 
### Paul's Letter to the Galatians

A Pastoral Commentary

by Edwin Walhout

Published by Edwin Walhout

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Edwin Walhout

Cover design by Amy Cole

See www.edwinwalhout.com for additional titles by this author.

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### CONTENTS

1 The Opening Salutation

2 The Problem: A Different Gospel

3 Paul's Apostolic Credentials

4 The Jerusalem Conference

5 Becoming Righteous Persons

6 Rebuke

7 Abraham

8 The Law

9 Children of God

10 Paul's Example

11 An Allegory

12 Freedom

13 Christian Ethics

14 Concluding Comments

CHAPTER ONE

The Opening Salutation

Galatians 1:1-5

*Paul an apostle,

not from men nor through men

but through Jesus Christ

and God the father who raised him from the dead,

and the brothers who are with me,

Galatians 1:1-2

* Translated from the Greek by the author.

1. Letters in those days were sent as rolled-up scrolls, sealed on the outside so they would not unravel during transit. Further, it was customary to identify oneself at the very beginning rather than as we do now at the end of the letter. So that's why the first word of this letter is "Paul." Readers would not have to unroll the entire scroll to find out who wrote it.

2. The second word is "apostle." We may wonder why Paul identifies himself this way, rather than, say, "Paul of Tarsus." We customarily think of the apostles as the disciples of Jesus whom he sent with the command to disciple the nations. So how did this man, originally Saul of Tarsus, once a feared persecutor of Christians, acquire the title of "Apostle"? Paul was not one of the original Twelve. In fact it is doubtful if he ever even met Jesus in the flesh. It's common enough for us today to use the term, the Apostle Paul, but probably not for people back then. So did he just take the title for no valid reason?

We need to remember the meaning of the term "apostle" as contrasted with the term "disciple". "Apostle" means a person who is sent out. "Disciple" means a person who is attached to a teacher as a learner. The original twelve disciples were in the learning stage at first, and then when Jesus sent them out on their own with the message of the kingdom they became apostles. And that is what the Great Commission means also. When Jesus instructed them to go out to bring the gospel to the whole world and to disciple the nations, he was _sending_ them, that is, expanding their responsibility from learning to proclaiming, from taking in to giving out. That instruction transformed the disciples into apostles.

So how does Paul figure into that picture? Paul and Barnabas were officially commissioned by the church in Antioch to bring the gospel to people who had not yet heard it. They were sent, and that is what made them apostles. Paul did not simply adopt the title without authority.

Still, it is interesting that he himself does not refer to this commissioning from the church of Antioch, but insists his apostolic authority is "not from men nor through men." Rather, it comes directly from "Jesus Christ and God the Father," the same God who raised Jesus from the dead.

Apparently there were numerous people at the time who were more than a bit skeptical of this claim by Paul. We probably would be also if someone nowadays made a similar claim, "I'm an apostle because God appointed me." No church, no council, no synod, no missionary organization, just God. So we find Paul addressing this question over and over again in his letters, and already here in the very first sentence of his letter to the churches in Galatia he makes the claim to apostleship. We have no serious doubts about it now in the twenty-first century, but there were a lot of people back then who remembered him as a fierce persecutor and they were not absolutely convinced that what he was teaching was the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

3. It is also worth noting that Paul points out an item concerning God and Jesus that he obviously considers a matter of first importance, that God raised Jesus from the dead. There are a good many Christians today who seem to consider the item of first importance that Jesus died for our sins on the cross. This makes the crucifixion of prime importance, whereas Paul makes the resurrection central.

We might be curious about why Paul puts so much importance on the resurrection. It's because this was the central feature of his conversion outside the gates of Damascus. Paul had been resisting the claim that believers were making that the man whom they put to death on a Friday had come back to life on Sunday. It can't happen, he thought, and the notion drove him into fanatical defense of the sacred Torah, arresting Christians wherever he could find them and delivering them to the religious authorities in Jerusalem for punishment.

But when he lay there on the ground at the gate of Damascus, dazed by sunstroke, Jesus appeared to him and immediately Paul knew beyond any doubt that Jesus was still alive even though he could not be seen physically. So that conversion experience was what told Paul that the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ was indeed true, and that it centered on the fact of Jesus' resurrection.

If we study all the letters of Paul, as well as the descriptions of Paul's work in the book of Acts, we will see clearly enough how Paul weaves his understanding of the gospel around the resurrection as the chief feature of the message of salvation. Just briefly, the connection is this: when we come to believe in Jesus' resurrection, something similar happens to us. We are raised out of a life of sin – like Paul out of his life of persecution – into a life of holiness and truth. Paul, again and again in his letters, insists that we share in Christ's resurrection when we believe and are delivered out of a self-centered lifestyle. Already in this life and in this body. Now before we die. We die with him and we rise with him to a new life.

All of that gives us some idea of why Paul would write as he did about God raising Jesus from the dead. For him resurrection was central in the gospel.

4. One more point here. Paul writes that this letter also comes from "the brothers who are with me." He does not identify them. Perhaps he means his partner Barnabas. Perhaps also all the elders in the church at Antioch who had commissioned them to make their earlier visit to the province of Galatia. But it seems, does it not, that Paul does not want to write on his own individual authority, but that he writes as a representative of the Antioch church as a whole.

Accordingly, it seems that Paul was at Antioch when he wrote this letter, very likely not too long after he and Barnabas had returned from their first missionary trip, the one in which the Galatian churches had been started. There will be more to say about the setting of this letter as we work our way through it, because it is clear enough that he wrote this letter as a result of hearing some disturbing things about what was going on in those young churches.

5. I'll use this occasion also to state my opinion about when this letter was written. When I was in Seminary we were taught that it was probably written rather late in Paul's career. This opinion was based on the similarity in some doctrinal points with the letter to the Romans. Romans was written during the latter part of his third missionary trip, so Galatians is also assigned to that general time period.

For myself, on the contrary, I think Galatians was the very first extant letter of Paul, written between the first and the second missionary trips. I think this mainly because of the content of the letter and the brusqueness of its tone. He and Barnabas have just started some churches and now hear that some serious issues are arising in them. He is incensed by this development, confronting it for the first time and becoming almost disrespectul in his condemnation of it. His later letters do not betray this same intensity of criticism, or at least not the same intense language to express it. One might imagine that Paul learned that a soft answer turns away wrath but that harsh language only serves to stir up more wrath. The fact that he identifies himself as an apostle in the very first sentence suggests something of kind of criticism he himself has been receiving out there in those churches, and which forms the reason why he writes this letter at all. He is extremely unhappy to hear what is being said about him and the gospel he brought, questioning his apostolic status.

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

in order to liberate us from the present evil age

according to the will of God our Father,

to whom be praise from age to age:

Amen.

Galatians 1:3-5

1. When we today hear the word "church" there are all sorts of connotations associated with it that have developed over the twenty centuries since the gospel began. It was not so, of course, in the beginning. There was simply a small group of people who believed in Jesus and who assembled from time to time to confirm and strengthen that bond of faith. The term Paul uses is "ekklesia," which means "called out." These believers, at that early time, were probably mostly persons of Jewish background whose traditions were those of the Jewish synagogue. Very likely their meetings were simply continuations of synagogue meetings, only now centered on Jesus rather than on the Torah. In time other problems and traditions would appear as persons of non-Jewish background were welcomed into the fellowship of believers.

2. What we see here is the standard form of letter writing customary in those days. The writer would first identify himself and then identify the recipient. By way of contrast our customs in letter writing have usually been to identify the recipient at the outset and the writer at the end.

3. So Paul identifies the recipients as "the churches in Galatia." Notice the plural, churches. So far as we can tell there are three, possibly four, of these congregations, situated in the cities that Barnabas and Paul visited with the gospel during the last half of the first missionary trip. These are Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe, with possibly Antioch of Pisidia also included, all of them in the heart of the country we know as Turkey. Very likely Barnabas and Paul had visited these cities because they had sizable Jewish populations where they would have a hearing right away.

If I am correct in surmising that this letter was written shortly after this first missionary trip, then the churches there would have been not more than two or three years old, and not very much advanced in understanding the ramifications of their new faith in Jesus. Their faith in Jesus was real and genuine but not yet mature. As we shall see, these good people were subject also to other evangelists coming in and presenting the gospel in different ways.

3. "Grace to you and peace." The Greek word for "grace" is χάρις (charis) and means in its root form, to rejoice, be glad, be joyful. The Greek word for "peace" is εἰρήνη (eirene) and means much the same as the Hebrew "shalom," a condition of peace and prosperity and general goodness. These terms were used as a standard form of salutation in the Jewish community.

Notice, however, that Paul's salutation is not only from God our Father but also from our Lord Jesus Christ. This addition makes the salutation specifically Christian as opposed to generally Jewish.

4. Now Paul presents the gospel in a nutshell, explaining in one sentence the whole purpose of Jesus. It is to "liberate us from the present evil age." And how does Jesus do this? By giving himself for our sins.

Don't be too quick to relate this to the twenty-first century. Paul is talking about his own times. So what is so evil about the age in which he lives and from which Jesus has delivered them? Jewish readers would have different ideas about this, perhaps, than those of Gentile readers. Paul would mean, for the Jewish community, the fact that the people as a whole had rejected Jesus and crucified him, the very messiah that God had provided for them. If there were Gentile believers who were the first readers of this letter, then they would probably understand the general wickedness of Roman society. So just how does Jesus "liberate" believers from the present evil age? By "giving himself." And just how does that work?

Jesus worked in such a way as to prepare a small group of men to carry on a project of which they had no idea to begin with, actually contrary to what they thought they were preparing for. They thought Jesus was going to lead them in rebellion against Rome and then set up an independent Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem. So Jesus had to disillusion them until they understood that the kingdom that God wanted did not come with observation but by the inner working of the Holy Spirit of God in the hearts of people. When that happened to them, the disciples were liberated from their former erroneous ideas, from the ideas common in that "evil age."

But in order to bring the disciples through that traumatic process of disillusionment Jesus had to "give himself." He had to put himself totally in the hands of the people who hated him, and who regarded him as a false messiah because he would not start a rebellion against Rome. They put him to death but God raised him back up.

And that is a picture of how the disciples were liberated from the former false ideas about the kingdom. They had to die with Jesus to those notions, and they had to rise with Jesus to a new appreciation for what God was doing to establish his kingdom in the hearts of people. This happened, as Luke informs us in Acts, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on them on the day of Pentecost. That's when the disciples were "liberated" from the present evil age, and that is what Paul is getting at.

When anyone believes in Jesus he or she is taken out of the misconceptions about religion that were formerly held, and brought into a clearer understanding of what God is doing in life and in history and in one's own personal life. A new and different spirit begins to function within our hearts and minds and begins the process of forming us into true images of God.

5. Paul now adds, "according to the will of God our Father." Paul is a dedicated theist, meaning that all his thinking and activity was controlled by God. At his conversion in Damascus Paul learned to see how God was functioning in the resurrection of Jesus. Ever afterward he was careful to describe Christian faith both in terms of God and of Jesus. Both.

We must not think that God and Jesus are the same. They are not. One is the Creator, the other is a creature. So that requires us to distinguish God from Jesus, but what Paul writes here also requires us to keep them together. We cannot say we believe in Jesus without also saying we believe in God the Creator. And vice-versa. We cannot say we believe in God the Father without also believing in what he has done, namely sending Jesus to liberate us from the errors we may be enmeshed in.

6. And finally, in this Salutation Paul gives all praise and thanks to God. Not just to Jesus but to God who is Jesus' Father in heaven. That should be the net result of our entire life in this world, that all we do serves to thank and praise the God who created us and who redeems us by sending his Son Jesus.

7. "Amen" is not simply an ending, it is an emphatic confirmation. Indeed this is so! So don't forget it! That's Paul's intent.

CHAPTER TWO

The Problem: A Different Gospel

Galatians 1:6-12

I am surprised that so soon you are abandoning

the one who has called you into the grace of Christ,

accepting a different gospel

even though there is no "other" one.

If there is someone who is confusing you

and who is trying to change the gospel of Christ,

yes, even if an angel from heaven is evangelizing you

with a different gospel,

let him be accursed.

As we have said before, and as I say again,

if anyone proclaims a message different from what you have received,

let him be accursed.

Galatians 1:6-9

1. "I am surprised that so soon you are abandoning the one who has called you into the grace of Christ, accepting a different gospel." That's pretty strong language! Paul is bawling them out for accepting different views from what he has taught them, and he is pronouncing a curse on the person or persons who are leading them astray.

So that's the first thing Paul has to say to them. Criticism. But in his later letters he starts out with something positive, thanking God for their faith and constancy. Paul would be revisiting these Galatian churches in a year or two, at which time he would, perhaps, come to realize that harsh condemnation is not the best way to relate to people, but to recognize what is good and true about their faith, and only then to assist them to evaluate items which need correction.

2. What is that "different gospel" that Paul mentions? He doesn't explain it right away here at the beginning, but we will hear more about it later in the letter. What we do hear now is that "there is someone who is confusing you." Apparently other Christian leaders had come to town and explained what they understood what it meant to be a Christian. What they said was "different" from what Paul had taught them.

And if we are permitted to imagine somewhat about how that went way back then, we can visualize the new Christians in Derbe suggesting to these new evangelists that what they are saying is different from what Barnabas and Paul had said. So the argument proceeded until the newcomers seemed to have persuaded the new believers that Paul was wrong. It isn't clear how Barnabas figured into all that. Perhaps because, though Barnabas was the elder statesman, Paul was the main spokesman.

Closely associated with that would be the criticism that Paul, never having been one of the original disciples of Jesus, was not really entitled to the office of apostle, at least not in the sense of being fully reliable. You can't trust him to give you the full picture of what it means to be a follower of the Way.

Paul says about these newcomers, "Let them be anathema." Accursed. We will hear more of this later in the letter, but for now let us observe simply that these new evangelists in Galatia were telling the people that it was necessary for them to continue their traditional Jewish customs as taught in the holy Torah. If God gave these instructions, then we need to obey them. Believing in Jesus is added on to those duties but it does not replace them.

What Paul objected to in this version of the gospel is not so much the fact that Jews would continue to do these things but that Gentile believers would also be required to observe them. Customs like circumcision, sabbath observance, kosher food, temple worship, and the like.

Actually we ought to recognize that this matter of what to do about Torah observance became the single most pressing controversy during the first century. Do Christians have to obey the instructions of the old covenant, the Old Testament, even if they are not Jewish by ethnicity? What authority, if any, does the ancient Torah of God have for Christian believers living by the inner power of the Holy Spirit? Paul said No, none. The newcomers to Galatia said Yes, all.

3. An historical sidelight here. About the same time that Paul wrote this letter there came a delegation of men from Jerusalem to Antioch with much the same complaint against what was happening in Antioch. The church leaders in Jerusalem were hearing that a large number of non-Jewish folk were responding to the gospel in Antioch. This was good, but what the men in Jerusalem did not like was that these Gentile believers were not required to observe the traditional Jewish religious ceremonies. That failure seemed to the Jerusalem people to be an unacceptable compromise, giving in too much to Gentiles who would find some of those customs to be uncongenial.

So this delegation of elders from Jerusalem came to Antioch to find out first hand what was going on up there. And Paul and Barnabas were there at the same time, just having returned from their first missionary trip, and at the same time having heard that something like that was happening in the new churches they had begun just a year or two earlier in Galatia.

We can surmise that Paul wanted to make a personal visit back to Galatia as soon as possible to set the people straight, but this delegation from Jerusalem had to take priority. As a matter of fact, the Antioch elders decided that they should send an official delegation back to Jerusalem with the Jerusalem committee, and try to get the whole matter straightened out in an official way back down there in Jerusalem. So, since Paul and Barnabas were both part of the Antioch delegation to the Council of Jerusalem, maybe the year 49 or 50, Paul would have to postpone a personal trip back to Galatia until after he returned from the Jerusalem trip.

Am I now listening to humans or to God?

Or am I seeking human approval?

If I were merely pleasing people I would not be a servant of Christ.

I want you to know, brothers,

the gospel proclaimed by me

does not come from humans;

for I did not receive it from humans,

nor was I taught it,

but from a revelation of Jesus Christ.

Galatians 1:10-12

1. There are really two things on Paul's mind, not only the substantive matter of whether Gentile believers are required to observe the Torah ceremonial law, but also the personal matter of his own integrity as an apostle. So, before dealing with the Torah issue, he chooses to defend himself and present his apostolic credentials.

His stance is thoroughly theistic. His authority does not in any way come from humans but from God himself. He is contrasting himself with those other evangelists who have come in from elsewhere with a different message than the one brought by Barnabas and Paul. Paul is not listening to them but to God. He says that if he taught the way some Jewish believers wanted he would not be serving the Lord Jesus Christ.

2. He says the gospel proclaimed by me "does not come from humans," implying perhaps that the gospel proclaimed by the others does come from human authority, namely that of the Jewish traditions. Most ministers and missionaries and gospel workers have had rather intensive instruction themselves in Bible knowledge and theology. They have gone to Seminary or Bible School or studied in some depth with a knowledgeable pastor. Not so with me, writes Paul. I didn't get the gospel from anyone, no priest, no rabbi, no human being at all. I got it directly from God by way of a "revelation of Jesus Christ."

3. That claim of Paul deserves further consideration. Paul does not imply he is uneducated or that he has had no schooling at all. We know differently. As a boy Paul was sent by his father from Tarsus to Jerusalem to study to become a rabbi. He spent his teenage years in that study and he himself claims to have been one of the best students. That is how he came to be in Jerusalem as the story of Jesus was being told by the early disciples. Paul himself did not believe it at all. He did not accept Jesus as the Jewish messiah (Christ, anointed one), nor especially did he believe Jesus rose from the dead. Instead, after graduating from rabbi school Paul became a fanatic persecutor of any Jewish people he could find who did believe in Jesus.

So it is in that setting that Paul can now say nobody has ever given him instruction in Christianity. In Judaism, yes. But in Christianity, no.

4. So how did Paul acquire the knowledge and insights that he so eloquently presents in the letters he wrote? From "a revelation of Jesus Christ." So how did that happen? He is referring to his conversion at Damascus, the occasion when God revealed Jesus to him. That's what he now goes on to explain.

CHAPTER THREE

Paul's Apostolic Credentials

Galatians 1:13-24

For you have heard of my earlier conduct in Judaism,

how I so violently attacked the church of God and ravaged it,

and how I advanced in Judaism far beyond any of the other students of my age,

because I was more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.

But because in God's good pleasure he selected me before I was even born

and then called me by his grace to reveal his son in me

in order that I might evangelize the nations,

I did not then consult with flesh and blood,

nor did I go up to Jerusalem to meet with the apostles,

but I went away into Arabia, and later returned to Damascus.

Galatians 1:13-17

1. Paul knows he has a bad reputation. Unconverted Jews would look on him as a traitor to Judaism. Converted Jews would look on him as an untrustworthy former persecutor. So now, if someone criticizes Paul as being wrong he would have a receptive audience. That's what was happening in the Galatian churches. So Paul was at pains now at the beginning of his apostolic career, to establish his apostolic authority. He does so by recounting his conversion experience and what happened afterward.

2. It is not absolutely sure exactly when these events happened, but some scholars are suggesting that Paul was about ten years younger than Jesus, so that he would have been in his early twenties when Jesus was crucified. Then, if we take the years 45-48 for the first mission trip of Barnabas and Paul, the one in which they began the churches in Galatia, and allow a year or two before this bad news reaches them in Antioch, we are about in the year 49 or 50. So what was Paul doing in all those years after his conversion and before he became an apostle?

We can estimate that his conversion came about the year 35, so there would be about ten years before he and Barnabas set out on their first mission trip in 45. What was Paul doing all that time?

That is what he is explaining here in Galatians 1. He says God called him "by his grace to reveal his son in me." He means his conversion experience at the gates of Damascus. Luke writes about that in the book of Acts, showing how the frightened Christians in Damascus did nonetheless show kindness to the young man blinded by a sunstroke, an event which resulted in canceling his mission of arresting them.

Then, Paul continues, he "went away into Arabia, and later returned to Damascus." He did not go back to Jerusalem, to the high priest there who had sent him to arrest Christians in Damascus. Instead he went farther away, to Arabia. Why?

Why? Because he, having been such a strong-willed dedicated devotee of the Torah, needed time, much time, to absorb what had happened to him. The whole meaning of his life had fallen apart and he had to deal with it. All his fanatical prosecution of Christians, he now saw, was entirely wrong because it was opposing God's will. He had thought that obeying the precepts of the Torah Law was what God was calling him to do. But now he saw that it was the opposite of what God was really calling him to do. He was now being called to proclaim the very message that previously he had been trying to destroy. When Jesus spoke to him as he lay inert and blind in the dust outside Damascus, he realized that what he was doing was in reality opposing the God whom he thought he had been serving.

Dealing with that did not come easily, as we can well imagine. It took time for him to process all the implications for his own understanding of God's will. He simply did not want to face his former friends back in Jerusalem, nor for that matter, did he feel ready to join the band of disciples, men like Peter and John and the others. He had to figure out in his own mind just what God was now asking him to do.

How long he stayed in Arabia, and what he did there to earn his living, we do not know. I speculate that he got a job learning the skills of tentmaking, a skill that stood him in good stead from time to time in his later years when he had to secure funds for his mission work. But who knows?

However, after a while – may we guess several months, maybe a year or two? – he felt secure enough to return to Damascus. There, as Luke reports in Acts, he began to explain as best he could what he had learned and figured out about the plan and purpose of God as culminating in Jesus' resurrection.

