaching?  Let’s begin with what they were teaching.  This letter clearly indi­cates that the agitators among the Galatian churches were teaching that Christians had to be circumcised to be included among God’s people.  This would have been a very troubling message for the Christians of Galatia, because the churches there were made up primarily of non-Jews or gentiles, so the men in those churches would not have been circumcised as infants.  But it does not appear that these agitators were just promoting circumcision.  In Gal 4:10 Paul says that they “are observing special days, and months, and sea­sons, and years.”  Since the issues being promoted by these agitators all appear to be related to the Mosaic Law, it is fairly certain that this verse reveals that the agitators were promoting the observance of the Jewish Sabbath and other Jewish holy days and festivals.  In Gal 2:11-14, Paul tells of his strong response when Jewish food laws were dividing Jewish and gentile Christians in Antioch.  That passage likely suggests that the agitators in Galatia were also promoting the observance of those same food laws.  And since, as Bruce Longenecker points out, “In most forms of Judaism, the law was perceived to be an indivisible whole,” it seems likely that these agitators “expected the gen­tiles to carry on with further observance of the law once they had been circum­cised” (The Triumph of Abraham’s God, 32 & 33).  Bruce Longenecker’s book, in fact, has caused me to suspect that the goal of the agi­tators was to cause the Galatian Christians to keep the whole of the Mosaic law, even if their initial goal was only to convince the Galatian Christians to be cir­cumcised.  So that is the teaching that Paul opposes.

Now to the agitators.  My study of Galatians has caused me to believe that these agitators were Jews who believed in Jesus as the Christ/the Messiah, but they also believed that Christians still had to keep the Law of Moses to maintain their place among the people of God.

What are their motives?  Paul has quite a bit to say about the motives of these agitators.  Galatians 4:17 was a part of our Scripture reading, but I want to read that verse again from a translation which I think better conveys Paul’s intention.  Listen to Gal 4:17 as it is rendered by R. N. Longenecker in his commentary:  “[These people] earnestly court you, but for no good.  What they desire is to exclude you [from us], so that you would earnestly court them” (Galatians, 187; see his justification of this rendering on page 194.).  In other words, these agitators are seeking attention from the Galatian Christians, and to get that attention they are seeking to separate them from the influence of the apostle Paul and the gospel he proclaimed.

In Gal 6:12-13 Paul has more to say about the motives of these agitators.  There we read,

It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised—only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.  Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh.

Paul here reveals that their concerns are not spiritual ones but fleshly ones.  He also makes clear that they want to avoid persecution.  This likely indicates that these agitators wanted to avoid persecution from Jews who were angry to find out that Jews who believed in Jesus were accepting uncircumcised gentiles as people of God without requiring them to obey the Law of Moses.  So the rea­son the agitators are doing what they are doing is to gain the attention, the respect of the Galatian Christians and to avoid persecution––motives that Paul makes clear are fleshly in nature.

So why was Paul so concerned about this false teaching?  Why was he so much more angry about these issues than the ones that unsettled and divided the Christians in the city of Corinth?  He makes that clear too; the false teaching that was infecting the churches of Galatia effectively changed the mainspring, the driving force, the life-changing power of Christian faith.  You see, Paul knew that the power for the person intimately connected to Jesus was a new power that had broken into the world through Christ Jesus.  You may not have noticed, but we heard Paul express that view in the opening of this letter when in Gal 1:3 & 4 he said “the Lord Jesus Christ . . . gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age.”  Here Paul affirms that through Christ believers have been freed from the evil power that controls the rest of the world.  It is almost as if believers do not live in this age anymore, because we have been delivered from its oppressive power.  He says much the same thing at the end of this letter.  In Gal 6:14-15 Paul writes,

May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.  For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!

Here Paul says that through Christ the world had died to (“been crucified to”) him and he had died to (“been crucified to”) the world.  In other words, through the power of Christ’s crucifixion Paul had been radically severed from the world and its power.  That severing had impacted Paul, the pharisaical Jew, so profoundly that he now knew that circumcision, which he once valued, was nothing.  That was a part of the old world to which he had died.  He now knew that the new creation God was effecting was all that mattered; it is, he says, everything!”

So the doing of the law to be right with God and to be a part of God’s people was a part of “the present evil age.”  It was an external observance that was not empowered by the new creation power that Christ’s crucifixion pro­vided.