It will be important here to remember that Paul had been an excellent rabbi student, meaning that the knew the ancient Hebrew documents exceptionally well, the scrolls we now know as the Old Testament. What he did not know much about was what we now have in the four Gospels, the story of Jesus' life and miracles and parables. Only what he may have picked up during his student years in Jerusalem, items he did not believe when he heard them.

3. So it was from that fund of information that Paul now was drawing as he begins to explain about Jesus. He does not know very much at all about Jesus; what he does know is about God and his preparation of the people of Israel to receive God's messiah. And, to expand the point, when we read and study his letters in the New Testament we will see these characteristics. There is precious little about Jesus' life, but there is a great deal of rehearsal of Jewish history and of Old Testament quotations.

It is interesting that God prepared this man, with the background he had, to become the chief missionary to the Gentiles. Not Peter. Not John. Not Andrew. Not any of the original disciples. But Paul, trained in the Law but not in the personal embrace of Jesus on earth. Is it possible that Paul has a broader grasp of the gospel than the original disciples? That he is better educated in the things that will become important as the gospel makes its way into the Greco-Roman world? That, coming as he did out of fanatical support of the Torah, he is most capable of shepherding the wholesale transition from Judaism to a full-bodied Christian faith? That, it would appear, would seem to be God's intent as judged by what really did happen in those early decades of the church.

Then after three years I went back to Jerusalem to visit Cephas,

and I stayed with him for fifteen days.

I did not see any of the other apostles

except James the brother of the Lord.

The things I am writing you, before the face of God I am not lying.

Then I went into the region of Syria and Cilicia.

I was unknown by face among the churches of Christ in Judea,

they only heard that it was said

that now the one is proclaiming the gospel who used to try to destroy it.

And they praised God because of me.

Galatians 1:18-24

1. Now back to Paul and what he was doing in those years prior to becoming an apostle sent out by the church in Antioch. Luke reports in Acts that some people in Damascus became so incensed by the things Paul was now saying that they turned on him with threats of assassination. Presumably the unconverted Jewish community in Damascus. They turned on Paul the same way Paul had previously turned on the believers there. Paul was now receiving the same identical treatment he had previously been dealing out. Luke reports that his new Christian friends helped him escape by letting him down outside the wall in a basket.

2. So where could Paul go now, having escaped death in Damascus? To Jerusalem. But what kind of a reception could he expect there?

Exactly what did happen. His former friends, the priests and Pharisees and scribes of the Jewish people now hated him and certainly would not provide him shelter and food. Paul went to Peter for shelter and advice. Besides Peter he met James, the brother of Jesus.

They received him but the Christian community in Jerusalem simply would have no trust or confidence in the young man they remembered as being so violent a persecutor. So what to do?

3. Paul writes that he went into the region of Syria and Cilicia. Syria would be the province in which the city of Antioch was then prominent. Cilicia was the region around the corner north and east, now Turkey, in which Paul's home town of Tarsus was located.

We may surmise that Paul probably went back from Jerusalem to Tarsus, back perhaps to his parental home. We have no direct information about where he lived, how he supported himself, how he spent his time, what he did in terms of talking about Jesus.

4. That he did talk about Jesus, however, we do know, and that he did acquire a reputation in a broad region for being an effective proclaimer of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

How do we know that? Because, as Luke reports, a man by the name of Joseph came all the way from Antioch, many miles away, to ask him to become a pastor in the church there. Many non-Jewish people were becoming believers, so that the church in Antioch needed educated men who were capable of explaining the work of God in Jesus. They heard about what Paul was doing in Tarsus and they sent an elder to invite him to help them instruct and guide the new converts in Antioch. So that is what brought Paul to Antioch, the city which remained his sending church throughout his missionary career.

5. Let's look again at the timeline. If we take the year 35, a few years after Jesus' crucifixion, as the year of Paul's conversion, and then allow about three years for his time in Arabia and Damascus, and then recall that Barnabas and Paul set out on their first mission trip in the year 45, then we have a period of about seven years for Paul's work in Tarsus and the beginning of his work in Antioch. Shall we guess about five years in Tarsus and two in Antioch until the first mission trip? Scholars might well have other timelines, but this at least gives some notion of what may have happened, filling in the gaps in what Paul writes in Galatians 1.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Jerusalem Conference

Galatians 2:1-10

Then after fourteen years I went back to Jerusalem

with Barnabas, taking along Titus.

I went up according to revelation.

And I explained to them the gospel I am preaching to the Gentiles,

to make sure that I was not running uselessly.

But not even Titus, who was with me, Greek as he was, was forced to be circumcised

by false brethren secretly brought in,

who came in to investigate our freedom

which comes in Christ Jesus,

in order to enslave us.

But we did not submit to their pressure

in order that the truth of the gospel would always stay with you.

Galatians 2:1-5

1. "Fourteen years." Paul is explaining to the new believers in the Galatian churches why he is a credible apostle of Jesus Christ even though he has been taught by no one else. He has explained how he went off on his own after his conversion, with only two weeks with Peter in Jerusalem. Now he is fourteen years after his conversion, ten of which we have previously discussed.

The additional four years will be the three years of the first mission trip plus one year back in Antioch afterward. At which time he is writing this letter, if I am correct in supposing it to the very first letter he wrote.

2. The trip to Jerusalem to which Paul is referring here is what is known as the Jerusalem Conference, and is described in detail by Luke in Acts 15:1-35. Although Luke does not mention it, it seems that Titus had also been part of the Antioch delegation, and Paul makes a special point of explaining that Titus was one of the Gentile converts in Antioch, but nobody required that he be circumcised.

By mentioning that incident of Titus, Paul is leading up to the main reason for this letter, which was to insist that Gentile believers must not be compelled to observe the traditional Jewish rituals such as circumcision. While he has not yet spelled out this problem in this letter, he will be doing it more clearly as the letter continues. It was the same identical problem concerning which the delegation of elders from Antioch went down to Jerusalem to consult with the church leaders there.

We may infer that since that visit to Jerusalem is now past history for Paul, this letter was written soon after the delegation returned to Antioch, and before Paul suggested to Barnabas that it would we useful for them to make a return trip there. They would read Paul's impassioned letter and soon thereafter Paul would come back to explain it all in person.

3. Paul mentions "false brethren secretly brought in." Luke explains that they were teaching the brothers, "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved." They were insisting that, since God gave the Torah, everyone had to obey what it commanded. You can't be a Christian if you don't observe God's law.

Paul and Barnabas knew better. There were numerous men in the Antioch church who were not circumcised and were excellent Christians, Titus being one of them. In fact it is likely that Titus was functioning as Paul's scribe in writing this letter. Titus remained a part of Paul's evangelistic team for as long as we know about it. So Paul, strong-willed and dynamic as he was, was not about to let these "false brethren" go unopposed.

4. Paul insists that what these intruders were doing results in being "enslaved." When he writes like this we need to remember that he knows from experience what he is talking about. He knew himself to have been "enslaved" by his fanatical devotion to the Torah for his entire youth and early adulthood. Thinking he was doing God service he was in fact opposing God. So he found that faith in Jesus Christ is liberating, freeing him from the bondage of having to keep all the ins and outs of the Torah that the priests and the rabbis were insisting on.

Paul now knows better. He knew that a person could be very diligent in keeping all the religious requirements but not really know what it meant to love God and one's neighbor. One could be driven by tradition and custom but miss entirely the peace and freedom that comes from the Spirit of Jesus. So Paul will hear nothing of that compromise. Believers are freed from the Law in that sense, from the traditions of Jewish religious custom.

It will not appear in this letter to the Galatians, but from his other writings it will appear that Paul is not much concerned if Jewish Christians want to keep up those customs. He himself observed them to some extent, as seen, for example, in his trip to Jerusalem after the third mission expedition. But he is adamantly opposed to any attempt to compel Gentile believers to first become Jews by obeying all the rituals. Rituals add nothing to their faith and their obedience.

5. So he concludes this point by explaining that he wants the truth of the gospel to remain with them forever, not compromised by false insistence upon obeying the Torah, "in order that the truth of the gospel would always stay with you."

One wonders, as one looks over the landscape of modern church life, how much this truth of freedom from the Law is preserved. It seems that often church groups like to make lists of items they require in order to become members. Believe this, don't believe that; do this, don't do that. And pretty soon it degenerates into a form of ecclesiastical slavery that crowds out the joy and freedom that Christ provides by his Spirit of holiness.

But from those recognized to be leaders –

whether they were makes no difference to me,

God does not show partiality –

those leaders contributed nothing to me.

But on the contrary, seeing that I was entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised,

just as Peter was to the circumcised,

for the one who energized Peter as the apostle to the circumcised

also energized me to the Gentiles;

when they recognized the grace given to me,

James and Cephas and John, the acknowledged pillars,

gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship,

in order that we go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised.

Only that we remember the poor,

which we were eager to do.

Galatians 2:6-10

1. Paul is still explaining what happened at the Jerusalem Conference, explaining that it was there that his apostolic credentials were certified. And just a note about my translation of the Greek; it doesn't flow well in English, but that is because I want to preserve the way Paul's thought went. He was, after all, dictating this letter, not writing it himself. He expressed his thoughts just as they occurred to him, and Titus (or whoever was the scribe) did his best to keep up with it. So the clumsiness of my translation does suggest something of this train of thought process.

2. Paul is now explaining his relationship to the church leaders in Jerusalem. He mentions three of them: James (half-brother of Jesus), Cephas (Simon Peter), and John. We need to understand from what Paul writes here that the original disciples of Jesus, even though working from the command of Jesus to disciple the nations, were still finding it psychologically difficult to make a complete break out of Judaism. That is part of the circumstance that Paul describes as he insists that these church leaders, even with their strong authority, did not dictate anything to him in terms of how he must present the gospel to the Gentiles. They did not, he is saying, agree with the men who had come to Antioch to insist that the Law of Moses be obeyed by Gentiles as well as Jews.

3. Paul himself did not have the same difficulty in relating to Gentile persons as did the original disciples. He had been raised in childhood, indeed as a Torah-abiding Jew, but in a city that was thoroughly pagan, Tarsus. So even though his commitment at the time was certainly to the traditions of the Jewish people, he had learned how to maintain that commitment within a social context of people who did not. He was comfortable enough in that environment to be able to relate the gospel in terms they could understand and appreciate.

As we know from Luke's book of Acts, Paul did regularly go to the Jewish synagogue when he came to a new city. He always had a hearing there because he was, after all, a Jew well learned in Jewish lore. Then, when he brought the news that the man Jesus they had heard about was indeed the messiah of the Jews, he was forcing his hearers in the synagogue to make a decision. Yes or No. And this normally resulted in a split in the synagogue. Some believed, most did not. And Paul would usually be hounded out of town by the Jews who did not believe.

But precisely because the majority of Jewish hearers rejected Paul's message, he used that opportunity to speak to proselytes (Gentile converts to Judaism) and wherever he could to any Gentile person who would listen. So most of the churches started by Paul and his evangelistic team began with Jewish converts and then grew with Gentile converts. It is likely that by the end of the first century the Christian church as a whole had a majority of non-Jewish members.

In time Paul's reputation began to suffer because of these experiences, not so much by the believers, but in the wider Jewish community, especially in Jerusalem. But even then, among the believers, sometimes Paul would be severely criticized, as we see happening here in the Galatian churches. Two foci of the criticism: Paul was not an authorized apostle, and therefore what he is teaching is only part of the truth. Besides believing in Jesus we must also obey the Law of Moses, the sacred Torah.

And these insights help us to understand why Paul spends so much time on what happened there in Jerusalem when the church leaders assembled precisely to examine what was happening as Gentiles were brought into the church fellowship.

4. The elder delegates from Antioch explained in depth what was happening in Antioch with respect to Gentile believers. We have not required them to be circumcised or to perform the other rituals of the Law of Moses. If they want to do it, fine, but we do not require it. We are of the opinion that Gentiles gain nothing by obeying these laws. They are doing fine simply from their faith in the Lord Jesus. They are living in grace and peace and love simply from the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. We think, accordingly, that it would be a big mistake to force them to observe our traditional Jewish religious practices. After all, look what that policy did with respect to Jesus. People who insisted on the Law are precisely the ones who called for his crucifixion. We simply do not need to go back to those customs. [That's how I imagine the argument may have gone!]

5. So when all was said and done, the church leaders approved of what the church in Antioch was doing, especially also the work of Barnabas and Paul as they worked with Gentile people. (Barnabas and Paul, you will recall, were associate pastors of that Antioch church.) As Paul put it, they gave "the right hand of fellowship" to Barnabas and Paul to continue their work as they had been doing.

What Paul wants the good people in the three Galatian churches to understand is that there wasn't anyone who could judge him and Barnabas to be wrong. These visitors who are undermining our authority have no standing whatever, since the highest church leaders in Jerusalem have given their approval to what we have been doing. Your visitors are the ones who are wrong, not us. Don't listen to them.

But when Cephas came to Antioch,

I personally opposed him, because he was at fault.

For before these men came from James he would eat with Gentiles.

But after they came he drew back and separated himself,

fearing the men of the circumcision.

And the other Jews joined him in that hypocrisy,

so that even Barnabas was deceived by their hypocrisy.

But when I saw that they were not acting according to the truth of the gospel,

I said to Cephas in the presence of everyone,

If you, a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew,

how can you force Gentiles to live like Jews?

1. Paul is defending his authority as an apostle, and here he describes an incident in which he challenged even the Apostle Peter. We do not have a record of this confrontation anywhere else in either the book of Acts or in Paul's other letters. Apparently Peter had made an unrecorded visit to Antioch, perhaps as part of that delegation of elders from Jerusalem that precipitated the Jerusalem Conference afterward.

2. There was a requirement in the Jewish religion at the time that if a Jewish person had personal contact with any Gentile person he must afterward perform a cleansing ceremony to purify himself from that contaminating contact. Normally, then, Jewish people would try to avoid as much personal contact with Gentiles as they could, especially such intimacies as eating together.

Here Paul is suggesting that Peter was willing enough to eat with Christian Gentiles, but when a group of men came who believed it was a violation of strict Judaism to do so, he then refused to eat with the Gentiles, even though they may have been believers. Even Barnabas went along with it. But Paul is incensed, recognizing that such discrimination is a blatant violation of the unity of all believers. So Paul rebukes Peter, even though Peter is an acknowledged Apostle of Christ whose authority carried a lot of weight. Paul calls it hypocrisy.

3. "If you, a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force Gentiles to live like Jews?" Live like a Gentile? What does Paul mean? He means living for the approval of men, not the approval of God. Gentiles have no divine guidance like the Jewish Torah, the sacred Law of Moses. They are concerned more about their reputation than about their integrity before their Creator. Paul is saying that is what Peter has been doing, more concerned about what the circumcision people think than about what God thinks.

So Paul accuses Peter of hypocrisy and challenges him, How can you expect Gentile believers to obey all those rituals of our heritage when you yourself violate the spirit of the Law? And that is how Paul is explaining to his friends in the Galatian churches that he does indeed have apostolic authority, so much so, in fact, that he has used it to rebuke the sainted Peter. Don't let those intruders challenge my apostolic character, for they do not know what they are talking about when they do that.

CHAPTER FIVE

Becoming Righteous Persons

Galatians 2:15-21

We are ethnic Jews and not sinful Gentiles,

but we know that a person does not become righteous by works of the law

but through faith in Jesus the Christ.

And we do believe in Christ Jesus,

in order for us to be righteous by faith in Christ and not by works of the law.

Because by works of the law no flesh will become righteous.

However, if having become righteous in Christ we are then found to be sinners,

is then Christ the servant of sin?

No way!

1. The term "justification by faith" has become the standard expression of what Paul is explaining here. However, we do need to be very careful what we mean by the term "justification." It is sometimes used to mean a declaration by God that our sins are forgiven. Jesus paid the penalty for our sin and we are therefore forgiven when we believe that. That's what the term means sometimes in our Systematic Theology books.

But that is not what Paul means by the Greek term he uses, ς. Paul means becoming a righteous person. Not merely a declaration by God but the actual transforming of our lives. God wants us to be persons who live in such a way that we can accurately be described as images of God. Becoming that kind of person is what Paul means by employing that term to describe what happens when we believe in Jesus. ς means becoming a righteous person.

2. How do we become true images of God, that is, transformed into righteous people? By believing in Jesus, not by obeying Torah rules. That's what Paul is explaining to the new Christians in the Galatian churches. The newcomers to those churches were trying to persuade them that it was absolutely necessary for all of them, Jews and Gentiles alike, to keep observing these laws of God. If God gave them to our forefathers, it is necessary for us to keep obeying them. If we don't, God will punish us like he did our ancestors when they failed to do so. It was a strong and powerful argument.

3. But Paul knew it was not true. How did he know it? By personal experience. He had once been a dedicated devotee of the Torah, fanatical even. He had dedicated his life to preserve its authority over the Jewish people. But at the gates of Damascus God sent him a sunstroke which knocked him off his donkey and left him blinded in the dust. Christ Jesus then appeared to him in a vision and told him God had other and better things for him to do in the future.

Paul had tried honestly and diligently to make himself a good person before God by a zealous keeping of the Jewish laws. But what did that zeal make him? A persecutor of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thinking he was obeying God he was actually opposing God. And that's why Paul could write so definitively that no human person can possibly become the person God wants him to be by obeying the laws of the Torah.

4. Again, we do need to be careful how we apply this to ourselves in the twenty-first century. We hear our preachers insist that we are not saved by works but by faith. And of course that is true. But sometimes we get the impression that this is an abstract declaration by God which has nothing to do with the way we choose to live. If that is the impression we get from Paul's terminology we miss his point badly.

To be saved (become a righteous person) requires more than a divine declaration that our sins are forgiven. It means whatever it takes to get us to become the kind of person God created us to be. When we live a self-centered life, concerned only for our own happiness, we miss living as images of God, reflecting his goodness and love and truth in everything we do. I suspect that there are a good many persons who do believe their sins are forgiven but who keep on doing them anyway, figuring that God will keep on forgiving indefinitely. But God wants us to get out from under whatever lifestyle we have that keeps us from imaging God in the way we think and work.

So in that sense it is indeed "works" that are the proof that our faith in Jesus is real. Faith in Jesus is what makes us image God in our activity. Faith and works are inseparable, so that we ought not think that our works, the way we live, are immaterial to salvation. They are the essence of salvation. And they come only through genuine trust in the God who sent his Son for us.

5. Then Paul poses a rather strange question. "However, if having become righteous in Christ we are then found to be sinners, is then Christ the servant of sin?" What is he getting at, and why is he bringing it up?

Perhaps when Paul mentioned his challenge of Peter this triggered a new train of thought, the idea that Christians might be required to keep observing the Torah laws. If you are saved by faith in Jesus, and then revert back to legalism, does this imply Jesus leads you into sin? Because that legalism is indeed sin. First you do commit yourself sincerely to follow Jesus, but then you also follow the Law, which is sin. Is this what Christ Jesus does? Is this the way he wants you to go? It's what those interlopers into the Galatian churches were trying to impose upon the new Christians there.

But Paul is emphatic in his rejection of that procedure, Certainly not. No way can that happen. Jesus does not require you to revert back to a covenant arrangement that did not work even for those who followed it sincerely, obedience to Law. Don't listen to those men, people we today call Judaizers. Obedience to those traditional Jewish customs does nothing whatever to help you become a better person, to image God more completely.

For if the things I destroyed I build up again,

I myself become a contradiction.

For through the law I died to the law in order to live to God.

I have been crucified with Christ.

So it is not I who live, but Christ lives in me.

Even though I now live in the flesh,

I live by faith in the son of God

who loved me and gave himself for me.

I do not deny the grace of God,

for if one becomes righteous through the law,

then Christ died for nothing.

Galatians 2:18-21

1. The Apostle Paul recognizes that if he were to start compelling Gentile believers to obey the precepts of the Mosaic Law, the Torah, then he would be "building up again" the things that he had formerly destroyed. When he recognized that the Torah had made him into a God-opposing person, and instead learned that it was simply humble faith in the Lord Jesus that transformed him into a true servant of God, he was in fact burning his bridges. There was no going back to the things that did the opposite of what they were supposed to do, the legalism of Torah. No way would he consent to adding Torah to the duties of new Gentile believers.

2. We may notice at this point that Paul is now moving a bit farther into his discussion of the Judaizers. He is becoming what we might call theological. That is, he is providing a theological perspective on the issue, not merely his own personal experience of conversion. He wants his readers to understand how God works, how Jesus implements God's plan, and how the Holy Spirit applies the work of Jesus to the lives of believers.

In the previous sentences he has talked about "justification," the process by which God is shaping people through the gospel into the kind of persons they were created to be. In this section of Galatians 2 he is explaining the significance of the death of Jesus in the context of "the grace of God."

3. He writes, "I have been crucified with Christ." Well, obviously this cannot be taken literally. There were two others crucified at the same time as Jesus, but Paul was not one of them. If he had been he would not have been writing this letter. Obviously. So what does Paul mean?

He means the person he had been prior to his conversion. That person died. Not literally, not in the flesh, but in the spirit. Paul recognizes that something happened to him during that catastrophic experience outside the gate of Damascus that was analogous to Jesus' crucifixion. Jesus died physically on the cross, Paul died to the values and theologies he had previously held. The commitments and perspectives by which he had been persecuting the Christians are now gone, dead, never to be resurrected.

Paul does not here make the comparison with Jesus' resurrection, but he does in some of his subsequent letters, definitively in Ephesians 1 and 2. It seems as if this analogy is just beginning to form in his own mentality but has only developed to the comparison with Jesus' death. Later he would be explaining that what he used to be was dead, like Jesus, but what he now is is alive, like Jesus in his resurrection. Something died in Paul and something came to life, and Paul understands this to be the way he shares in the death and resurrection of Jesus. It's an enormously important insight for all of us to see.

4. "It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me." This is rather obscure, but let it mean about the same as what he has said in the previous sentence, that something has died in Paul and something different has come to life. The "I" that Paul used to be is dead; the person that Paul now is, is what he is not because of something Paul himself had done, but as the result of something Christ is doing in him.

That may be a rather cumbersome way of explaining conversion, but do try to understand Paul. When he had lived by his own will-power, he had found himself in opposition to God, but now, after seeing and hearing Jesus as alive, he recognizes that it is God's will-power, not his, that is propelling him into the apostolic ministry of the gospel. That's what he means by insisting that it is Christ who lives in him.

5. Paul is not denying the grace of God. He knows full well that the ancient Torah had been given by the grace of God to the Israelites at Mount Sinai back in the days of Moses, and that the Torah had a vitally important part to play in shaping the people into a holy nation. He is not denying that.

But he is explaining that now that Jesus has come the Torah has become obsolete (to use a term from in the book of Hebrews). The Torah has done what it was capable of doing, but just look at the result it has produced. God's people, Israel, have rejected and crucified God's only-begotten Son, and have thus placed themselves in opposition to the God who gave the Torah.

Paul is not denying or minimizing the grace of God by insisting Gentile believers do not have to obey the Torah. On the contrary, he is emphasizing that the grace of God has now moved a step beyond the Torah and is now centered in Jesus' life and ministry. God channeled his grace through the Torah for a millennium but is now channeling it through Jesus. Hence the proclamation of the gospel which extends God's grace beyond the nation of Israel to all nations. The Torah was for the Jews, the gospel is for all nations.

6. "For if one becomes righteous through the law, then Christ died for nothing." Paul is hammering his point home in every way he can. Here he insists that it would not have been necessary for Jesus to die and rise again if the Torah had done its job satisfactorily. God sent Jesus precisely because the Torah was not producing the kind of people he wanted, people who live authentically as his images in the way they go about their lives. Jesus will be doing for the nations of the world the same thing the Torah was supposed to do for the Jews, make them righteous people, a holy nation.

CHAPTER SIX

Rebuke

Galatians 3:1-5

O foolish Galatians, who deluded you,

who with your own eyes saw Jesus Christ obviously crucified?

One thing I would like to learn from you,

Was it by works of the law that you received the spirit

or by believing what you heard?

Who deluded you?

Having begun in the spirit are you now finishing in the flesh?

Have you experienced so much uselessly, if indeed it is useless.

So then does he supply the spirit to you and work miracles among you

by works of the law or by believing what you heard?

Galatians 3:1-5

1. Paul is really upset by what is happening in the Galatian churches. "O foolish

Galatians, who deluded you?" How he heard of it we do not know; very likely by travelers who had passed through Galatia and came to Antioch. But he senses that the purity of the gospel message he and Barnabas had brought is being dangerously compromised.

We can sense the emotion with which he is writing, sparing no feelings as to how the readers will respond to being called foolish and being deceived. He is rebuking them with all the fervor with which he formerly opposed the gospel. He does not want them to relapse from the work of the Spirit in them and turn to other avenues of righteousness. He wants them to stay in the Spirit.

2. In this paragraph Paul is repeatedly making a distinction between what the Spirit does and what the Law does. By "Law" of course he means the various duties enjoined upon the Jewish people by the sacred Torah Law of Moses, the customs still in force today in some sectors of Judaism. Chief among those duties is circumcision, a rite that Paul often mentions as an example of the entire body of rituals in Judaism. Paul does not think circumcision or the other duties such as sabbath observance or kosher food makes any difference at all in whether or not a person is serving God faithfully.

It is true that God gave the Torah in the beginning with the goal in mind of shaping the Israelite nation into a holy nation, that is, a nation embodying and practicing the virtues that describe the image of God. In the end, however, the people did not truly assimilate the inner faith and commitment that the Torah presupposed, but rather seemed to be satisfied with mere outward compliance with the rules as defined by the rabbis.

So we need to understand that the Law itself was a good thing, actually necessary at the time to weld the people into a coherent nation. But, even so, though the people needed that guidance, there was an inherent flaw in the Law. There was nothing in that set of rules that effectively shaped the people from the inside. And in time that flaw resulted in the people thinking more highly of their Law than of God himself, and then crucifying Jesus when God sent him as their messiah. That flaw is now being remedied by God who sends his Spirit into the inner being of those who accept and believe in Jesus.

And that explains why Paul is so incensed by those Judaizers who are insisting that Gentile converts must obey the Torah in addition to believing in Jesus. Paul knows what damage such devotion to the Torah can make. He knows it from two sources. First, because it led them to crucify Jesus; and second, because he experienced it in his own past life.

So Paul does not want anyone now to believe in Jesus and think they have to do more. He insists that it is enough to believe and then to receive inwardly the awesome power of the Spirit of God to guide them into true righteousness. Believe in Jesus and live by his Spirit. That's the stance from which Paul is writing to these deluded believers in Galatia.

3. So how do we derive an application for ourselves in the twenty-first century? I don't suppose there are many Christians today who opt for circumcision or kosher food. There are some who opt for strict sabbath observance. But what occasionally happens is that other outward actions are defined as essential to living as a Christian. Perhaps a matter of proper clothing. Perhaps regular church attendance. Perhaps tithing our income. Perhaps avoiding such things as gambling, movies, dancing. Perhaps the list of sins defined in the decalog. It does happen from time to time and from group to group that such items form a checklist of whether we are living in the Spirit or not. But what it amounts to is a modern form of legalism.

It isn't easy to work one's way through that procedure. On the one hand we do not want to become legalists. On the other hand there are matters that are sinful, things Christians should not be doing. Paul himself provides a list later in this letter. Two lists in fact, one detailing the deeds of the flesh, the other detailing the deeds of the Spirit. The point, however, is that it must always be the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit that decides for us whether or not we should do this or avoid that. We will make mistakes in discerning the truth, but that is the way we should go to the best of our ability. And be patient with one another, not judgmental.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Abraham

Galatians 3:6-18

Similarly Abraham believed God,

and that was counted for him as righteousness.

You will recognize then that those who believe,

these are sons of Abraham.

The scripture foresaw that Gentiles would be made righteous by faith.

God foretold the gospel to Abraham,

"all Gentiles will be blessed in you."

So then those who believe are the ones blessed by the faith of Abraham.

Galatians 3:6-9

1. The Jewish people at the time were very proud of their ancestry from Abraham, through Isaac and Jacob. So Paul senses that the Jewish believers in the Galatian churches would be helped by this reference to Abraham. Non-Jewish believers might be interested, but not nearly so involved emotionally as their Semitic brothers and sisters in faith.

2. As he will explain a bit later, Paul wants his readers to understand that Abraham did not have the Torah. It was given hundreds of years later at the time of Moses. But Abraham did have faith. Not faith in Jesus yet, since Jesus would not come on the scene for a millennium and a half, but still genuine faith in the one only true God.

So, while for Abraham this faith was a radical departure from what he had been raised in, Babylonian polytheism, he intended it to be the beginning of a monotheistic culture for his own descendants. And then, at some indefinite time in the future, he understood, hoped, expected, that the benefits of this new kind of culture would expand into other nations also, not merely for his own descendants.

3. That's how Paul read the ancient sacred scrolls of the Jewish people. He was an expert in this, as we know, having studied those documents intensely as a rabbi student in Jerusalem years ago. So Paul was appealing to two aspects of traditional Judaism, descent from Abraham, and reverence for the scriptures.

He was also bypassing another major aspect of traditional Judaism, the Torah. He was going back in their history farther than to Moses, all the way back to the beginning of the nation, to Abraham. In this way he was assuring his readers that he was not a heretical person, abandoning the entire tradition. The Judaizers were going back to the time of Moses, Paul is going back to the time of Abraham.

He was, as a matter of fact, basing his message, not so much on what the Jewish people have done, but on what God has been doing in the past and what he is continuing to do in the present.

4. There is an interesting grammatical feature to be noticed in Galatians 3:8, "God foretold the gospel to Abraham." The Greek word translated as "gospel" is used by Paul here in a somewhat broader sense than we customarily use it. In later passages it will be translated as "promise," so that in Paul's mind the promise that God gave to Abraham – that he would become a blessing to all nations – is what he means by the term here.

In Greek the term means literally, "good message." God was giving Abraham a good message, the promise that he would be a blessing to all nations. Paul is explaining that that message, given nearly two millennia ago, is now being fulfilled. It is being fulfilled by the coming of Jesus and the extension of his work into the Gentile world. Hence what Paul means is that the good message originally given to Abraham is now the good message fulfilled in Jesus.

Accordingly, what we know as the gospel of Jesus Christ is not something new but something in the works since the time of Abraham. The good news is God's plan for the salvation of the whole world, begun in Abraham, come to a climax in Jesus, and now in process as Gentiles are drawn into the kingdom of God.

For those who are under the Law are under a curse.

For it is written, "Cursed is he who does not do everything

written in the book of the Law to do them."

That no one is made righteous before God by the Law is evident,

because "A righteous person shall live by faith."

The Law is not out of faith,

but "Whoever does them shall live by them."

Christ delivered us from the curse of the Law,

becoming for us a curse,

as it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree,"

in order that Gentiles may gain the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus,

and in order that they may receive the gospel of the Spirit by faith.

Galatians 3:10-14

1. Here is more of the same. But Paul is extremely blunt about it. He writes that people who are "under the Law are under a curse." Really? Has he not read Psalm 119 which insists "Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord"? (vs. 1) And which continues, "Oh, how I love your law! It is my meditation all day long." (vs. 97) How can Paul now write that such people "are under a curse"?

Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 27:26, "Cursed be anyone who does not uphold the words of this law by observing them." (NRSV) Paul is saying to these Christians in Galatia that Moses' curse applies to everyone who does not carry out _everything_ in the Law. Note his emphasis on "everything." Psalm 119 also says this, "Happy are those who keep his decrees, who seek him with their whole heart." (vs. 2) Seeking God with one's whole heart is also essential to obedience. It is this feature of obedience that Paul finds to be lacking in people who are insisting so strenuously on forcing Christian Gentiles to become virtual Jews by obeying Jewish religious customs.

So Paul spares the feelings of no one in his bluntness. You are under a curse if you put all that reliance on the Law but fail to recognize that the Gentiles are indeed seeking the Lord with their whole heart when they believe in Jesus. On the contrary, Paul insists, "no one is made righteous before God by the Law." What makes a person righteous is faith, "A righteous person shall live by faith." What makes Paul's argument here so effective is not merely his bluntness but more importantly the fact that he is quoting the Hebrew scriptures, throwing back at the Judaizers insights that he sees, as a very learned student of the Old Testament, and what they do not see.

2. "The Law is not out of faith." What does Paul mean here? He means faith in Jesus. The desire to obey the Jewish ceremonial laws does not proceed out of faith in Jesus. You can have genuine faith in Jesus without putting yourself under the obligation to keep all those festivals and customs that have defined Judaism for centuries.

3. "Christ delivered us from the curse of the Law, becoming for us a curse, as it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.'"

In no way is Paul implying that the Law is a bad thing, though we might begin to think that his terminology implies it, "the curse of the Law." He has already explained what that curse is, a curse falling on everyone who does not do "everything" required in the Torah. Everything includes seeking the Lord with one's whole heart. And honestly, who does that to perfection?

When Paul writes that "Christ delivered us from the curse of the Law," he is writing something never heard before. Understand that all of Paul's letters were written before any of the four Gospels were written, perhaps before any of the other New Testament documents had been written. Paul was pioneering into unexplored realms of theology when he examines the effect that the coming of Jesus is having on the hallowed traditions of his people.

Think what a blow that must have been to his readers of Jewish background. If you believe in Jesus you don't have to circumcise your sons, you don't have to obey all those limiting sabbath restrictions, you don't have to be fussy about eating pork, you don't have to go the the temple on Passover Day, you just don't have to pay any attention to any of that anymore. Forget it. Jesus delivered us from having to do all that.

It isn't hard for us to perceive why, when such teachings became better known to the larger Jewish community, Paul's reputation took a nosedive. He seemed to be throwing out the whole of Jewish history and distinctiveness. (If we can take a peek several years later, when Paul returned to Jerusalem after the third mission trip, he was summarily attacked in fury by the Jews who recognized him and knew his reputation.)

4. So it is an understandable question as to why Paul could say these things. Why would believing in Jesus segue into no longer obeying the customs of the Torah that God gave us? How do you get from simple faith in Jesus to abandoning the whole heritage of Jewish obedience? Wouldn't that be throwing out the baby with the bath water?

Here is how he explains that. "In order that Gentiles may gain the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus, and in order that they may receive the gospel of the Spirit by faith." Paul figured it all out on the basis of the Old Testament and what little he knew about the life of Jesus. From the Old Testament he quotes God's promise to Abraham to the effect that all nations will be blessed in him. And then explaining that this promise has now been fulfilled in the coming of Jesus as the gospel is expanding into the Gentile world.

Specifically, and of utmost importance, Paul mentions the Holy Spirit. For Paul "the gospel of the Spirit" replaces the Torah Law. The Torah did not have anything in it to persuade the people to obey from their hearts. And in time the people obeyed from their wills but not from the hearts, so the Torah did not and could not achieve the best results that God wanted. But now, in this new arrangement, this new covenant, this new setup, God is providing something that the Torah could not provide, namely the transforming of our hearts.

Believing in Jesus authentically must result in receiving his Spirit into our lives. So when this happens it shows. It shows in the way we think, in the way we talk, in the goals we consider important, in the way we relate to other people, in the way we control our own behavior. The sum of all this is that we begin by loving God above all, and then displaying this love for God in the way we love our fellow men.

5. I want here to make a little excursus. Perhaps you noticed, perhaps you didn't. But what I have just been explaining is the holy trinity. Begin with God, continue with Jesus, and end with the Holy Spirit. God wants all people to be his children; he sends Jesus into the world to draw all nations into his kingdom; and Jesus sends his Spirit, which is also the Spirit of God, to take charge of our lives from within. Whatever else the trinity may or may not mean to you, let it be based on those three facts.

Brothers, I speak from human life:

In human life an authenticated will (covenant) nobody changes or cancels.

To Abraham was given the promises and to his seed.

It does not say, "And to seeds," as to many,

but as to one only, "And to your seed," which is Christ.

This is what I am saying: the will (covenant) authenticated by God

is not abrogated by the Law coming four hundred thirty years later,

so as to nullify the promise.

For if the inheritance comes from the Law,

it does not come from the promise;

but God gave the promise to Abraham.

Galatians 3:15-18

1. One has to wonder where Paul gets all the arguments he brings up in opposition to the Judaizers in Galatia. Here he presents an argument based on common human experience. When a man dies and leaves behind a will stating just how he wants his possessions to be allotted, nobody steps in to change the will. Using that analogy, Paul is now saying that the covenant God made with Abraham is like such a will. When Abraham dies the will is not altered or abolished.

One of the main provisions of that covenant is that in Abraham all the nations of the earth will be blessed. Just as a man's will remains effective after he dies, so too this provision remains effective after Abraham dies.

Whether this argument is thought up at the moment Paul is dictating the letter, or whether he had processed similar thoughts when he was working his own way through the implications of the resurrection of Jesus, we do not know.

2. We might also wonder about how Paul develops this particular argument. He goes on to make what to him is an important distinction between singular and plural, "seed" or "seeds," child or children. And then he insists that the singular "seed" refers to Jesus (not to Isaac or Ishmael or Midian or any of the other sons of Abraham).

How does he apply this distinction?

He explains that this promise, given to Abraham, is now being effectuated in Jesus. It is through Christ's death and resurrection that God is now expanding his saving work beyond the Jewish world into the Gentile world. The covenantal promise was not fulfilled by means of the Sinaitic Law but by the ministry of Jesus.

The Judaizers must come to recognize that the Torah Law has spent its vigor. It has not produced the holy nation that God envisioned. It has, on the contrary, crucified the messiah God sent.

But God has resurrected his messiah and through that resurrection God is enabling the believing Jews to go back to Abraham, not merely to Moses, for the impetus to be faithful to God's calling. Bring the gospel to all nations. Baptize all nations. Teach all nations. This was God's intent all during the long history of the Israelite people, all the way back to Abraham. And we may say also, all the way back to the creation of the human race.

The Law has done what it could; it was not enough. Now the gospel of Jesus Christ, working through the inner Spirit of God, will take this enormously important step forward in the working out of God's divine plan for his world.

3. Paul wants to make sure that his readers get his point. He puts it in different words, "This is what I am saying: the will (covenant) authenticated by God is not abrogated by the Law coming four hundred thirty years later, so as to nullify the promise."

Paul wants his readers to understand that the giving of the Law during the time of Moses does not trump the promise made to Abraham, does not make that promise void. The whole attitude of the Jews in Jesus' day seemed to suggest that they had forgotten the promise to Abraham about the nations being blessed through him. The Torah became front and central to them, not the Abrahamic promise. So Paul is calling them to expand their vision of God's plan for the salvation of the world. God embraces all nations not simply the Jews.

4. Try to visualize Paul dictating to his scribe and the scribe taking it all down as fast as he could. But Paul's mind keeps looking for even better ways of saying what he is trying so hard to explain, so that he sometimes borders on the redundant, simply saying the same thing in different words. So he does this in bringing this particular idea to completion, "For if the inheritance comes from the Law, it does not come from the promise; but God gave the promise to Abraham."

The "inheritance" of which Paul speaks is the promise that all nations will benefit by what Abraham does. Paul insists that this has not happened while the Jewish people kept the Law as the central focus of their national life. In fact the opposite has happened. They have killed the messenger of the covenant whose task it was to enable that blessing to be extended to the nations, the Gentiles. So, Paul concludes, the promise of the covenant comes from the faith of Abraham, not from diligent obedience to the Torah.

Paul's implication is that it is emulating the faith of Abraham that enables Gentiles to enter the kingdom of God, not meticulous observance of the rites of circumcision and the other traditions of Jewish religion. One becomes a member of the kingdom of God simply by believing now in what God has done in raising Jesus from the dead, not by works of the Law. Hence, Paul's argument runs, you Judaizers must not impose the burden of the Law on the basic faith of Gentiles when they come to believe in Jesus. This will add nothing to the value of their faith, and it may in fact produce such sins as were evident in the unbelieving Jewish community.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Law

Galatians 3:19-29

Why then the Law?

Because of transgressions it was graciously added,

until the seed comes who was promised.

It was arranged through angels by the agency of a mediator.

A mediator, however, is not [representative of] one, but God is one.

Galatians 3:19-20

1. Paul now turns to an extremely important question: Why then the Law? If the Law was not capable of making the Israelites a holy nation to begin with, why even have it? If it could not do the job that God wanted to have done, why did he even give it? Was all that Old Testament struggle among the Israelites necessary? Why, for example, could not God have sent Jesus into the world at the time of Moses, and dispensed with the Law altogether?

Later, in the letter to the church in Rome, Paul would address a similar question in the form of: "Then what advantage has the Jew?" (Romans 3:1). Apparently he had run into men who objected to his teaching, thinking it cancelled out all significance of the Law, and with it the significance of the long centuries of Jewish history. The questions are very similar.

2. Here is how Paul answers the question here in Galatians, "Because of transgressions it was added." (Please forgive the clumsiness of my translation; I've tried to retain some of the directness that the Greek seems to present.)

Why was it necessary for God to provide the Torah? Because of transgressions. Why was it not sufficient to keep the simple covenant with Abraham in force without adding all those burdensome requirements we read about in the Pentateuch? Because of transgressions.

Because of sin. It's a little difficult to follow Paul's train of thought here. Whose transgressions is Paul talking about? Those of the slave tribes in Egypt? Those of the Egyptians? Perhaps the sins of the Israelites that would inevitably come in the future? Our sins, yours and mine?

3. I suspect Paul does not have specific people in mind here, but rather the sinfulness that all people everywhere exhibit. So, if this is the case, Paul may have been thinking in the context of what God was planning to do about the general sinfulness of the humans he created. How would God get the human race out of this bondage to sin? And in the immediate context, How would God get the nation of Israel closer to the kind of obedience and service that would make them into a holy nation rather than in the grip of misleading sin?

We do have to take a theistic stance as best we can. God ultimately wishes all people everywhere to come into the kingdom of God. How will he get them there when by nature alone it seems that they always revert to evil choices? Paul is now explaining that God has given the Law to the Israelites for the purpose of overcoming sinfulness, that is, "because of transgressions," because of the natural tendency of humans to choose transgression rather than holiness.

So Paul is explaining that the Law has as its purpose to address the basic question of human sinfulness. Both our study of history and our study of the Bible tell us the story of human sinfulness. While great progress is being made in exercising our God-given abilities to become the dominant force in the world, supplanting for example the dinosaur era, it is surely evident that we humans are a long way from doing our job the way God wants us to. So we can understand that way back then already God was taking steps to address the problem of our human inability to make our civilizations holy. The giving of the Law to Israel more than three thousand years ago is one major step in the process whereby God is teaching us his ways.

4. "Until the seed comes." What God did way back then at Sinai was not enough to get the job done, as the history of Israel shows, and as the crucifixion of the messiah also demonstrates. But what the Torah did accomplish was to prepare a nation, one nation among many, by way of monotheism and recognition of responsibility to one God only, to become the springboard for bringing the gospel to all nations, thus fulfilling the promise given to Abraham, and at the same time enabling the human race to become what Genesis One tells us we are, images of God.