Paul’s new view, since being crucified to the world, allows him to make a distinction between doing the law and fulfilling the law.  In Gal 5:3, if we render the relevant Greek word quite literally, Paul says, “Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to do the entire law.”  Paul clearly has a negative attitude to doing “the entire law.”  Now listen to what he says just eleven verses later in Gal 5:14:  “For the whole law is ful­filled in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  Paul is very positive about fulfilling the law by living a life characterized by loving “your neighbor as yourself.”  And he makes a very similar statement in Gal 6:2 when he writes, “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”  The relationship between loving your neighbor as yourself and bearing one another’s burdens is not hard to see.  The words “ful­fill” and “law” are used in both verses as well which strengthens that relation­ship, and the relationship between these two verses has caused several scholars to argue that the phrase, “the law of Christ,” in Gal 6:2 is not to be viewed as something totally different from the Mosaic law.  I agree with that assessment.  When the law’s goal is loving mutual service and when that goal is achieved by the power of the Spirit of Christ within the believer, then the Mosaic law can be identified as the law of Christ and the believer can be viewed as a person who fulfills the law.  When persons focus on performing/
doing a lot of external observances prescribed by the law in order to be right or to stay right with God, then that is not what God desires.  That kind of religi­osity is of the present evil age.  That kind of religiosity, Paul makes clear, means that a person has fallen from grace.  (Gal 5:4 says, “You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace).”  But to fulfill the law by the power which has broken into the world through the crucifixion of Christ is good.  To fulfill the law by the power of Christ’s crucifixion generating a practical love that serves others is good.  That is what is supposed to happen in the lives of the followers of Christ Jesus.  That is a sign that the powerful grace of Jesus is alive within the follow­ers of Jesus.  That is a sign that the follower has not fallen from grace by turn­ing back to the power of the present evil age but instead is connected to the new creation power generated by the crucifixion of Christ.

‘So why Rodney,’ you might ask, ‘did we use Gal 4:12-20 as our Scripture reading this morning?  You have said very little about that verse.’  There are two reasons.  First, these verses helped us see the change that had taken place due to the arrival in Galatia of the agitators.  But the second reason is even more important.  It is that these verses very explicitly articulate Paul’s goal for this letter in a way that can now be better understood.  Paul knows that the force that generates transformation within the believer is the power of Christ.  Paul says that he has that power in Gal 2:19c-20 when he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is 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 himself for me.”  “It is Christ who lives in me,” Paul says.  That is the power that Christians are to be transformed by.  They are not to be transformed through external observances empowered by fleshly forces.  It is the power of new creation going on within us because Christ is within us.  That is the way God gets God’s work done.  The Galatian Christians have turned away from that power under the influence of some Jewish agitators who have perverted the gospel.  Paul wants to bring them back to the power that began such a great work within them.  Listen to the way he describes what he wants to do in Gal 4:19.  He says, “My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.”  Paul makes clear that planting the Galatian churches had created pain within Paul like the pain of childbirth.  Now he says, he is having to experience that same kind of pain again as he seeks to “birth” within them the living presence of Christ who would transform them by the new creation power of His crucifix­ion.

Sisters and brothers, what power source is effective within our lives?  Is it the power of this present evil age?  Are we still trying to be changed through external observances comparable to the keeping of days, months, seasons, and years that Paul condemns in Galatians?  Are we still trying to do the law, or is the power of Christ within us fulfilling the law and causing us to be persons who love our neighbors as ourselves, who bear one another’s burdens, and who show forth a practical love that serves others?  Can you, can I say with Paul that “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:19c-20b)?  Is Christ formed within us?  That is the question that my study of Galatians is causing me to ask.

I want Christ dynamically alive within me.  I want to be freed from the present evil age.  I want to be crucified to this old world that is under the curse of God.  I want “a new creation” to be everything to me as it was to Paul.

I want us to spend some time in reflection now.  Adam is going to come and lead a couple of songs.  These songs are to aid our reflection.  If you reflect better by simply listening to these songs, please just listen and reflect.  If you are better able to do that through song, please join in and sing.  If you need to kneel, kneel.  If you need to bow your head, bow your head.  After these songs there were be a couple of minutes of silence to continue your reflection time.  Throughout this period focus on the desire to have Christ formed within you.  Open your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength to the transforming power of Christ.  Be crucified with Christ and die to your­self.  Die to the world.  Make God’s new creation everything.  This time of reflection will lead into our eating of the Lord’s Supper.