Until Jesus comes. Paul is explaining as clearly and as potently as he can that God's eternal purpose, that is, his purpose from the very beginning, is to be seen in the coming of Jesus. The Torah Law must lead to Jesus. If it doesn't, then we have gone wrong somewhere. God's work must be seen from creation to Abraham's promise to Moses' Law to the new covenant in Jesus. Each is a step forward in the accomplishing of God's purpose of putting humans on earth.

Paul is not implying at all that the Law is a bad thing or that the Jewish dependence on it has been wrong. Not at all. But he is saying that there is such a thing as progress, as development, as forward movement from good to better. The Law was a good thing for the Israelites, but now something even better has come. The Law could take us only so far, but now Jesus is taking us even farther, to places the Law could not bring us. The Law addressed us from outside, but Jesus addresses us from inside by his Spirit. The Law welded us together as a separate nation, but the gospel expands truth and goodness to all nations.

5. "It was arranged through angels by the agency of a mediator." It's rather difficult for us to follow Paul's train of thought here. Why, in this context of explaining the importance of the Torah, does he now talk about angels and a mediator? What's the connection?

For that matter what is the antecedent of "It"? Is he referring to the Law or to Jesus? Or possibly to the plan of God? What was "arranged"?

Perhaps Paul is referring to Deuteronomy 33:2 which quotes Moses as saying, "The Lord came from Sinai, ... With him were myriads of holy ones." We don't read about angels at Mount Sinai in the Exodus accounts of the giving of the Law, but here, much later, Moses does say it. In that case the "mediator" Paul mentions would be Moses himself, the man through whom God gave the Torah Law.

But if Paul is referring to the coming of Jesus, just mentioned, then the mediator would be Jesus, but what about the angels? Those announcing Jesus' birth to the shepherds?

For myself, I incline toward thinking Paul is referring to the plan of God, concerning which now we are dealing with two phases, the Law and the Gospel. Both may be seen as involving a mediator, one who goes between God and people, Moses for the Law and Jesus for the gospel. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, it is clear that Paul is thinking theistically, from the viewpoint of what God is doing for the advancement of his kingdom.

6. "A mediator, however, is not [representative of] one, but God is one." I confess I am mystified by this sentence, as to what is going through Paul's mind to make him say it. God is one. Monotheism, of course. A mediator goes between two persons or entities, representing two parties, in this case God and people. Yes, of course. But what is Paul explaining to his readers in Galatia that will help them in understanding just how to deal with Gentile believers and the Law? Perhaps he is simply trying to find another way of explaining that Jesus functions for the new covenant the way Moses functioned for the old covenant. The same God is involved.

Is then the Law against the gospel promises of God?

Of course not!

For if the Law had the power to make alive,

then righteousness would indeed be from the Law.

But the scripture says all humanity is imprisoned by sin,

so that what the gospel of Jesus Christ promises

may be given to those who believe.

Galatians 3:21-22

1. It would be possible for someone to argue, If obeying the Torah does not make us righteous, then it would seem that the Torah opposes the gospel, and that would mean the Torah is a bad thing. That may have been what Paul had in mind when he addresses the question of whether the Law (Torah) is "against the gospel promises of God." Paul advises, that cannot be.

The Torah Law is the Law of God. It was given by God at the time he emancipated the Israelites from Egyptian servitude. It simply cannot be that God would provide a bad thing to his people. In fact, the giving of the Law was a good thing. It was exactly what the people needed at that time in their history. They needed a comprehensive set of laws to weld them together as one coherent and independent nation. Without it they would likely have splintered off into numerous tribal factions similar to their relatives: Ishmaelites, Midianites, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and others.

But Paul has now come to see, from his own personal experience, that the common Jewish observance of this ancient set of laws has degenerated into a fierce practice of certain ceremonies and traditions but has failed to soften the hearts of those who so lived. With the coming of Jesus it was becoming plain that the Torah had outlived its usefulness and had now become obsolete. Something better had come.

2. "For if the Law had the power to make alive, then righteousness would indeed be from the Law." The Law did not have the power to make alive. It did not have the inherent power to penetrate beyond the power of the will to do certain things. It hoped for, and perhaps even presupposed, that the persons who obeyed these requirements would obey from the hearts, but there was no way that a set of rules imposed from outside could possibly guarantee that to happen.

If it had happened, then the people would not have clamored for Pilate to sentence Jesus to be crucified. They would have loved God with all their heart and would have recognized that Jesus was not an imposter but had truly been sent by God to be their messiah.

3. "Imprisoned by sin." Paul knows the Old Testament well, the ancient scrolls that formed the national literature of the Jewish people. He had been an ardent student of them since moving to Jerusalem to take up rabbi studies. He knows that these ancient writings taught that the whole of the human race is caught up in sin, "imprisoned" as he puts it.

What Paul wants his readers in Galatia to do is to take the universal perspective. During their entire history as a separate nation they have been trained to take the particularistic perspective, thinking of themselves as God's special people.

Which of course they were. But they had to remind themselves that just because God had chosen to work specially with them, he did not therefore abandon his concern and care for the rest of the world. And now the time has come for that concern and care to be expanded from their own special and unique stance to embrace with love the entire world, thus imaging the love of God himself for all his creation. That is why, for Paul, the promise made to Abraham looms so large and important, for it expresses the universal context for the entire work of God. God calls Abraham out from the nations, in order that in due time a blessing may be brought precisely to those nations. God's goal is to get the entire human race into his kingdom.

4. "To those who believe." The critical thing that must happen is that people be persuaded from within that what they hear in the story of Jesus is the truth. It must be their decision. It must therefore be the kind of conviction that involves their entire being, what they think, what they value, what they hope to accomplish, how they relate to other people, the standards of behavior they follow, their total life comportment. That's what believing in Jesus involves, and that is what brings them into God's kingdom. That's what brings them out from under the domination of sin and provides for them the inner strength to be what their Creator intends them to be. It's what makes them not only Christians but authentic human beings. Simple faith, but oh so profound!

That kind of life style, totally dominated by the Spirit of Jesus, is not available in any other way. Certainly not by mere conformity to a set of rules imposed by human authority. And not, let us expand to say, by other religions either. Only in "those who believe" does this transformation of life happen.

And now, Paul is emphasizing, this ancient promise to Abraham is being fulfilled as Gentile persons are indeed being delivered from their life of sin by committing themselves to follow Jesus. Don't, he insists over and over again, don't go back to the failed Law which has nothing to add to what Jesus has done, and does not do anything helpful for Gentile believers. Don't compel them to do things that detract from their pure faith and obedience. Don't insist they be circumcised or that they must eat only kosher food or observe useless sabbath restrictions. God has provided a better way to obey him now, the way of faith in Jesus.

Before faith came,

under the Law we were imprisoned and guarded

until faith would be revealed.

So the Law was our pedagogue to lead us to Christ,

in order that we may become righteous by faith.

Now that faith has come

we are no longer under a pedagogue,

for all are sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

As many as are baptized in Christ

are clothed with Christ.

There is no Jew or Greek,

there is no slave or free,

there is no male or female,

for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

If you are of Christ you are Abraham's seed,

heirs according to the promise.

Galatians 3:23-29

1. Paul is getting a bit repetitious here. Perhaps some time has elapsed since his last dictating session and he has forgotten exactly what he had said earlier. In any case we hear him going over the same things again.

He makes his point even stronger by saying the Law has "imprisoned and guarded" us. He means the entire Jewish nation. One can imagine that his opponents, when reading this terminology, would seethe. The Law of God is a prison and we have been prisoners all these centuries since Moses? But Paul minces no words since he knows by bitter personal experience that what he is saying is true and accurate.

Still, I suppose the connotations of that "prison" terminology that we have now in the twenty-first century might not be exactly what Paul intended. I suspect he uses those terms in a more positive sense, not merely in a derogatory sense. The Law has indeed guarded us against a lot of errors and sins, shielding us, as if in a prison, from the ravages of the devil.

2. He says the Law has been "our pedagogue to lead us to Christ." This is hardly "prison" talk. Paul is trying to find all possible ways of helping his readers understand the true function of the Law in God's plan for the salvation of the world. NRSV uses the term "disciplinarian" to translate "pedagogue."

The term "pedagogue," however, is a transliteration of the original Greek term. The notion is that in those days a trusted slave would be assigned by the parents of a child to bring the child to school. That would involve seeing he gets into no trouble, that bullies do not bother him, that he doesn't lose his way, that he gets there on time, and anything else that will serve to protect the child and deliver him safely to school. It does not mean what we mean today by the term "teacher".

Paul is now using that feature of life to describe something of how the Law works. There may indeed be some teaching aspects to the Law, but Paul is here emphasizing its protective use. Just as a trusted slave accompanies the child to school, so too the Law has accompanied us as we are led to Christ. The Law has protected us from the ravages of polytheism and the evils associated with that. So Paul wants his readers to recognize that, while the Law should not be taken as final, neither should it be taken as useless. The Law is indeed superseded by the coming of Christ, but that does not imply that all the centuries of its function have been meaningless. The Law has done what it could, namely brought us to the Lord Jesus.

3. "Now that faith has come we are no longer under a pedagogue, for all are sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus." The work of the pedagogue ends when the child grows up and becomes able to protect himself. Or, we might add, when he graduates from school.

Paul is saying this about the Torah Law. It has served its purpose successfully (even though it did produce a nation that crucified its messiah). Accordingly, the success of the Law must be seen not in the people who continue to live by it but in the people who move out from under its supervision into Christ.

The people who do this, who do come by faith to Jesus, are all "sons of God." They are the grown-up people who, having been trained earlier by the Law, are now released from its custody into the freedom of full-fledged sons and daughters of God. You will sense how the analogy of a pedagogue functions in Paul's thinking. He is saying to his readers in Galatia, You don't have to put yourselves back under the supervision of a pedagogue; you are grown-up children of God capable of following the Spirit's lead without the stultifying requirements of the ceremonies of the Law.

4. "As many as are baptized in Christ are clothed with Christ." Here is another analogy that pops into Paul's head as he waits for his scribe to catch up to his dictation. Baptism into Christ results in being "clothed with Christ." Paul does not mean merely the sacrament of baptism all by itself. He is not suggesting that the sacrament itself carries with it the power to save. He is saying that when the sacrament of baptism is administered to those who had repented and turned to Jesus in faith, then it results in this being "clothed with Christ."

But what does that analogy imply? Being clothed with Christ? We can put on our clothes and we can take them off. Is this Paul's intent? Surely not.

Paul means to say that the way we live, the way we show ourselves outwardly, reflects the way we have believed inwardly. What is on the inside will show on the outside. The repentance we have experienced inwardly will produce a corresponding change in the way we live. The experience of baptism inwardly will express itself in the living of baptism outwardly. That's the "clothing" which Paul intends.

5. "There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." These categories by which we identify ourselves and which sometimes create divisions among us lose their significance. Paul is saying to his people in the Galatian churches that the historic stance of the Jewish people in separating themselves from all other national groups is now passé. There is now a new unity, namely shared faith in the Lord Jesus.

This change would be exceptionally difficult for Jewish people to make. Their entire tradition, all the way back to Moses and even Abraham, was based on the separation which God made, defined by the special covenantal relationship. Now, Paul insists, that long period of separation is ended, so that the Jew/Gentile distinction is no longer valid in the Christian churches.

What are we to make of this today in the twenty-first century? Sometimes we think about Christianity in terms similar to the Old Testament separation. We think God is drawing believers out of the rest of humanity, as if this separation is the end goal of faith. It is not.

God's goal is not to draw some people out of the larger run of humanity, it is to make disciples of all humanity. We Christians are not to think of ourselves as separated from the culture around us; we are called to enter into it and do what we can to shape it into the kind of culture God wants, one that is just and honest and truthful and beneficial to all. God wants the entire human race, along with its civilization, to become part of his divine kingdom. And he accomplishes this by means of the gospel and the church and the inner persuasive power of the Holy Spirit of Jesus.

6. "If you are of Christ you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise." Here Paul concludes his sometimes rambling analysis of the importance of Abraham and the promise that God gave him, as well as the significance of the Torah Law in their heritage. The extension of the promise to all nations is now being accomplished as the gospel is beginning to penetrate the non-Jewish world, and it is time for us to move out from under the tutelage of the Law into the freedom of the children of God.

CHAPTER NINE

Children of God

Galatians 4:1-11

I am saying, as long as the heir is young

he is no different from a slave --

even though he will possess the property --

until the time set by the father.

Similarly for us, when we were young,

we were enslaved under the standards of the world.

But when the fullness of the time had come,

God sent his Son,

coming from a woman, coming under the law,

in order to lead us out from under the law,

in order that we may be adopted as children.

And because you are children, God sent the Spirit of his Son

into our hearts, exclaiming, 'Abba Father.'

Accordingly you are no longer a slave but a son,

and if a son, then also an heir of God.

Galatians 4:1-7

1. Paul likes to reason from analogy. In the preceding section he drew the analogy of a prisoner to a free man. Here he draws the analogy of a slave as compared to an heir. A slave, though given responsibility for administering part of the master's estate, will not expect to inherit it. Inheritance in those days was usually passed on to the oldest son with whatever other arrangements might be made for the younger brothers. A trusted slave might be provided for with a special arrangement, but not with the estate as a whole.

So here Paul is insisting that when we believe in Jesus, whether of Jewish or Gentile ethnicity, we become children of God. Our status before God is that of an elder son, not that of a slave. The important item for Paul is the matter of believing. Does a person commit himself or herself to follow and obey Jesus? If so it does not matter what nationality or ethnic background the person has. The determinative factor is simply that matter of the commitment of faith.

It may well be that, while a child, an elder son in a family is treated the same way a slave might be treated, compelled to live in such and such a way. But when the child reaches the age of mature responsibility the difference from a slave becomes evident. He has freedoms and responsibilities and expectations the slave does not have, among which is the possibility of inheriting the estate upon the father's death.

Paul's analogy suggests then that every Christian, every person who honestly follows Jesus as Lord, by that very token becomes an heir of the promises of God, going all the way back to Abraham. Paul is suggesting that the period before coming to faith should be regarded as slavery, whereas the period after coming to faith is freedom, maturity, emancipation. When you believe you get out from under whatever it was that previously controlled your life. You have inherited and obtained the lifestyle for which God has created you. Your Lord and Master is now the Son of God, Jesus, and in him you find what you need to live a godly life.

2. "The fullness of the time." Here is a phrase well worth thinking about. What does Paul mean? How can time become full?

Paul is a theist, a dedicated and consummate theist. All of his thinking, no matter how complicated or detailed or difficult to follow, is always done within the basic philosophy that he has acquired from his long years of study of the ancient Hebrew scrolls which we know today as the Old Testament. He never argues whether or not there is a God. He assumes, as does the Bible, that God not only exists but that he is also the Creator. And if he is the Creator, God is also the Lord of all he created. He knows why he created the world. He knows exactly how the human race will function, and he knows precisely just what he will do to train the human race to become what he wants them to become.

Paul also knows that God is therefore in charge of time and history. He knows that God's purpose takes time, enormous stretches of time. He knows that God has all the time in the world, as we say, to get done what he wishes to get done. God is in no hurry, understanding that the human race he brought into existence needs centuries, even millennia, of slow maturation and guidance. And that is the theistic background for what Paul now writes to the Galatian churches.

3. When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son. He means when the time was right for this to happen. The time was not right five hundred years earlier when God sent Judah into captivity. The time was not right when the Maccabean brothers set up an independent kingdom in Judea a hundred and fifty years ago. Certain things had to happen to get the total situation just right for the coming of Jesus. Not a hundred years earlier. Not a hundred years later. Just exactly now.

But not only just right for the Jewish community, just right for the world at large as well, for the Greco-Roman culture into which Jesus came and into which the gospel was now penetrating. This is a very large subject, requiring much more expertise and historical knowledge than I can provide here in this pastoral commentary, but the main point should be clear enough. As God guided the course of human events, not only among the Jews but among the Greeks and Romans as well, the time came when it was optimally right for Jesus to come.

4. It may be well to step back a bit and examine that matter of God and time and history, since we have now seen another two millennia pass by. Historians sometimes miss the factor that it is God who is in charge of the way life and times and civilizations proceed. But there is an overall guiding hand behind and above everything our historians study and analyze. There is a purpose for it all. History is not just a sequence of events, it is a process, the process of the human race going somewhere, going to a destination that only God really knows. So what we need to do in our study of history is to trace as best we can what that process looks like. That's what our church historians should do best.

I say "as best we can." There is no way we can see the future accurately and in detail, but we can do something about tracing how God has guided us in the past. And as we do the best we can to see God's hand in the development of nations and civilizations we need always to be humble enough to realize that the more time passes the more our insights and understandings may need to be modified and improved. We cannot allow ourselves to be bound to the understandings of previous generations when it becomes obvious that new insights demand new understandings in theology as well as in science.

5. Paul is doing his best to help his readers understand the times in which they live. He traces what God has been doing in the past, through Abraham and Moses, and now through Jesus. Paul is deeply concerned with tying down these events with real observable and experienced history. Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the Law." He is not talking the abstract language of Greek religion, a Father God Zeus and a mother God Hera and numerous God children. He is talking human life, human history, human events.

Much of that is for his Gentile readers, as well as the emphasis that Jesus was born into the Jewish community, not the Greek or Roman community. Jesus' life and ministry is to be understood from within the Jewish heritage of monotheism, not from with the Gentile heritage of polytheism.

The gospel will have to be received and absorbed by the new Gentile community, but it will be absolutely important for them to do so in such a way that it does not compromise the monotheism of its Jewish origin or of the basic theistic stance that is involved. As we know from ancient church history this preservation of the monotheistic stance has been compromised to a degree we now recognize as unacceptable, but nonetheless God has utilized even that in ways that have clearly served his own sovereign purposes.

Paul would have no way of knowing what future centuries of theological speculation would bring, but here in Galatians he is insisting as clearly as he can that Jesus is truly a human being, born of a human mother, and truly a Jewish person, born under Jewish law. And he is at pains also to put everything under the umbrella of divine purpose, God sent forth his Son.

6. I take here another brief excursion, examining the term "Son of God." Some good Christian people think the term implies that to be the Son of God means that Jesus is a divine being. It does not. It means he is a human person designated by God to accomplish something important in God's plan for the world. God causes Mary to be pregnant and to give birth to a son, and this person is designated to be the messiah of the Jews and the savior of the world.

It is useful also in this very context that Paul explains that all of us who believe in Jesus thereby become children of God. That does not make us divine beings, does not imply even that we are part of God. It means that we too have an important part to play in God's plan for the salvation of the world. So Paul would not want us to conclude from his terminology that Jesus is a divine being, God the Son alongside God the Father, two divine beings.

7. "... in order to lead us out from under the law, in order that we may be adopted as children." Paul explains that Jesus was born under the Law for the purpose of bringing us out from under that Law. He means, of course, the Jewish people, not Gentile people who had never been "under the Law." He has in mind those Judaizing evangelists who are insisting that the Law must remain in force not only for Jewish believers but for Gentile believers as well. Not so, explains Paul. The Law, good and necessary as it was in the past, has inherent limitations, not able to penetrate into the hearts of people and guarantee love of God. All it could do was to bring outward conformity to certain rituals, and that is not sufficient for God. So the purpose of God in sending Jesus "under the Law" was to provide an exit from it, to show how people can begin truly to serve the Lord from a transformed heart, living by the inner Spirit of God instead of the external Law of God.

Paul explains the same event using different terminology, "adopted as children." That's the analogy that he has been working with now for a while, and he gets back to it here. But he is thinking of the same happening as getting out from under the Law. Just as a child growing up will need strong and firm external guidance, but then must also come to the point of responding favorably to that guidance when mature, so too the Jewish people were taught for generations by the external Law, but must now come to maturity in the Lord Jesus and in the inner guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The result is that such believers are "adopted" as children, so that together with Jesus who is the "only begotten" child of God, we may all proceed in life in the maturity of spiritual obedience.

8. "And because you are children, God sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, exclaiming, 'Abba, Father.'" Paul is not only a dedicated theist, he is also a convinced trinitarian. Note the combination of the three, "God sent the Spirit of his Son." Note also the down-to-earth meaning of the trinity, "into your hearts." Hundeds of years after Paul the theologians of the church defined the trinity in abstract terms, but here in the real world of the gospel and the new Christians in Galatia Paul is explaining how the gospel works in terms of trinity.

Start with God and with the understanding that when the process of human history reached just the right point God sent Jesus into the world, into the Jewish world. Jesus completed his work on earth, designated his disciples to continue the work by bringing the story of Jesus to the surrounding peoples, and now when people receive the gospel believingly, something happens inside them. The Spirit of Jesus persuades them that this is the truth, this is the right way for people to live.

Religion is not a matter of obeying certain rules, it is a matter of learning how to live the way our Creator made us to live. And that is what Paul is now explaining to his friends in Galatia, and we take special note of the trinitarian context in which Paul functions. They must learn, as must we still today, that the Creator of the universe is indeed our Father who loves us as his own children. Abba, Father.

9. "Accordingly you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then also an heir of God." This sums up again the main point of what he has been explaining. To believe in Jesus is to inherit, to gain, to receive, all the promises that God has made, promises first indicated in Genesis One about the image of God, and repeated again and again in a variety of forms to Adam and Eve, to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, to David, to Jeremiah, and on down to the present times. Christians are by definition heirs of the promises of God about what kind of people he is making us.

Let us put this in still larger perspective. We today live in a world of competing forces. The twentieth century saw the attempt of Nazi fascism to dominate the world, only to have it defeated by allied nations. At the same time there was an attempt by Soviet Communism to become the dominant controlling power in Europe and the world at large. It too failed. At the current time in the twenty-first century we see various other forces seeming to be vying for the position of world dominance, China, radical Islam, resurgent Russia, Iran. There is nothing particularly new about such attempts; historians have chronicled the same type of effort since humans emerged into self-conscious history.

All such efforts have relied upon external coercion of one kind or another, military weaponry usually. But what we have here in the gospel of Jesus Christ, with its decidedly theistic orientation, is a new kind of power, the power of inner persuasion occasioned by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The gospel is saying to us in the modern world that God is still in control of the course of human events, that he has injected into our history at just the right time a power that is greater than any other kind of power, the power of the Holy Spirit. This power has been functioning in human life and civilization ever since the time of Jesus. It has, as a matter of objective historical fact, been the constant decisive influence in the way western civilization has developed, and will continue to be that factor in the centuries to come for all of world history.

The gospel is stronger than all the combined powers of military and political efforts. Simply because it is the power of God for the salvation and formation of the human race, the gospel is slowly but surely shaping the human race into its true character as the image of God.

Paul does not develop this insight, but he does lay the foundation for it, so that in hindsight we can see where the gospel in its trinitarian focus has brought the human race. Those who believe in Jesus and live by his Spirit become the heirs of God, meaning that this is where God is leading us as human beings. All the promises of God as to what humans can become do come to fruition in the combined lives of those who live by the Holy Spirit. But keep the big picture in mind, what God is doing with us as a human race.

However, formerly when you did not know God

you were enslaved to beings that were not gods.

But now that you do know God,

or rather that you are known by God,

how can you turn back to weak and beggarly things;

why decide to be enslaved to them again?

You are observing days and months, times and years.

I am afraid that my efforts for you have been useless.

Galatians 4:8-11

1. Paul now turns to the Gentile believers in the Galatian churches. Previously he has been talking mainly to Jewish believers, explaining at length what they must now think of the Torah Law. But now he has Gentiles in mind, evident by saying, "formerly when you did not know God you were enslaved to beings that were not gods." Paul is contrasting the Jewish monotheism with the Gentile polytheism.

The problems that Gentile believers were encountering took on a different hue from those the Jewish believers encountered. Both had to deal with what to do with the sacred Jewish Torah, but the background of each group differed. Gentile believers had to make a break with all those traditional Greek gods, moving out of polytheism into monotheism.

Actually, as the succeeding centuries would demonstrate, that problem was never adequately resolved. Too many Christian thinkers in the next several centuries would be trying to make a theology that was meaningful to them in a polytheistic culture.

But that was not Paul's concern. His concern was to preserve the real freedom that Christ brings by means of his Holy Spirit. He could see that the religious traditions of the Gentile believers would be merely modified a bit if they now only changed from obeying Greek religious ceremonies to obeying Jewish religious ceremonies. This was already happening when Gentile men converted to Judaism. For Paul this kind of change was insufficient because it still kept them under what he calls "slavery." To change from being enslaved by idols to being enslaved by Torah would not bring the sense of freedom from both that Paul coveted for them.

2. "But now that you do know God, or rather that you are known by God." This self-correction is interesting and worth commenting on. The first clause shows that Paul is trying to put himself in the shoes of his readers, showing what changes would be occurring in their minds when they believe in Jesus, now they "know God." This is a man-centered approach. This is perfectly valid, but as soon as he dictates the words he realizes that there is more to understanding faith than a change in our thinking.

Paul senses then that he must make a theistic correction, reminding his readers that what is happening is not the product of what we do but the evidence of what God is doing. Hence the correction, "Rather, that you are known by God," a God-centered approach to faith. Paul wants us all to understand that the changes that occur in our thinking and behavior are not merely dependent on our will-power, but are accomplished in us by the work of the Holy Spirit when we believe in Jesus.

3. "How can you turn back to weak and beggarly things; why decide to be enslaved to them again?" Gentile believers would be thinking that they were indeed making a huge life-changing transition when they moved out of their previous polytheism into the grace of God in Christ Jesus. And indeed they were. But the Judaizers were teaching that besides this huge change they must also adopt the Laws of God as practiced in traditional Judaism.

Paul sees this, however, as a change out of one form of slavery, to the pagan gods, for another form of slavery, to the Jewish Torah. So he explains to them in this very direct and confrontational way that to believe in Jesus does in fact produce the freedom that God wants us all to have, Jews as well as Gentiles. So to move back into the Jewish form of slavery would negate the freedom that Jesus has already provided for them. Why would you even think of doing this?

4. "You are observing days and months, times and years." The Judaizers who have come to Galatia seem to have persuaded the Gentile believers to begin observing the whole system of Jewish religious festivals. Paul mentions observing not only the sabbath regulations but the whole gamut of Passover and Pentecost and Yom Kippur, all those festivals observed at different times of the year. There may well have been similar festivities in their pagan religious past, so it would seem natural for them to continue similar practices to honor their new God.

But Paul has been explaining in as many ways as he could think of that Jewish believers also need to move out from under that traditional system of Jewish festivals. All of that has served its purpose, but now that Jesus has come it is no longer useful or helpful to perform all those religious duties. Simple faith in Jesus, with the consequent sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit, is all that is now necessary to be good children of God. Rituals add nothing, and may well detract from that simple faith and obedience. Not only Gentiles but also Jews need to be liberated from that bondage to legalistic requirements.

5. "I am afraid that my efforts for you have been useless." While Paul is indeed a truly dedicated theist, he is not therefore ready to detract from his own efforts. God has called him to be an apostle to the Gentiles (as well as to the Jews). He has begun to do this work and the churches in the province of Galatia are the product of his and Barnabas' gospel work.

So it is understandable that Paul should sense that their work for the gospel is being undermined when the Judaizers come in and gain a hearing. It is precisely the things that those intruders are preaching that Paul is opposing. Paul knows from bitter personal experience that to live under the Torah does not produce the kind of religious obedience that God desires. It produces the opposite. Instead of liberty it produces bondage. Instead of love it produces self-righteousness. Instead of forgiveness it produces condemnation. Instead of changing the heart it produces hardened consciences.

Paul knows what the Torah has done, not only to himself to make him a persecutor of the church, but especially also to the nation of Jews to make them reject and crucify the messiah God sent. He does not want that to happen in the churches of Galatia. So when he writes in terms of his own work being in vain, he is at the same time writing in terms of the purpose of God being circumvented. Paul does not want these churches to succumb to the Judaizing pressures, but he opposes it, not just for his own satisfaction, but for the true progress of the gospel God is sending to the nations.

CHAPTER TEN

Paul's Example

Galatians 4:12-20

Become as I am, just as I became like you, brothers, I urge you.

You did not dishonor me.

You know that it was because of a weakness of the flesh

that earlier I brought the gospel to you.

Even though this was a trial for you,

you did not despise or reject,

but as a messenger of God you received me,

as Christ Jesus.

Galatians 4:12-14

1. It might be useful at this point to recall that Paul was dictating this letter to a scribe, and that the scribe would perhaps be scrambling somewhat to keep up with what Paul was saying. It's conceivable that the scribe might have missed something Paul said, or that Paul simply said what popped into his mind at the moment without bothering to explain his train of thought.

I bring this up because it is not abundantly clear what Paul means by saying, "Become as I am, just as I became like you." Perhaps there is a Greek connotation in this saying that is difficult for us to sense, a colloquialism that the readers would know but that escapes us.

My guess, and that is all it is, is that when Paul first visited these churches he did his best to put himself in their shoes (to use a figure of speech common today), to understand just how their background determined their religious practices. And now, perhaps, he is urging his readers to do the same for him, put themselves into his shoes in such a way that they understand how his own religious conversion changed his whole relationship to God.

If the readers can do this, they will sense the importance and urgency with which Paul has been writing about the Torah and the work of God in the past. They will then see that what Paul is explaining in this letter is indeed the truth and that the Judaizers are wrong.

2. It's also a bit difficult to get the thrust of Paul's next sentence, "You did not dishonor me." Obviously Paul is remembering just how it went a few years back when he and Barnabas traveled into the heartland of Asia Minor with the gospel. He remembers that he had been ill for a while before leaving Perga on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. He remembers also what happened to him twenty or so years earlier when he was converted at Antioch, the blindness that left him dim-sighted for the rest of his life.

So when he recalls how the people in those three Galatian churches received him and Barnabas he does realize what a poor impression he must have made on them physically. He was still weak from a long illness and his poor eyesight may have made some disfigurement in his facial features. But they did respect him as Barnabas' partner and did listen with courtesy to his explanation of Jesus. They did not dishonor him because of his appearance, even though in one of those cities he was stoned almost to death (not by the believers, however!).

3. And that is what he is explaining in the rest of this paragraph. "You know that it was because of a weakness of the flesh that earlier I brought the gospel to you." Maybe not "because" but "in spite of." Whether this refers to his sickness earlier in Perga, or to his poor eyesight dating back to the blindness caused by the sunstroke at Damascus, we do not know. Presumably the readers in the Galatian churches would understand.

But Paul is reminding them that they had received him courteously and respectfully, listening carefully to what he had to say about Jesus as their messiah. Paul is implying, it seems, that what they were now thinking about him is different. They are being persuaded by these newcomers that Paul's apostolic credentials are deficient and that therefore his messsage is truncated. Paul is urging them to return to the respect and confidence they had shown earlier when he was with them in person.

4. "Even though this was a trial for you, you did not despise or reject, but as a messenger of God you received me, as Christ Jesus." The word translated here as "messenger" is the Greek word ἄγγελον, transliterated angel. They had received Paul and Barnabas as angels of God, that is, as messengers sent by God.

We should be a bit more careful about what the term "angel" means in the Bible. Usually we think of them as non-human beings that God uses to send out messages to us. Surely this is often correct, taken symbolically. But here, as well as in the early chapters of Revelation of John, the term angel refers to a human being who is bringing the message of God.

Paul is reminding them to be thinking not only of human beings, himself and Barnabas and the men now disturbing them in Galatia, but about God and what God is doing through Jesus. It isn't merely a matter of Paul's credentials but of the message he is bringing about Jesus. Paul wants them to let that aspect of the problem determine how they think. What is God saying? It doesn't matter all that much about what you think about me as a person, but what you think of me as a messenger of God. Are you listening to God?

5. "As Christ Jesus." Interesting! Paul says they listened to him as if he were himself Christ Jesus. He is not, of course, making any absurd claims for himself, but is reminding them of the respect and courtesy they had previously had for him and for Barnabas. The same kind of respect they would have given to Jesus had he been there instead. Remember that respect and restore the same respect to me now again. Don't listen to what those intruders are saying about me.

So where is your happiness?

For I testify that, if possible, your eyes

you would have plucked out and given to me.

Have I become your enemy now for telling you the truth?

They show a false affection for you.

But what they want is to alienate you [from us]

in order to show that affection.

It is good to be shown affection if for a good reason,

not only when I am present with you.

My children, I am again in childbirth pain until Christ be formed in you.

I wish I could be with you now,

in order to change my speech,

because I am in doubt about you.

Galatians 4:15-20

1. Here is the clearest evidence that Paul's eyesight was poor. He reminds the readers in Galatia that they had respected him sufficiently that they would have, if possible, plucked out their own eyes so that Paul's vision would be better. (But could this have been in Lystra, where his enemies persuaded the townspeople to turn on him and stone him to death?) At any rate he is challenging them as to why their attitude toward him is now suspect. What is causing it? Of course we know, the charges made by the newcomers that Paul was not a genuine apostle and therefore could not be trusted.

Paul is not complaining personally, asking for sympathy. He is in this way challenging those people who are dissing him. Before these men came you were very appreciative of me and Barnabas. Now you are not. It's not because I have changed; you accepted me in spite of my physical appearance. What happened to all that love and appreciation?

A sidelight. What caused Paul's poor eyesight? There is only one incident we know of in his life that could have caused it, his sunstroke at the time of his conversion fifteen or so years earlier. For several days he could not see at all, and it seems likely that his vision from that time forward was severely impaired, perhaps also causing some disfigurement to his facial features. It is also likely that when in later letters he refers to his "thorn in the flesh" this is what he means. For the rest of his life he had to deal with that problem of poor vision. One wonders how much this dedicated student of the old Hebrew scriptures might have chafed under that incapacity. Could he even read those handwritten scrolls?

2. "They show a false affection for you." Paul is making a contrast between what he has been saying about their previous love for him and the kind of love the newcomers are exercising now toward them. Their earlier love for Paul was genuine and sincere. The affection that the Judaizers are showing is, Paul says, "false." Why false?

Because, as he states in the next sentence, "But what they want is to alienate you [from us] in order to show that affection." These newcomers are trying to separate the Galatian believers from Paul and Barnabas. Their affection is dependent on that division, that separation, that alienation. The Greek word used there is the same word whose base we translate as "church", , meaning "called out ones." The Judaizers are "calling out" the new believers away from Paul and Barnabas, separating them from the gospel as they first heard it from the apostles from Antioch. Without that separation the Judaizers would have no affection for the people in the young Christian churches in the province of Galatia. That makes their affection "false."

3. "It is good to be shown affection if for a good reason, not only when I am present with you." The thought process in Paul's mind is revolving around the notion of affection. He thinks about the mutual affection shown when these believers first heard the gospel and came to believe what they were being told about Jesus. Now he is thinking about the loss of that affection, and the kind of conditional affection the Judaizers are now offering in its place.

He says to his scribe, Affection is a good thing, but only if it is genuine and not conditional, not false. He means to suggest to his readers that what they first had toward Barnabas and Paul was for "a good reason," with the implied criticism that what the now have from the Judaizers is not for "a good reason." Paul is, in fact, reassuring his readers that the affection he has shown for them in his earlier visit is still valid, still in force. He still loves them with all his heart. That is why he is writing this letter the way he does. "Not only when I am present with you," he writes, but also still now when I am hundreds of miles away.

4. "My children, I am again in childbirth pain until Christ be formed in you." Here is an entirely unexpected analogy going through Paul's mind. He compares the personal struggles he has had in bringing them to new birth in Christ to the pains a mother has in delivering her baby. Similar pains Paul is now having as he hears what is happening to their earlier faith, and it hurts him deeply since he does not know just what the results will be. Will they come through this trial unscathed, or will they succumb to the false apostles who are leading them astray?

Paul wants Christ to "be formed in you." This is worth thinking about. How can Christ be formed in us, in anyone who believes? The answer, in short, would be that the Spirit of Jesus so functions within us that slowly but surely we become persons like Jesus. Jesus himself, as the Apostle John would write much later, is the Word of God made flesh. Jesus is the human person who incarnates everything that God wants a human to be. When the coming of faith begins that process in us we are progressively shaped also into the image of God, just as Jesus was, by the inner work of the Holy Spirit.

That is what Paul wants to happen in the Galatian believers, a process now being challenged by the Judaizers who have a different perspective on how this happens. They think it must be done by rigorous obedience to the ceremonial requirements of the Torah, but Paul thinks it is done only by the Holy Spirit working through faith in Jesus.

5. "I wish I could be with you now, in order to change my speech, because I am in doubt about you." Paul appears to be confident that if he were able to be in Galatia in person he would be able to refute the Judaizers. If he could do this, he could "change my speech." That is, he would not need to be rebuking the new Christians there for doubting his apostolic character and the reliability of the gospel he and Barnabas had brought. They would see clearly that Paul was in the right and the newcomers were in the wrong.

But, since he is in Antioch, not in Galatia, he is "in doubt about you." He is not sure which way they will go, whether they will retain their original confidence or yield to the Judaizers.

We today understand that, as soon as he could arrange it, he would make a personal visit back to them. It's what we know as the second missionary trip of Paul. Paul had a difference of opinion with Barnabas about taking along the helper, Mark, who had deserted them on their first trip.

So on the second trip it was Barnabas and Mark revisiting the churches on Cyprus, and Paul and Silas revisiting the churches in Galatia on their way still farther west to Troas and Greece. We do not learn precisely how these people received Paul the second time, but it seems that they did receive him lovingly. Actually, as another sidelight, a young man named Timothy joined his evangelistic team there in Galatia and remained with Paul the rest of Paul's life.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

An Allegory

Galatians 4:21-31

Tell me, you who want to be under the law,

Are you not listening to the law?

For it is written that Abraham had two sons,

one by a female servant and one by a free woman.

But the one from the servant was born of the flesh,

whereas the one from the free woman was through the promise.

Galatians 4:21-23

1. Paul is still pounding away at the Judaizers, and he is trying to come up with all the arguments he can think of to explain why they are wrong. Here he begins a long allegory based on the story of Abraham's first two sons, Ishmael and Isaac.

He goes all the way back, farther than Moses, to Abraham. But he is talking about being "under the law." Normally, the law means what we have been calling the Torah. But sometimes the term Torah means the entire document in which the laws are written, and even still broader, the entire Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. So perhaps Paul is here implying that broader use of the term "law," broader than simply the set of laws given at Mount Sinai for the constitution of the nation of Israel. After all, he is going back farther than Sinai, even though he is talking about being "under the law."

2. Paul is challenging the Judaizers and those Christians who may have been convinced by them to "listen to the law." But he isn't talking about what happened at Mount Sinai, he is talking about what happened hundreds of years earlier to Abraham. He is referring to the story of the difficulty of Abraham and Sarah to have children, and of what they decided to do about it. Paul wants his readers to "listen" to that story.

He, Paul, knows the ancient Hebrew documents very thoroughly, having studied them intensely during his years as a student rabbi in Jerusalem. So Paul knows these scriptures very well, probably better than any of the Judaizers now making trouble in Galatia, and better than any of the non-believing Jews there who would also be pressuring the newly converted followers of The Way. And Paul thinks there is a powerful argument to be made from the story of the first two sons of Abraham, and he is about to explain just how that will work out in terms of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

3. "One by a female servant and one by a free woman." One by Hagar, the Egyptian slave girl of Sarah, and the other later by Sarah herself. One wonders what went through the mind of Paul's readers in Galatia when they first read that sentence. Hagar and Sarah? Ishmael and Isaac? What have they to do with whether or not we need to obey traditional Jewish customs and feast days? All of that happened hundreds of years prior to the Torah. What's the connection?

Paul has been contrasting slavery and freedom. He has explained that to remain under the Torah is slavery, whereas to embrace Jesus and to live by his Spirit is freedom. Now, as he considers this contrast, he recalls the experience of Abraham recorded in Genesis, and all of a sudden to sees that the connection of Hagar and Sarah, with their respective sons, is also a contrast between slavery and freedom. Hagar was a slave girl, Sarah's personal attendant, but Sarah was the free woman. So Paul is now drawing out the implications of that connection with what he is trying to explain to his readers in Galatia. "Abraham had two sons, one by a female servant and one by a free woman," Ishmael and Isaac.

4. Paul also remembers something else about this story of Abraham. Sarah was too old, humanly speaking, to bear a child. So she concocted a scheme to provide Abraham with a son who could inherit his estate and carry on the faith of his father. She brought her personal attendant, an Egyptian slave girl, to her husband.

Ishmael, the baby born of this union, grew up to follow his mother's religion but not his father's. In the meantime God promised Abraham that Sarah would have a son in her old age. This indeed happened with the birth of Isaac. Isaac did grow up to revere his father and to preserve the new monotheistic faith of Abraham. So Paul understands that God was working out his own purposes, not by the clever machinations of people, Ishmael, but simply by his own promise and his own will, Isaac.

That's the meaning of the way Paul puts it here, "But the one from the servant was born of the flesh, whereas the one from the free woman was through the promise." Next, Paul will show the connection to his present subject matter.

This is an allegory.

For these are two covenants,

One is from Mount Sinai, bearing slave children, who is Hagar.

So Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia,

corresponding to the present Jerusalem,

for she is in slavery with her children.

But the other is the free Jerusalem above.

She is the one who is our mother.

For it is written, "Rejoice, you who are barren,

break forth and exclaim, you who do not have birth pangs,

because more are the children of the unmarried,

yes indeed, more than the children of the married."

1. "This is an allegory." It helps that Paul states this explicitly. Without that introduction we might possibly find the section difficult to understand, perhaps merely passing on without paying any attention to it.

What is an allegory? It's something like a parable, where certain tangible items represent other intangible things. We sometimes say a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. Jesus often used this means of teaching, telling a story without necessarily implying it is a matter of fact, but to illustrate some important insight into life. So what Paul is doing here is to take the facts concerning Abraham's first two children, with their mothers, to illustrate something important about understanding Jesus and how the gospel works in our lives.

2. Paul explains first that "these are two covenants." So we need to understand that Paul has in mind what the later writers of the New Testament documents called an "old covenant" as contrasted with what Jesus brought as a "new covenant." Paul want us to see that this difference can be traced way back to Abraham's time.

Already then we can see the difference between what Sarah and Abraham concocted and what God himself did. First a decision based on natural capabilities, second an event based on a act of God. First a son contracted by natural insights, plans, and hopes; second, a son given by the unexpected grace of God. First, Hagar and Ishmael; second, Sarah and Isaac.

Paul is now explaining to his readers in Galatia (Would the Gentile believers know anything about Abraham and Hagar and Sarah; or even care?) that this contrast already at the beginning of Jewish existence is comparable to what is happening now. Unbelieving people are like Hagar and Ishmael, whereas believing persons are like Sarah and Isaac. Just as it was Isaac, not Ishmael, who inherited God's promises (and Abraham's estate), so too it is believers who inherit God's promises today, not unbelievers.

An interesting parallel that Paul does not mention can be seen in what later Gospel writers explain about the miraculous birth of Jesus to a virgin mother, as compared to the miraculous birth of Isaac to an aged mother past normal motherhood capability.

3. Hagar. "So Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, corresponding to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children." Paul explains his allegory. Hagar is comparable to Mount Sinai (meaning the Torah) and both of them are comparable to what has been going on in Jerusalem (meaning rejecting Jesus).

4. Sarah. "But the other is the free Jerusalem above. She is the one who is our mother." Continuing his explanation of the allegory, Paul says that Sarah is comparable to "the free Jerusalem above." What does that mean? The "free Jerusalem" means the Jewish people who have been liberated by the gospel from the enslaving yoke of the Torah Law, plus now also those non-Jewish people who have come to faith in Jesus – all believers. The "above?" Paul is pointing to God in heaven who is directing all these affairs on earth. Those who believe that God has sent Jesus to be the savior of the world have their confidence, not on earth and on obeying precepts of the Law, but on the promises and work of God himself "above." That "free Jerusalem above" is what we now understand by the "new Jerusalem," the total company of men and women and children who believe in Jesus and live by his Spirit.

5. Paul quotes Isaiah 54:1 to confirm his point. Paul demonstrates again and again that he knows the Jewish scriptures very well, and here is a quotation that he seems to come up with from memory. "For it is written, 'Rejoice, you who are barren, break forth and exclaim, you who do not have birth pangs, because more are the children of the unmarried, yes indeed, more than the children of the married.'" How does Paul make the connection between this ancient prophecy of Isaiah and what is happening in Galatia?

First, what did Isaiah mean? Isaiah was writing for the remnant of Jewish people who had just returned to their ruined country from exile in Babylon. For years they had been forced to live in foreign countries, doing little or nothing in the way of serving their Lord God; this would be what Isaiah meant by the barren ones who did not bear children. Now they have returned and the task of rebuilding Jerusalem and the temple and of reviving the covenantal pledge to become a truly holy nation is before them as a daunting and unknown challenge. Isaiah wants them to know that they will be successful in restoring a nation dedicated to serving the Lord – and this is what he means by having more children than during the years of captivity.

Next, what does Paul mean? Paul is thinking in terms of the original promise of God to Abraham, namely that in him all the nations of the world will be blessed. Paul is doing what he can to bring the gospel to "all the nations." Many Gentile people are responding, so that in fact, as the future will show, there will be more Gentile Christians than Jewish Christians. Where for long centuries there were no (or very few proselytes) non-Jewish people in God's covenant, now there will be thousands. So Paul is explaining that what Isaiah was prophesying is now happening as the gospel expands into the non-Jewish world.

6. It may be well for us to remind ourselves why Paul makes quotations like this over and over again. Gentile believers would not have much appreciation for them, very likely, other than to recognize that Paul knew what he was talking about. But believers of Jewish background would recognize that yes indeed what is happening now is what God has been working at ever since the time of Abraham. They would begin to see, with Paul's help, that their entire history as God's covenant people was slowly working up to this climax with the coming of Jesus and the extension of God's saving work to all who believe.

The more clearly we understand the work of God in history the better we will be able to function in such a way that his work is furthered. Not everyone needs to be the scholar that Paul was and that many dedicated theologians are today, but even so the more clearly we can see what God is doing as the centuries roll on, the more faithful and useful to his kingdom we become.

You then, brothers, along with Isaac are children of promise.

But just as the one born of the flesh persecuted the one born of the spirit,

so it is now.

But what does the scripture say?

"Throw out the slave girl and her son,

for the son of the slave girl will not inherit

with the son of the free woman."

So, brothers, we are not children of the flesh but of the free woman.

Galatians 4:28-31

1. Here Paul applies the allegory. What's the point in making an elaborate allegory if it doesn't make any difference in a person's life? So he makes the application clear, "You then, brothers, along with Isaac are children of promise." Not just Jewish believers but all believers regardless of ethnic origin. They are the people who are inheriting the promise made long ago to Abraham when he began is monotheistic experiment of serving only one God instead of the competing gods of Babylon. God had assured him that, given time, everyone in the world would benefit from what he was doing. That is now happening through the life and ministry of Jesus the Christ.

2. Paul makes another application, "But just as the one born of the flesh persecuted the one born of the spirit." Back in the time of Abraham the two boys, Ishmael and Isaac, grew up together, and as it became apparent that Abraham was favoring the younger son because of his mother's status, Ishmael took to taunting and teasing and making life difficult for Isaac.

Paul is explaining to the believers in Galatia that something similar is taking place now. The people who represent Ishmael now, that is, those who have rejected the truth of Jesus, are making life difficult for those who have accepted that truth. Paul does not want them to be surprised by that opposition, but to accept it as part of the price they pay for faithfulness to God and to God's messiah Jesus. If you understand the situation properly you will not be thrown off balance or tempted to revert back to what you used to be, but you will go forward in the confidence that the Spirit of the Lord will guide you safely through life. Jesus himself put his life in the hands of his opponents, trusting that his Father in heaven would bring him through. We should do the same.

3. Paul makes another quotation from the sacred scrolls, "Throw out the slave girl and her son, for the son of the slave girl will not inherit with the son of the free woman."

Some critics have complained that this does not comport well with the gospel. Why would Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away without means of support? It seems heartless and unloving and contrary to how we ought to relate to others.

Two items in response. a) We need to transport ourselves back into the moral climate of the times. There are numerous instances of actions in the Old Testament that do not comport well with our Christian understandings of love and mercy and forgiveness, but in those days Jesus had not yet come so that the gospel teachings of love have not penetrated into the lifestyle of those ancient patriarchs. We do not, of course, need to take the example of those ancients as patterns for our living today.

b) We need also to understand the process by which God has taken his humans out of sheer animality into the fullness of his love and mercy. This did not happen in a day, nor in a century, nor in a millenium. All those untoward events we read about in the Old Testament, including this action of Abraham and Sarah, took place during a developmental period, and began a process by which the promises of God for a better life was just beginning. Hence we think not first of all about the human actions but about the divine plan. God's purpose was that the covenant beginning with Abraham would develop century by century until the violence and cruelty that characterized human behavior during the transitional period out of animality would give way to patience and respect and cooperation and love. That life pattern was introduced into the world by Jesus and continues to this day wherever the gospel is believed and the Spirit of Jesus guides.

The Apostle Paul is now trying to explain some of that to the misguided believers in Galatia.

4. "So, brothers, we are not children of the flesh but of the free woman." The full blessings of the gospel were not yet available to Abraham and Sarah, recently removed out of sheer polytheism. But God's promise was that they were beginning something that would eventually enable the whole human race to move out of the crass cruelty and violence that was associated with the past and into the life of shalom in the future.

Paul is explaining that God's promise is now taking another major step forward toward the ultimate goal. What began with Abraham and his descendants is now being expanded to all people, so that all who believe in Jesus should understand that they are now enabled to live in the freedom of the Spirit of Jesus, no longer enslaved to the Torah or to the false gods of Greece.

We today in the twenty-first century need also to understand that everything that has happened in western civilization due to the function of the gospel is another step forward in the direction of creating a human race that functions in all its varied dimensions as the image of God. We need have no illusions that church history has been faultless. It has not. Nor should we think that our particular church or denomination is anywhere near to the perfection that God has in mind. None of us can go it alone, whether individual believers or local megachurches or vast ecclesiastical organizations. God's purpose will not be attained until "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."

Paul and Barnabas were doing their part way back then in the first century, having no idea of what might be happening a thousand years later. Similarly the churches today are doing their part as best they can, also with no idea what the world will look like a thousand years hence. We need to keep our eyes focused not so much on what the churches are doing but on what God is doing, maintaining full confidence that God knows what he is doing even if we do not.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Freedom

Galatians 5

Christ has set us free for freedom,

stand firm therefore and do not get tangled up in a yoke of slavery.

I Paul am saying to you that if you get circumcised

Christ will be of no benefit to you.

I bear witness again that every man who gets circumcised

is obligated to do the entire law.

You have cut yourself off from Christ,

all you who try to get righteous by the law;

you have fallen out of grace.

For it is by the Spirit out of faith

that we expect to receive the hope of being righteous.

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision avails anything

nor being uncircumcised,

but faith working through love.

Galatians 5:1-6

1. Here Paul returns to the subject of freedom. He has stressed over and over again that to believe in Jesus involves being liberated from the need to obey the Mosaic Law. When you believe in Jesus, he keeps insisting, there is no further need to keep doing those Jewish customs.

On the contrary a person who believes in Jesus must learn how to make that freedom work in his or her life. That's the significance of Paul's saying, "Christ has set us free for freedom." Jesus did not deliver us from the Law just to have us go back again under it. Jesus wants us to exercise that freedom and show it in the way we live.

So we have here in chapter five of Galatians the start of a new avenue of thinking by Paul, what we might call a description of Christian living, or a set of ethics.

2. But before Paul gets down to specifics, his mind is racing again over the same ground he covered previously. Perhaps the dictation session has been interrupted for a night's sleep, and now Paul is taking up his task again, rehearsing things he has previously explained in detail. So he says, "Stand firm therefore and do not get tangled up in a yoke of slavery." Don't go back into slavery now that you have been released from it.

And then further, "I Paul am saying to you that if you get circumcised Christ will be of no benefit to you." Wow! That's putting it bluntly. And it's not what the Judaizers have been saying. They have been telling the people that believing in Jesus must be added on to what they already have, not replace it. The traditions must be carried on, and what is new must be added on. But Paul insists onthe opposite. The traditions have served their purpose, but now they accomplish nothing.

On the contrary, they now become worse than nothing. Paul selects one item from the panoply of religious duties of the Jewish tradition, circumcision. Jewish people regarded this ceremony as the distinctive difference between the Jew and the Gentile. Jewish men in good and regular standing are all circumcised; it is the proof of their Jewishness and at the same time proof that they are children of God. All Jewish men from the time of Abraham have accepted this evidence of belonging to God's people.

But Paul now insists that if a new Gentile man comes to believe in Jesus he must not allow himself to be circumcised. For if he does, his newly professed faith in Jesus will not take hold in his life. He will be thinking his circumcision, plus all the other Jewish traditions, is what does the job and makes him a child of God. And if such person does accept circumcision then he will never come to the point of living in the freedom of the Spirit of Jesus, he will be living under the obligations of legalism. Christ will be of no benefit.

3. Why will Christ be of no benefit? Because "every man who gets circumcised is obligated to do the entire law." The connection is not immediately obvious. Even if you do get circumcised and then also keep the other Jewish customs, why would this keep you from receiving the benefit of believing in Jesus? Can't you do both, as the Judaizers were insisting?

Paul is saying it is impossible for anyone to "do the entire law." The ceremonial observances such as circumcision, sabbath keeping, kosher food, Passover, do not include the attitude of the heart. You can observe all those things and still have a heart that is selfish, greedy, dishonest, untrustworthy. But if you insist on being "under the law" you are obligated to do all of that also, and this just does not happen, as is demonstrated in the fact that the people most dedicated to the Law are the ones who crucified the messiah sent by God for their benefit. It simply does not happen that by staying under the Law the people observe it in all its comprehensive requirements.

So that's the background of Paul's statement about being "obligated to do the entire law." He is telling the Christians in Galatia that God has provided a better way, one that really does work, for becoming a true and genuine child of God, loving and obeying him from the heart. That way is by simply believing in Jesus and living according to his Spirit. You do that and you will be an authentic child of your heavenly Father.

4. Paul can be very blunt in this his first letter that we have in the New Testament. "You have cut yourself off from Christ, all you who try to get righteous by the law; you have fallen out of grace." What can be more direct than that?

Paul is reminding them that they had made a good start when they committed to believing in Jesus as their Christ (messiah). But they did have to understand that believing in Jesus meant a radical change away from their former religious practices. Gentiles would have to abandon whatever idol gods they had previously served. Jews would have to move out of their traditional Jewish heritage of subservience to the Torah. God was giving them something new, something infinitely better, something that would really work, that would really make them into good people from the inside out, righteous, justified, faithful, obedient, holy, images of God.

But if both those groups turned back to the Jewish heritage they would forfeit all that blessing. It just would not happen. Their lives would not be changed by a Holy Spirit working within them, for they would be concentrating on external observances without the inner freedom of developing their lives by the Spirit of God. Relapsing to the Law means, for Paul, being cut off from Christ, cut off from the benefits that believing bring. They would be "falling out of grace."

I don't know how this insight of the Apostle Paul can be squared with the emphases that some Protestants have made, for example in the Canons of Dort. That document insists on what is called the "perseverance of the saints." Or, as some Fundamentalists say, "Once a Christian, always a Christian." Paul is certainly saying that for people who once have committed to Jesus Christ but who later become legalists, this amounts to falling out of grace, losing the benefits of their first faith. Paul clearly is implying that this can happen. Believers can opt for other avenues of attaining righteousness and thus cease being Christian, that is, cease being led by the inner Spirit of Jesus only. This was precisely the danger that the new Christians in Galatia were confronting, and which the intruding Judaizers were trying to force upon them.

5. Paul is trying his absolute best to enable his readers to know what he is talking about, what the great danger is that the newcomers are trying to get them to do. He has warned them bluntly that they are in danger of losing the benefits of believing, and now he adds what they simply must understand about their duty. "For it is by the Spirit out of faith that we expect to receive the hope [promise] of being righteous."

Paul is again reminding them of that ancient promise of God to Abraham, the promise he has been at great pains to explain earlier in this letter. "In you all the families of the earth will be blessed." That promise means the hope of becoming righteous people, people who live the way their Creator intends. That did not happen simply by observing the Torah Law, important and beneficial and necessary as it was for a time. But now, in our times, explains Paul, the hope and expectation of Abraham, carried on for centuries past, is happening.

Jesus has come, and with him the Spirit of God. Believing and trusting and following him, living by and in his Spirit, people are coming into a fellowship that truly and realistically begins the embodiment of the kind of communal life God intends for the whole world. This holds true for all people, of whatever nationality or background or prior religious commitment. Leave what is past. Embrace what is given in Jesus. Move into the future trusting that God is guiding the whole human race in the direction that will eventually make us all into the authentic image of God. This will happen only when "it is by the Spirit out of faith" that people live and expect to be made into righteous people.

6. "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision avails anything nor being uncircumcised, but faith working through love." It doesn't matter one way or another whether you are circumcised or uncircumcised. The only thing that matters is that you have a faith that works.

This would be very difficult for Jewish people to accept. Circumcision was the defining characteristic of the uniqueness of Jewish life and culture. Now all of a sudden Paul is saying it doesn't count for anything. Unbelieving Jews were going by tradition; Paul is going by theism.

God doesn't care one way or another about circumcision; what he cares about is what kind of a person you are. Do you live as a child of God, working out your faith in terms of trust in Jesus and in his Spirit? Note well: not only having faith but having a "faith working through love," a faith that works. Not the "works" of traditional legalism but the works of love and mercy and patience that define what a human being really is, an image of God.

When Paul focusses on circumcision we need to understand him doing this as one item of a very large body of tradition. What he says about circumcision applies equally to all the items in the ceremonial contents of the Torah, all the rituals and holy days and definitive Jewish practices.

Actually, if we wish to push this insight a bit farther, we should recognize that the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, is in a different category. It is indeed part of the Torah but it is not part of the ceremonial structure of it. The Ten Commandments are expressions of the basic ethical standard for humanity in general, not just for Israel. They describe what it means to be in the image of God, valid for everyone. But the other ceremonial laws are valid just for Israel, and now that Jesus has come they are no longer useful or necessary; but the Ten Commandments are.

So when the other writings of the New Testament speak of a new covenant and of the abolition of the old covenant, we understand this to apply to the ceremonial aspect of the Torah, not to the permanent ethical principles defined in the Decalogue. It never becomes outmoded, for example, to hold to one only God, creator of the heavens and the earth, or to honor one's parents, or to avoid murder, stealing, adultery, and covetousness. But it does become outmoded, as Paul insists, to circumcise, to make sabbath laws, to insist on kosher food, to observe Passover.

You were running well;

who persuaded you not to obey the truth?

Such persuasion does not come from the one calling you.

A little bit of yeast yeasts the entire loaf.

I am persuaded about you in the Lord that you do not think otherwise.

But the one troubling you will bear the penalty, whoever it might be.

But, brothers, if I am still teaching circumcision,

why am I still persecuted?

For then the scandal of the cross is removed.

I wish those who are disturbing you would cut themselves off.

Galatians 5:7-12

1. Paul has, apparently, finished his explanation of the reasons why God no longer requires his people to obey the traditions of the Jews. He is getting now into the more ethical aspects of the issue, rather than the historical.

So here Paul chastises his readers for their decision to listen to the Judaizers. You have started out very well on your journey of faith; who has gotten you off course? We, Barnabas and I, have explained to you the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and you responded then just in the way you should have. But now you are no longer "obeying the truth." Recognize that you have been listening to a false presentation of the gospel.

So right here we have an instance of erroneous teaching at the very beginning of the expansion of the gospel to all nations. Not everything said about Jesus is correct. There is a difference between right theology and wrong theology, and we need to do everything we can to keep to the truth and not let every wind of doctrine blow us this way or that.

Not everyone who claims to have the truth is by that token right. Tradition, for example, has its place, but must, as Paul is at pains to show here, be subject to a higher authority, the authority of truth. Paul has been explaining that traditions may have great importance for a time, but then may be supplanted by something even better.

Pursuing this topic a bit further, we can learn something also from the fact that Paul now turns to the ethics of the matter. Truth is not for Paul something abstract, sheer logic. It is the understanding of God's will in such a way that it results in a person living a godly life. A person might, for example, accept sound theology but not show that it makes any difference in the way he lives.

On the other hand there are a lot of people nowadays who do live Christian lives, doing what is right and honest and trustworthy, without sensing the need to be a church member. These people are showing that the work of the Spirit is guiding their lives, even though they may have little or no theology to explain why it is so.

2. "Such persuasion does not come from the one calling you." The persuasive words of the Judaizers, Paul insists, do not come from God, "the one calling you." They do not come from the reality of the gospel and from what God is doing now in sending the gospel to the Gentiles.

Here Paul provides the insight into determining whether something said about Jesus is true or false. Not logic. Not authoritarian compulsion. Not tradition. But whether it comports with what God is doing. If we do not understand what God is doing, then we will not understand how the gospel works. But when we understand that God is "calling" us by the gospel then we will have a genuine starting point. Through the gospel God is calling us to become the kind of human beings he designed us to be, his images. And that means not only an intellectual response of faith but a total life-embracing change from self-centeredness to God-centeredness.

3. "A little bit of yeast yeasts the entire loaf." Another reminder about my translations. I realize they are wooden, but I'm trying to capture something of the original flavor. Here I'm making the word "yeast" not only a noun but also a verb. That's because the Greek words used have the same root.

But how does this business about yeast fit in with Paul's discussion of the Judaizers? Maybe Paul's scribe didn't get everything Paul said down in writing. Or maybe Paul's active mind didn't bother to flesh out his train of thought sufficiently. But it does seem not to fit very easily into his argument.

It is likely, however, that he wants his readers in Galatia to think about what the Judaizers are doing. They are putting a little yeast, circumcision, into the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul is warning them that that yeast will grow into other items, sabbath observance, kosher food, Passover observance, many other items of Jewish customs, until the whole gospel is saturated with legalism. So in this rather enigmatic analogy Paul is warning them that to give in on one item, circumcision, will in time bring a lot of other ceremonies also. Give in to one and you will be giving in to all, the whole Torah complex of ceremonial obedience.

And Paul is also implying that this will destroy the significance of the gospel that is designed to enable people to live in a way freed from such legalisms. Nobody will achieve the freedom of the gospel in that way.

4. However, Paul is not giving up on the new believers in the Galatian churches. He knows that the Judaizers have made some inroads into their lives, but he still believes that they have not accepted their whole message. He writes, "I am persuaded about you in the Lord that you do not think otherwise." He is confident that they will not succumb totally to what these newcomers are saying.

On the contrary, he is hopeful that the Judaizers themselves will eventually succumb to the true gospel. And if they don't, they will "bear the penalty." The penalty will be the failure to enter into the freedom of the Spirit in the kingdom of God. "Whoever it might be" that are bringing these false messages, if they do not themselves break out of that prison, will remain in it with the legalism that destroys freedom. The penalty of resisting the Spirit is built-in. Resist the Spirit and you will not have the Spirit. Resist the freedom of the gospel and you will not have the freedom of the gospel.

So Paul is expecting that the things he has been writing in this letter will clarify the issues involved sufficiently for the Galatian Christians themselves to resist what the Judaizers are saying. And he is telling them that these intruders will themselves "pay the penalty" of resisting the gospel if they continue to peddle the message of legalism.

5. We can sense that in Paul's mind he is nearing the conclusion of his letter. But he does still have another line of thought to explore, some discussion of what difference it makes in the way one lives. How does the freedom of the gospel make a person a better human being than the slavery of legalism? What might that contrast look like, the contrast between the way liberated Christians live and the way enslaved legalists live? So we may expect to see Paul making that transition in the rest of the letter.

6. But not quite yet. He dictates another enigmatic point. "But, brothers, if I am still teaching circumcision, why am I still persecuted?" How is that again? Why is Paul being persecuted? Because he is teaching circumcision? But he isn't teaching circumcision, he is rejecting it. What's Paul getting at here?

I suspect there were connections in Paul's mind that did not get down into writing, since this sentence doesn't make sense as it stands. There was a time in Paul's life, much earlier, that he did teach circumcision. Not only circumcision but all the multiple duties of his beloved Torah. But that was long ago, and now he is being persecuted because he is teaching that it is not necessary to obey all those ceremonies.

Perhaps Paul means to say, Why would I allow myself to get into a situation where I am persecuted? If I were still teaching circumcision this would not happen. So the fact that I am being persecuted shows how important this matter is to me and to the gospel.

Perhaps something like that was going through Paul's mind with that observation.

. "For then the scandal of the cross is removed." The term "scandal" is a transliteration of the Greek term _skandalon_. The meaning is easily grasped. In the public mind, only criminals are crucified. One would think Jesus had been a bad criminal, bad enough to get him nailed to a cross by Roman soldiers.

Paul is saying that if circumcision, implying total obedience to all the Torah laws, is followed as the path to becoming a righteous person, then it would not have been necessary for Jesus to die on the cross.

But Jesus did die on the cross, and the purpose of it was to put an end also to the era of Jewish dependence on the Torah. Now a totally new way of becoming a good person in the eyes of God is made available. It is a way that actually works, not like the Torah that didn't produce righteousness. It is the way of faith in the messiah who was rejected by the Jews and put to death on the cross, but whom God promptly raised back to life again.

Paul wants his readers to know beyond any doubt that the Jewish people, as well as the Gentiles there, were rejecting what God was doing when they crucified Jesus. And he wants them to know that Jesus, knowing full well what was happening, allowed it to happen without any protest or attempt to escape. Jesus wanted to make the people decide one way or the other whether they were going to accept God's messenger. They did not accept him.

But when God raised him from the dead God was saying to those same people who crucified Jesus, "You made a bad mistake. But now you can repent, and if you do and if you do recognize Jesus as the messiah I have sent to you, you will find a glorious and beautiful new horizon of life appearing before you. You will truly become images of God rather than images of the devil."

All of that will be removed, that skandalon, if you go back to reliance on the Torah, says Paul.

8. "I wish those who are disturbing you would cut themselves off." The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible has Paul wishing they would "castrate themselves." Not just circumcision, but total castration. That's in the Bible? I don't know if Paul ever regretted writing that, but it's rather gross.

But maybe, just maybe, Paul has something milder in mind. Maybe he means simply that they would be cut off from the church, that they would recognize they are not in tune with the gospel and would remove themselves from it.

For you were called to freedom, brothers,

only do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh,

but through love serve one another.

For the whole law is fulfilled in one saying,

in "Love your neighbor as yourself."

However, if you bite and devour one another,

watch out that you are not destroyed by each other.

So I say, walk by the spirit

and the desires of the flesh do not follow.

For the desires of the flesh are against the spirit,

and the spirit against the flesh;

for these are opposed to one another,

so that you will not do what you want to do.

If you are led by the spirit, you are not obligated to the law.

Galatians 5:13-18

1. Paul has previously explained the concept of freedom, now he begins to explain how this freedom should work in their lives, those young Christians in Galatia, "Do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh."

We can understand how that might work. If we no longer have definite rules to follow, and if we are responding only to the Holy Spirit working in our hearts, then there seems to be no objective standard of judgment. You can say the Spirit leads me to do this; I can say the Spirit leads me to do that. It seems that anything goes in Paul's scheme, so long as a person can say he is led by the Spirit. In immature Christians this could easily degenerate into self-indulgence, so that this person might deceive himself into thinking this is what it means to be liberated from the law.

2. Paul warns against that and provides the alternative, "Through love serve one another." Don't be overly concerned about what you can do, but think even more of what your friend next door might need. Live in love, which requires moving out of one's own selfishness into concern for the fellowship of believers.

3. It is, after all, possible that instead of loving one another, church people may become critical of one another. Instead of living in the truth of spiritual freedom they begin to judge each other by certain rules of behavior. You shouldn't be doing that. You're not behaving the way a Christian should. Don't gamble. Don't go to movies. Wear decent clothing. Go to church every Sunday. Tithe your income for the church. And so forth. People can become very sensitive to what other people do wrong and thus fail to live in the love that can forgive and be of effective help to others. Much of such criticism might even be true, but does it do anything to help them grow internally in faith and live and obedience?

So Paul says, "However, if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not destroyed by each other." That's what happens when we fail to live in love. We devour one another. We make things worse instead of better. We drive people away from Christ instead of drawing them closer to God.

But it is hard to overcome this tendency. Our first thought is that other people should do better, but when we think that way we are in fact succumbing ourselves to the critical spirit. We need first to look at ourselves and ask honestly, Do I really love those people whom I have been criticizing for this or that?

4. "So I say, walk by the spirit and the desires of the flesh do not follow." That's a wooden translation of what Paul writes. Don't give in to the lusts of the flesh; instead guide your behavior by the Spirit of Holiness.

Of course there are certain needs of the "flesh." We need food, sleep, relaxation, friends, work, housing. Lots of physical needs. But that is not what Paul is getting at. Paul is pointing to the overall attitude of self-centeredness as opposed to being God-centered. I suspect he has in mind the story of the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. The serpent beguiled her into thinking of how nice that tree's fruit would be for her and her husband, not of what God had said. Those are the two opposites that Paul is pointing out here. The way God wants us to live as opposed to the way the devil wants us to live.

5. Here's the way he amplifies his point, "For the desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; for these are opposed to one another."

My mind is wandering a bit as I contemplate the importance of what Paul is writing here. I'm thinking of what has been happening in western civilization for the past two hundred or so years, a process of gradual secularization of life. There was a time when almost everyone in public life espoused some form of Christian faith, even such a men as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in spite of their seeming agnosticism. But it seems as if there are growing numbers of people who regard any form of religion as inimical to democracy and common human decency. To me this looks like succumbing to what Paul defines as "the desires of the flesh," that is, what looks good to us, rather than maintaining a strong commitment to "the spirit."

To pursue that line of thought a bit farther. The solution, it seems to me, to this growing tendency is to analyze the roots of that secularism, its philosophical and moral and theological implications, and then to clarify why the Biblical point of view here espoused by the Apostle Paul is to be preferred. Just doing the same as we have always been doing will not be enough, since that is what these secularists are objecting to.

It is my conviction that the Lord is leading us now in the twenty-first century to radical new insights into his will and purpose. The way into this new dimension is being led by the scientific community with its astounding pattern of new discoveries about the way the world works. This is God's world. He made it. He made it work the way it does. He enables the scientists to discover what he has done, and that's the way God speaks to us about our life and our civilization.

The point is that if we really want to get back to the truth we must begin by self-consciously re-adopting a theistic point of view. And then we need to let the basic Biblical world-and-life-view control the way we approach life and its requirements. God made this world. He put humans into it to sub-create a human world, civilization, that corresponds well with the goodness of the world God created, that is, to image God. We will then view history as the process whereby the Creator of the world is slowly shaping the human race into the condition he wants them to achieve. We say sometimes that a thousand years are as a day to God, and a day as a thousand years. What we should be deriving from that saying is that God has all the time in the world to get done what he intends to do. Hundreds of years. Thousands. Millennia.

So now, to get back to Paul and his letter to the churches in Galatia, Paul wants his new converts to recognize this basic alternative: either you live by what you want to do, or you live by what God wants you to do. Either by the flesh or by the spirit, in Paul's terms. That is probably as good an analysis for us in our times as it was for them in the first century after Christ.

6. But now, what does all this have to do with whether or not we need to be guided by the Torah Law, which is the problem the new Christians had? Paul dictates, "If you are led by the spirit, you are not obligated to the law." But why does that follow? Can't we be guided by the Law, which after all is from God, and at the same time by the Spirit? Why either/or? Why not both?

Theoretically that would be possible. We think of the Old Testament saints of God who did their best to keep the provisions of the Law intact. But Paul, in his own experience, has come to see that this combination is no longer working. The nation as a whole, from the High Priest to the scribes to the Pharisees and Sadducees to the people in general, have degenerated into a rote legalism that is no longer enlivened by the Spirit of God. These are our religious duties; if we do them conscientiously, it doesn't matter what we think or feel inside. So Paul could see clearly that the emphasis now being placed on the Law was not producing a holy nation imbued with love for God and for their neighbors. The Law had outlived its usefulness.

Paul is saying here that God has provided something even better than the Law. He is providing for anyone and everyone the Spirit, the Spirit of Holiness, that changes people's hearts not merely their behavior. That is what God wants, obedience from the heart, not merely obedience from the will with the heart left hardened.

Indeed, Paul is going farther. You do not need to observe all those legal requirements that the Torah specifies, no need at all to continue them. They won't help you at all if you really do have faith in Jesus and in his Spirit. When you believe truly in Jesus then you are liberated from obedience to the specifics of the Torah Law. Forget the Law; live by the Spirit.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Christian Ethics

Galatians 5:19 – 6:10

The works of the flesh are obvious,

for example, adultery, impurity, outrageous behavior,

idolatry, sorcery, enmity, quarrels, malice (zeal),

anger, factions, divisions, discord (heresy),

envy, drunkenness, partying, and things like these.

I am warning you, as I have said before,

that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Galatians 5:19-21

1. It is possible that some of Paul's original readers in the Galatian churches might have thought he was teaching that there were no objective standards of right and wrong. If we go by the internal Spirit, who is to say that anyone else is wrong? So the result of such thinking would be that anything goes, regardless of whether or not the Torah or anyone else approves. We might call this libertarianism or licentiousness or some other term that implies no moral standards.

But of course Paul knows there is a difference between right and wrong. He knows that there are standards of morality. Basically, as he has just explained, the difference between right and wrong is the difference between serving God and serving self, between godliness and selfishness. So now Paul lays out that difference in terms of the behavior of people in that culture.

2. I don't want to examine each of these sinful behaviors that Paul lists, partly because some of them are near synonyms for similar bad behavior, like enmity and quarreling and factions and divisions. But mainly because the precise connotation of those behavior patterns would be closely tied to the prevailing morality of the times, so that it would seem very difficult for us to get their precise import. We live in a different culture. Some evil behavior patterns are common to all but their exact implications might vary considerably.

Take adultery for example. In those days it was accepted in Greek culture that men would visit a local temple where they would be serviced by priestesses. This would be part of Greek religion. Other cultures would have widely differing standards about sexual morality. Paul is saying here, however, it would seem, that men should respect their marriage vows and not have sexual intercourse with any other women.

3. Some of Paul's terms, however, are interesting. I have translated one of them as "malice." The root Greek word is the same word from which we derive our English word "zeal." Apparently in those days what Paul means is to be so dedicated to some personal goal that it results in doing harm to others. Perhaps he has his own experience as a persecutor of the church in mind. He had tremendous zeal for the Torah and he let that led him to do harm to anyone he could find who became a follower of Jesus. Paul does not want Christians to be so "zealous" for anything that it results in damage to other people.

4. Another interesting term is "discord." This term in Greek is the word from which we derive the English word "heresy." Some people today employ this term to mean someone who disagrees with accepted church doctrine. But it seems that in Paul's day the term meant more that a person would have opinions that result in sowing discord, disharmony, in the church. Troublemakers of one kind or another, people whose talk resulted in the formation of opposing groups, thus destroying the sense of unity among Christians.

5. I translated one of the terms as "partying." I use this term in the sense of people getting together, not just to have a good time, but in the sense of breaking any inhibitions that society might normally have. Carousing, drunkenness, drugs, sex – the kind of behavior that we associate with the Woodstock of the 1960's, expression of any kind of undisciplined behavior.

6. "I am warning you, as I have said before, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." The items Paul mentioned are examples of the kind of life-style that comes from a self-centered ethical commitment. He does not intend them to become a sort of check-list of sins. If that is what we make of it then we are relapsing into the very legalism against which Paul is arguing. It's the inner attitude of the heart that Paul is getting at, the inner commitment that shows itself in certain observable ways.

He says people who live a self-centered life and who show it in these ways "will not inherit the kingdom of God." Recall that Paul has been insisting throughout this letter that it is only by faith in Jesus that anyone "inherits" the promise made to Abraham that all nations will be blessed in him. So that is the significance of this sentence also. Where is the promise to Abraham seen? Through Isaac, not through Ishmael or Midian or any of the other sons of Abraham. Then through the nation of Israel to whom God gave the Torah, and not through the surrounding nations. And now, Paul has been explaining, through Jesus and not through legalistic obedience to the Law. Now, all persons of whatever ethnic or religious origin, all who come to Jesus in repentance and faith "inherit" God's ancient promise. This is where we see the ongoing plan of God in operation.

Note well that Paul is not talking about life after death, or going to heaven when one dies. He is talking about real people in this life in real cultures and real history. You people there in Galatia, you are the ones who are even today inheriting the promise of God, you are experiencing the Spirit of God changing you from self-centered to God-centered. So don't let anyone come in and deprive you of that inheritance by bringing you back into the slavery of Torah.

7. A word about what the term "kingdom of God" means. It is nothing other than what Paul has been talking about in this entire letter, the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham, the sending of the Spirit of Jesus into the lives of all who believe and obey. Either the devil reigns in our lives, seen in self-centeredness, or God reigns, seen in godliness. Where God reigns through faith in Jesus Christ and in the inner power of his Spirit, there we see the kingdom of God. Let's not identify it with the visible church with all its varied forms of organization, but with the church as described in the Apostles' Creed, the holy catholic church, communion of saints. We are in this world as a light in the world and a salt in the earth. That community of believers, worldwide, universal, catholic, embracing anyone and everyone who comes in repentance and faith to a new life in the Lord Jesus, that community is where we see the kingdom of God.

This is not to imply that God is not the sovereign Lord over the whole universe, even over the devil and all his adherents. But we do not see the culmination or actuality of humans obeying God in that dimension. God always has all the world in his purview and in his saving intent for the future, but it is through the gospel of the Lord Jesus that his reign is actuated within human life. The gospel must be spread and it must take effect in the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit in the civilizations of humankind.

However, the fruit of the spirit is love, grace, peace,

patience, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control.

Against such as these there is no law.

Those who are in Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh

along with its passions and desires.

If we live by the spirit, let us also remain in the spirit.

Let us not become conceited,

challenging one another, envying one another.

Galatians 5:22-26

1. This list should be juxtaposed to the preceding list. First, Paul specifies a number of examples of wrong living, now he specifies a number of examples of right living. Again, we must not make this list into a checklist, as if they were a number of rules to obey. Rather, they provide some guidance as to the character of life in the Holy Spirit.

It happens upon occasion that a person may believe strongly that he is doing something that God has told him to do, but which is obviously not a good thing at all. For example, shooting dead a doctor who performs abortions. Or taking the law into one's own hands. Or, as in the Middle Ages, burning heretics at the stake. Or shunning some person whose behavior does not agree with one's own standards. Or loudly defending some doctrinal point to the extent of vituperating one's opponent.

We should be careful not to set up a new set of rules for behavior, but be content with recognizing that there is a basic difference between right and wrong, between living in the Spirit and living in the devil, between the fruits of the Spirit and the works of the flesh. It is not always easy to tell which is which, as the changes in communal morality from generation to generation demonstrate. Patience is one of the virtues of the Spirit that Paul mentions, and it is often difficult to practice.

2. Again, as above, I am not analyzing each of these virtues, as I think they are pretty much obvious to us all. But perhaps a few observations in general are apropos.

It seems as if Paul puts prime emphasis on love, since it is the first he mentions, _agape_. I can recall an otherwise fine gentleman, an elder in the church, speaking disparagingly of love. He did not think it helpful at all in being a Christian. How can you love people like Hitler and Stalin and the whole host of people outside of Christ? Even if you think you can figure out a way to do that, what good would it do? They don't even know you; much less will they change their ways because some people love them.

As a matter of fact, in that particular church the emphasis was not on loving God above all and loving our neighbor as ourselves but on maintaining sound doctrine. That's how we Christians protect ourselves from the contamination of the world. You can't go wrong if you keep your theology straight.

I do not want now to become guilty of Paul's warning against "challenging one another." Still, it does appear that, correct theology being desirable, it ought not replace love as the major emphasis in any given church.

I must confess that that attitude did have major formative influence in my own life and career. As I look back on my early and middle years, I think I did not sufficiently sense what it meant to love one another as Christians. I was doctrinally oriented, and it was not until my retirement years that I began to perceive what it meant to love those with whom I disputed theology. Or, for that matter, to love those who were not Christians.

I know well enough that for me to love people who are not Christians will not do anything to change their lives. But it will do something to change my life. It will make me more patient, more kind, more understanding, less argumentative and confrontational.

And perhaps that is what Paul had in mind also here in Galatians 5. He wants his readers to be patient with those who are just emerging out of the Torah or out of polytheist religion. Don't force them into anything they are not ready for. Let the Spirit guide, slowly to be sure, but nonetheless truly. Live together in the quietness and gentleness and love of the Spirit.

3. Patience (μακροθυμία, great passion, feeling, emotion, from θυ, to rush; sometimes translated long-suffering). Why should we exercise patience? Because it is one way we image God. God has all the patience in the world. If it took him fourteen billion years to produce the world as we know it today, then it would mean little if it takes him more millions of years to get the human race in shape. What's a thousand years to God? A mere moment.

So that's why we need to be patient in the way we view the progress of history and of current events. We are so concerned about how bad the world looks and that it seems to be getting worse and worse. So it is extremely important for us to be theists, that is, to understand that God knows what he is doing. God knows what he is guiding us toward, and he knows how to get us there. We don't but God does. So that's why we need to be patient, trusting that God will take all the time necessary to get it done. We will do our part as best we can, knowing all the while that generations into the future will be doing the same in the context of the civilization of their times. Being patient means trusting that God is getting his purpose done in spite of the evils we may sense all around us.

4. "Those who are in Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh along with its passions and desires." Paul seems concerned to explain the crucifixion of Jesus. Why was it important? What difference does it make for us now?

The point that he is making is that Jesus' crucifixion carries over into our lives in so far as we crucify our flesh. Obviously he does not mean suicide. Not crucifying the flesh in that sense. But crucifying the sinful passions, desires, behaviors, goals, relationships, habits that used to control our lives.

Note well that Paul is making a moral connection here. So perhaps it would be useful for us to ask ourselves if this is the way the cross of Christ does in fact impact our lives. It is possible, for example, that we concentrate on the saying that Christ died for our sins, and that we think of the forgiveness of our sins as the product of the cross. In that case it would be the inner sense of forgiveness that is our connection to the crucifixion of Jesus. I do not want to disparage this at all, since forgiveness is indeed very important.

But forgiveness all by itself does not necessarily carry over into a total change of lifestyle. It is possible that person may know himself guilty of some particular sin, and have the trust that every time he does it he may repent and have it forgiven, but then at a later time go right out and do it over again. But Paul is emphasizing that the desire itself to do that sin must be destroyed, crucified. Christ's crucifixion needs to be assimilated in such a way that even the desire to sin is eradicated. That's what we need to be working on.

5. A bit of excursus now. This is the first of Paul's letters that are extant. He is still working on understanding more and more clearly just how the gospel of Jesus Christ is to be understood and followed. We can sense much of that process in the letter of Galatians as he seeks to find as many ways as he could to explain convincingly that it is not necessary for Christians to keep on obeying the Torah.

It is possible, in a similar fashion, to trace something of Paul's own personal growth in this matter by comparing this first letter with the later ones, and discovering some development in his thinking.

Take this emphasis on the crucifixion of Jesus and how it carries over into a believer's life. We die to sin in a way comparable to to Jesus' crucifixion. The connection is moral.

In later letters Paul adds to this comparison with the crucifixion a comparison also to his resurrection, and even a comparison to his ascension. How does believing in Jesus' death, in his resurrection, and in his ascension affect our lives when we believe? How do we share in his death, in his resurrection, in his ascension?

In _Romans_ (and others) Paul explains that we die with Jesus and we rise with him; we are joined to him in the likeness of his death and in the likeness of his resurrection. How? We die to sin and we rise to righteousness. Our previous lifestyle ends and a new lifestyle takes over, one dies, another comes to life. And in Ephesians Paul even adds that we sit with Christ in the heavenly places, joined to him in the likeness of his ascension, ruling with him over the evil desires of the flesh. So we can trace in this respect Paul's growing insight into the significance of the life and ministry of Jesus.

6. Paul is nearing the conclusion of his letter. He does not have much more that is new to say to them. Here he summarizes the main intent of the letter, "If we live by the spirit, let us also remain in the spirit."

That wasn't happening with the people who were responding to the Judaizers. Paul is reminding them that it is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God, that has brought them out of their former sinful life. That's how you began, he is saying, responding to the Spirit. But now you seem to be relapsing back into the legalism of the Torah. Don't do that. Keep on with how you began. Remain in the Spirit. The Spirit brought you into the life of the Spirit, don't go back but continue in the same Spirit with which you began.

7. "Let us not become conceited, challenging one another, envying one another." With these words Paul is trying to describe what is happening to them when they respond favorably to the Judaizers. They argue bitterly, they become sure they are right and others are wrong, and they let the others know it. They create arguments, dissension, disunity.

There is a sense, however, in which this is exactly what Christianity was doing to Judaism. Christianity was saying to Judaism, what you have been doing for a thousand years is no longer necessary. This message would be upsetting to dedicated adherents of the Torah. So upsetting, we know, that they crucified Jesus and did their best to stamp out the flickering flame of the gospel.

Still, Paul is arguing from the stance of the gospel. Once you have believed in Jesus you must do all you can to preserve the sense of unity and respect and love for one another. You must not let any other insights or claims or accusations destroy this spiritual bond of unity. That is what Paul is writing here. Don't become conceited or confrontational or separatistic. Maintain respect and patience with one another, always in the Spirit of Jesus.

Brothers, if a man be discovered in any stumble,

you spiritual ones, restore that one in the spirit of gentleness,

looking to yourselves, that you not be tempted.

Bear one another's burdens,

and thus fulfill the law of Christ.

For if someone thinks he is something when he is nothing,

he is deceiving himself.

Each person must evaluate his own work,

and then have satisfaction in his own and not in the other's work.

Each one must carry his own freight.

The catechumen should share with the catechizer in every good thing.

Don't be deceived; God is not mocked,

for whatever a man sows, that he will reap,

because the one sowing to the flesh will himself reap corruption from the flesh,

whereas the one sowing to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap life eternal.

So let us not grow tired of doing right,

for at the right time we will reap our own if we do not falter.

Therefore whenever we have occasion, be active for the good of all,

especially for those of the household of faith.

Galatians 6:1-10

1. "Brothers, if a man be discovered in any stumble, you spiritual ones, restore that one in the spirit of gentleness, looking to yourselves, that you not be tempted." To the eyes of a purist this translation is indeed a "stumble." But I think it gives the sense of Paul adequately. People do stumble. They do make mistakes. Paul is dealing with one specific form of that stumbling here in his letter to the churches in Galatia, that of listening to the Judaizers.

Paul has explained the situation at length, addressing the problem from every angle he can think of, and now he is concentrating on how to handle that situation. He addresses the "spiritual ones." He means those believers who have not reverted to the Torah but remain steadfast in the Spirit. He advises these steady folk to be patient with the others and to do what they can to restore them to the unity of the Spirit in the church. But in the process, make sure that you don't get caught up in the argumentation to the extent that you too succumb to the Judaizers.

2. "Bear one another's burdens, and thus fulfill the law of Christ." The law of Christ is the same as always, "Love God above all and love your neighbor as yourself." A person who does this is a person concerned not only for himself but for his neighbors as well. He will do what he can to help the neighbor when in some difficulty. In this case Paul has in mind the men who are responding to the Judaizers by going back to the ceremonies of the Torah.

They should not do that, Paul has been saying again and again in this letter, and those of you who know better should not be confrontational, dismissive, rejecting, but lovingly be of whatever assistance is possible to recall them back to the stance of faith and the Spirit. In this way they will be obeying the law of Christ.

3. "For if someone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he is deceiving himself."

Paul has in mind the Judaizers themselves. Or perhaps also those in the Galatian churches who had been persuaded by the Judaizers. Perhaps both groups. If so, then Paul would be implying that these people think they have all the answers to what it means to be a child of God, but in reality they do not. They are in fact "nothing."

They are deceiving themselves into thinking God still requires them to obey the outdated and obsolescent Torah. They do not see that what God now requires is simple faith in Jesus carried out in the Holy Spirit into all their life.

4. "Each person must evaluate his own work, and then have satisfaction in his own and not in the other's work." Here Paul is insisting that Christians ought not be evaluating the life and behavior of others. Don't keep looking at others and finding fault with them all the time. Just look at yourself and your own life and your own integrity before God and Jesus.

But consider that Paul says this after warning them of the pride that thinks too highly of oneself. It is possible that we look at ourselves with that kind of pride, proud that we are more faithful, more consistent, more dedicated than others that we could mention.

So when Paul now says we have to evaluate our own lives, not those of others, and have satisfaction in that way, he means not that we have pride in ourselves, but that we are content with the way the Holy Spirit is working in our lives. This contentment does not depend on running down other people or considering that we are better than they are, a holier-than-thou attitude. It depends on recognizing that, even in our failures, the Lord Jesus is having his way in us and is shaping us more and more into his image. It means we are satisfied with what the Holy Spirit is doing in us. That's what we should be concentrating on, writes Paul, and not on trying to evaluate others.

5. "Each one must carry his own freight." Freight. The connotation is the cargo of a ship, or the load carried by a camel.

Every person has a responsibility for his own life, the way he conducts himself, the way he uses his time, the things he enjoys, the goals he pursues, the relationships he sustains. God gives each of us a certain amount of time, a mere speck in the vast span of God's purpose, and he requires each of us to do what is right and fitting during that time. God will see to it that what we humans do does in fact contribute in one way or another to the shaping of the civilizations that we form and to the purpose of God in having a human race to begin with.

That's what Paul has in mind here, the point of view that begins with God and with his purpose in giving us as individuals a short period of time in which to do what it means to be human, to be images of God. Paul means that each of those Christians in Galatia is responsible for his own life and for his own response to God and to the gospel of Jesus. No one is to be the judge of another in this respect. Let each Christian look to himself, take full responsibility for what he believes and for what he does, Do not let any Judaizer come to you and say you are falling short because you aren't obeying the Torah. And don't yourself fall into that same trap of judging others.

6. "The catechumen should share with the catechizer in every good thing." "Catechumen" and "catechizer" are transliterations of the Greek words Paul uses, meaning a person who is taught and a person who does the teaching.

It's a bit difficult to get Paul's precise meaning here. Preachers like to think Paul implies that a preacher should get a decent salary. Maybe that would be implied, maybe not.

But if we try to understand this saying in the context of the problem Paul is dealing with in this letter, we should first ask what it means regarding the Judaizers and the people responding favorably to them.

I suspect we have it wrong if we think Paul is urging the people to support their pastors well. I think it's the other way around. Paul is reminding them that the men who originally brought the gospel to them – meaning Barnabas and himself – had the blessings of the gospel before the people in Galatia did. They were the ones bringing good news, "every good thing," and they have come to Galatia to teach the same good things to the people there. The people being catechized, therefore, get to share the blessings of the gospel along with the catechizers. Accordingly, the people catechized by Paul and Barnabas should not be listening to the voice of others who contradict their teaching. They should be content to share with the evangelists the blessing of liberation from their former lifestyles.

7. "Don't be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will reap." How does this fit in with the train of thought that Paul has been developing?

It's important to tie in all of these seemingly random sayings with the overall thrust of the letter, which is to warn against submitting to the Judaizers. Paul has in mind still that if the new Christians in Galatia revert back to the Torah they will lose the freedom they have just gained from the Holy Spirit. So he is saying that the Judaizers are sowing a message that will inevitably bear the fruit of legalistic submission to Torah; it will not bear the fruit of the joy of freedom.

And what is not be to missed, Paul, being the thoroughgoing theist he is, reminds them that this is the way God has arranged things. You reap what you sow. That is more than a human observation, it is the way God created things.

So when Paul writes that "God is not mocked" he means to say that this arrangement of God cannot be voided. This arrangement, you get what you sow, is built into the structure of life and reality by God, so that if it could be made not to function God would be mocked. In this way Paul is reminding his readers that they must always think of what God is doing and of how God's work is guiding and controlling the way they think and live.

And of course what Paul is getting at is to remind the people not to let the Judaizes sow the seeds of legalism into their lives, because if they do, they will inevitably reap its results in the loss of their freedom in Christ. They will become entangled in the slavery of rules imposed on them by their priests and rabbis.

8. "Whatever a man sows, that he will reap, because the one sowing to the flesh will himself reap corruption from the flesh, whereas the one sowing to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap life eternal." This is expanding on the previous statement about God not being mocked.

It may be useful to consider the contrast a bit more closely, particularly the terms Paul uses to describe what is reaped in each case. The contrast is "corruption" in the case of sowing to the flesh, and "life eternal" in the case of sowing to the Spirit. What precisely does Paul mean by "life eternal"?

Traditionally we have understood that term to mean unending life even after physical death, as if the soul continues existence without interruption. I am frank to say this is not in accord with the Bible itself. On the contrary this view of the soul comes from the philosophy of Plato and Socrates. In his dialogue, Phaedo, Plato has Socrates explaining that he is not fearful of death because he will be going to the underworld without the encumbrance of a body, there to converse with all the great minds that have preceded him. It appears that this view of the relation of body and soul was incorporated by the early Christian thinkers into their theology. But it is commonly recognized that this view of the soul cannot be found in the ancient Hebrew writings that we still have today in the Old Testament.

There was, of course, no New Testament at the time of Paul, so all he could go by was what he had studied for years in the national literature of the Jewish people. Paul simply would not have had the Platonic view of body and soul prevalent in the Greco-Roman world of his day.

So what might Paul have had in mind by the term "life eternal"? Simply the life given from heaven by the Holy Spirit to those who came to Jesus in repentant faith. The life that the believers in the Galatian churches were already experiencing, the life of freedom from the various forms of bondage from a sinful lifestyle. Nothing about life after death or about unending existence somewhere off in heaven.

Paul is addressing a real existential situation in Galatia. He is saying that God has set up the conditions of life in such a way that what we sow we will also reap. Not reap in some faroff future but reap in the realities of life in the here and now. If we sow to the Spirit we will reap the fruit of the Spirit, and that is precisely what Paul intends by the term "eternal life."

9. Incidentally, this should serve as a reminder to us that it is dangerous to take any given statement in the Bible out of context. Out of historical context and out of grammatical context. English translations of the ancient Greek can well carry connotations that are not in the original, and that should make us very careful not to read into our English translations ideas that are not there to begin with.

10. "So let us not grow tired of doing right, for at the right time we will reap our own if we do not falter." Here is Paul's punch line. You know you are on the right path if you believe in Jesus and do your best to live in his Spirit. Don't become "weary of welldoing" as some translations put it. All kinds of difficulties come in life, and sometimes we wonder if it is worth it to undergo all that trouble, perhaps persecution of various kinds, and just give up and revert back to what may seem good to us.

Paul says, Don't give up. It may take a while before you really experience properly the freedom you have in Jesus, since it may be a bit difficult to sort out what is important from what isn't, and to escape out of the habits you may have formed earlier. But the time will come when you do sense it better, and when you come to a more mature experience of God's Spirit working in you. That's what Paul is saying to his friends out there in the province of Galatia. At the "right time" ( _kairo)_ this will happen, the time when you reap what you are now sowing in faith.

11. "Therefore whenever we have occasion, be active for the good of all, especially for those of the household of faith." Paul's last dictation. The rest of the letter is written by his own hand, as we will see in the next sentence.

This sums up the ethical application of the main point of his message to the Christians in Galatia. Beware of the Judaizers who are seeking to destroy the liberty you possess in the Spirit of Jesus. Don't let that happen. Instead exercise yourself whenever the need arises to work for the "good of all."

But note the further explanation, "especially for those of the household of faith." Obviously, then, Paul has in mind even those who may have heard the gospel but have not yet yielded their lives to Jesus. Of course, do good for those also, the good being urging them to find the peace and joy and freedom of the Spirit through faith in Jesus. But especially keep faith with those of your brothers who have made that commitment; be attentive to do whatever you can to help them with whatever difficulties they may have. Don't criticize in such a way as to create divisions and hard feelings, but in genuine love and concern work with them in such a way that they may find the path of right.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Concluding Comments

Galatians 6:11-18

Notice how large the letters are that I am writing to you by my own hand.

Those who wish to make a good appearance in the flesh

are the ones who are forcing you into circumcision,

only so they are not persecuted for the cross of Christ.

Nor do even the circumcised themselves keep the law,

but they do want to have you circumcised

in order that they may boast about your flesh.

May I never boast about anything other than the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,

by which the world is crucified to me and I to the world.

Galatians 6:11-14

1. We do not know who the scribe was to whom Paul dictated this letter. Perhaps it was Silas, the man who accompanied Paul when, some time later, he revisited the churches in Galatia on what is known as his second missionary journey.

What we do know, based on what Paul writes here, is that he has been dictating, not writing with his own hand. He calls attention to the large letters he must use because of his poor eyesight, in clear contrast to the smaller letters used by his scribe. "Notice how large the letters are that I am writing to you by my own hand."

2. Paul does not have much new to write, but since he is now doing it in person, he sums up what he has been saying throughout the letter. "Those who wish to make a good appearance in the flesh are the ones who are forcing you into circumcision."

We will understand the clause "to make a good appearance in the flesh," to be in contrast to making a good appearance before God in the Spirit. The Judaizers are more concerned with what people can see than with what God can see.

The Judaizers might reply that what they were insisting on was in fact the Law of God. It was God who gave all these laws to Israel at Mount Sinai soon after they escaped the forced labor in Egypt more than a thousand years ago. God has always judged his people by how faithful they have been in keeping all the ceremonies and duties of that Torah Law. The Judaizers might be insisting that, since it was indeed God's Law, we have no right to abolish it or declare it invalid. Hence even Christians must keep on obeying it, as Jesus himself did.

This would have been a very forceful argument, persuading both Jewish believers and Gentile believers. But Paul has been at pains to show that the argument was in fact contrary to the gospel, and that the Law had failed to produce the kind of obedience God requires, from the heart. The Torah had produced a nation oblivious to the real desires of God as displayed in the coming of their messiah Jesus. They not only rejected Jesus in the name of the Torah, but they even demanded that Pilate crucify him according to the worst punishment of Roman law. Paul knows from bitter personal experience of his early years that diligent fanatical devotion to the Torah does not produce the result God desires.

3. The remainder of this same sentence presents a somewhat difficult insight, "only so they are not persecuted for the cross of Christ." What has that to do with upholding the Law of God? So that they aren't persecuted for the cross of Christ? What's the connection in Paul's mind? What has the cross to do with the argument of the Judaizers?

In the mind of all good Jews at that time, prior to the coming of Jesus, was God's promise to send a messiah to re-establish the throne of David in Jerusalem. This would involve some kind of war for independence, driving out the Roman occupying army, and setting up the messiah as king. When Jesus was crucified, in the mind of these people, it was the final proof that Jesus was not their messiah. He did not do what God said a messiah would do. So the cross of Christ was the one item that proved to them that Christianity was false. They would have to look for someone else to get the job done. Thirty years later they did rise in rebellion against Rome, a war that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple.

So the cross of Christ was a critical point in the decision of people in Paul's day whether or not to believe in Jesus. That meant, of course, that Paul and the other apostles had to explain why it was that Jesus was crucified instead of becoming a king in Jerusalem.

Paul does not do a great deal in this letter to the Galatians about this, but here in Paul's closing sentences he does allude to it, "May I never boast about anything other than the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world is crucified to me and I to the world." Paul is boasting about the very item that is causing unbelieving Jews so much difficulty. Why can Paul boast about Jesus not becoming king in Jerusalem, not driving out the Romans?

He may have much more to say about this in other contexts, but here he simply affirms that because of Jesus' cross Paul himself is also crucified. Actually a mutual crucifixion, the world is crucified to Paul and Paul is crucified to the world.

4. When Paul speaks of "the world" he has in mind the total array of Greco-Roman life. This involves the attitudes and habits and philosophies and mores that have made the world what it was at that time. Prominent among these philosophies is that in order to establish a viable kingdom or empire it is necessary to vanquish others by military force and to compel them to provide annual tribute to the government.

This is also, let us observe, the concept of the Jewish people when they thought about what a messiah was supposed to do for them. He would raise an army, fight the Romans as the Maccabees had fought the Syrians, and impose strict military control over whatever neighboring countries they might defeat.

So when Paul speaks about being crucified to the world this is the broad extent of what is in his mind. Jesus has come, not to do what prevailing worldly mentality expects, but what God is sending him to do, namely to provide a more humane and godly way of setting up the kingdom of God. A kingdom of shalom, peace.

And of that kingdom Paul takes the cross of Christ as the symbol. Jesus gave himself up to the machinations of the world, letting the world have its way fully with him, only to trust God to raise him from the dead. So it is important also to recognize that, even though Paul may not specify the resurrection here, it is in his mental array. Crucifixion ends one philosophy; resurrection begins another. With Christ, Paul dies to one mentality and rises to another.

And not only Paul as one individual, but the resurrection of Jesus introduces into the ongoing history of the human race a vastly more powerful and effective way of life than what the Roman empire could provide. It is a full-blown comprehensive universal catholic philosophy of life that, from those inauspicious beginnings, has swept the human race and is still today the decisive force in the way human history develops.

For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but a new creation.

And those who observe this canon [duty] \--

peace upon them and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.

For the rest, let no one make trouble for me

for the stigmata of Jesus I carry in my body.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, with the the Spirit, be to you, brothers,

Amen.

Galatians 6:15-18

1. Paul now repeats what he has been dictating over and over again, "For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything." The ceremonies of the Torah are no longer important because they have been supplanted by something even better, namely "a new creation."

What is "a new creation"? Something Jesus brought into the world that the Jewish people had not expected. Something new as compared with everything the people had been dealing with for centuries. Something contrasted with their traditional preoccupation with the requirements of Torah.

Jewish people in general at that time did not understand what was happening in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Did not understand what Paul had just been writing about, being crucified to the world. Did not understand that Jesus was bringing into the sphere of history a new powerful force, the force of the Holy Spirit, that would transform the way people lived and provide a totally new way of thinking about life and the world and about what God wanted for people.

We may think of that "new creation" as being what Jesus called "the kingdom of God." No longer the kingdom of military power and empire, or of political compulsion, but a transformation of human orientation from selfishness to godliness. Beginning inwardly with a change from self-centeredness to God-centeredness, triggered by Jesus' death and resurrection, and effectuated by the Holy Spirit of Jesus.

Paul understood himself in this light. He had been a fanatic and loyal adherent to the Torah and its ceremonies, so much so that he became a fierce persecutor of "followers of the Way." But at Damascus, in the dramatic story of his conversion recorded by Luke in Acts, he became what he now calls "a new creation." Created by means of his abject humiliation under the onslaught of divine calling, and then the long slow process whereby he learned how to live and serve the Lord in the strength of repentance and faith.

So that is what Paul has in mind as he shapes the "large letters" of his closing remarks. What is important is not our traditional Jewish ceremonies but becoming "a new creation" by faith in Jesus and the inner suasion of the Holy Spirit.

2. "And those who observe this canon [duty] \-- peace upon them and mercy, and upon the Israel of God." The term "canon" used here is a transliteration of the Greek term κανόνι (kanoni). It carries the connotation of a sense of responsibility or duty. Paul means simply those people who do believe in Jesus in repentance and faith and who want nothing but to live in his Holy Spirit. Upon them Paul pronounces his blessing, "peace and mercy."

Let us take note particularly of the interesting phrase, "the Israel of God." Paul means the "new creation" that was then taking form in the community of faith, what we today call the Christian church. This new "Israel of God" is replacing the old Israel of the Torah. God's work and God's purpose is no longer confined to the one nation of the Jews, important as that phase of God's plan had been, but is now located in the gospel of Jesus Christ and in the bringing together of people of all nations. As Paul would later put it, Gentile believers are being grafted into the root stock of Israel, so that this union of believing Jews and believing Gentiles is now the locus of the way God is working out his plan for the salvation of the whole world.

It is necessary, therefore, for us to understand that the ethnic people we know as Jews, now concentrated in the nation of Israel in their traditional "holy land," is no longer the place where we find the work of God centered. All nations are now involved in God's ongoing plan, so that wherever the gospel is proclaimed and wherever people respond in faith that the meaning of history under God's sovereign control is found. The ethnic nation of the Jews has no continuing significance, any more than developments in other ethnic societies. If we think that eventually the gospel will prevail in that nation, then the same needs to be said of any and all other nations. There is no longer anything special about the nation of Israel that demands our attention, other than what can be said about any nation.

That being said, it does appear that the some of the basic values of Israel are more compatible with the values of Christian nations than are those of other non-Christian societies, so that close cooperation between Israel and the Christian nations is highly desirable.

3. "For the rest, let no one make trouble for me, for the stigmata of Jesus I carry in my body." Stigmata. The term meant marks in the body, such as scars or tattoos or the marks put on a slave by an owner. Paul uses the term to mean the scars in his body left by events related to his faith in Jesus.

There are only two such events recorded in the Bible. The first was the time of his conversion when Paul suffered a sunstroke and was blinded temporarily. The second was when he was stoned and left for dead in the city of Lystra during his previous mission trip there.

My own opinion is that he is referring to the same thing he had previously mentioned in this letter, his poor eyesight suffered as a permanent "thorn in the flesh," and requiring that he normally dictate his letters rather than compose them himself. Paul cites this physical defect as proof of his apostolic character and authenticity, and suggests that it should be a sufficient reason for people to desist from attacking him on that account. I bear the marks of Jesus in my body; so don't you dare to say I am not a legitimate apostle.

4. In AD 1224 Francis of Assisi experienced a vision of some kind which he felt was a visit from an angel and which left him with wounds in his hands, his feet, and his side, comparable to the places where Jesus was wounded on the cross. He regarded this as his sharing in the cross of Christ, a sharing in Christ's wounds. This is the first recorded instance of anyone claiming to bear these "stigmata," but in later years there would be numerous others in the Roman Catholic tradition.

5. Paul concludes with a prayer that the blessing, the gift, the bequest, the benefit of faith in Jesus may indeed be theirs. That is the significance of the term "grace" here. The blessing of a new orientation in life, a liberation from the previous type of religion they had. "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, with the the Spirit, be to you, brothers."

Note also that Paul insists that this blessing will not be had apart from "the Spirit." However it may be that a person comes to faith in Jesus, the result must be seen in what happens in that person's life, a commitment to God and to Jesus that is rooted deep in one's heart and that transforms everything that happens, the way one thinks and behaves in all the varied circumstances of life.

6. "Amen." So be it. Not just, I'm done now. But, May everything I've written be true and accepted and determinative of how you react.

But Paul is indeed finished. He has written the last paragraph in his own hand, "large letters." And now he must find someone to deliver the letter.

And, we may interpolate, in the meantime he and Barnabas will be laying plans to make another mission trip that will bring them back to the province of Galatia as they make their way farther west to the Aegean Sea. Paul will be greatly interested to find out what effect his blistering letter may have had out there in the young churches that are now being attacked by the Judaizers.

* * * * *
