7. The foolishness of the Galatians
Throughout most of chapters 1 and 2 Paul has been robustly defending the divine origin of his apostolic mission and message. They had been derived from God, he insists, and were independent of other people.
Now he comes back to the Galatians, and to their unfaithfulness to the gospel as a result of the corrupting influence of the false teachers. You foolish Galatians! . . . Are you so foolish? (1, 3). The Galatians’ turning away from the gospel, therefore, was not only a kind of spiritual treason (1:6), but also an act of foolishness. Indeed, so stupid was it that Paul wonders if some sorcerer has bewitched them or ‘has been casting a spell’ (jbp) over them. His question is partly rhetorical, because he knows only too well about the activities of the false teachers. But perhaps he uses the singular (Who . . . ?) because behind these false teachers he detects the activity of the devil himself, the deceiving spirit, whom the Lord Jesus called ‘a liar and the father of lies’ (John 8:44). Much of our Christian stupidity in grasping and applying the gospel may be due to the spells which he casts.
What have the Galatians done to lead Paul to complain of their stupidity and to ask if they have been bewitched? They have yielded to the teaching of the Judaizers. Having embraced the truth at the beginning (that sinners are justified by grace, in Christ, through faith), they have now adopted the view that circumcision and the works of the law are also necessary for justification.
The essence of Paul’s argument is that their new position is a contradiction of the gospel. The reason for his astonishment at their foolishness is that before their very eyes Jesus Christ has been clearly portrayed as crucified. It is not just that Christ was shown to them, but that he was shown to them as crucified (an emphatic participle at the end of the sentence). It is possible that Paul is making a further reference to their having been bewitched. He seems to be asking how some sorcerer could have put them under the spell of an evil eye, when Christ has been portrayed as crucified before their very eyes.
This, then, is the gospel. It is not a general instruction about the Jesus of history, but a specific proclamation of Jesus Christ as crucified (cf. 1 Cor. 1:23; 2:2). The force of the perfect tense of the participle (estaurōmenos) is that Christ’s work was completed on the cross, and that the benefits of his crucifixion are forever fresh, valid and available. Sinners may be justified before God and by God, not because of any works of their own, but because of the atoning work of Christ; not because of anything that they have done or could do, but because of what Christ did once, when he died. The gospel is not good advice to people, but good news about Christ; not an invitation to us to do anything, but a declaration of what God has done; not a demand, but an offer.
And if the Galatians had grasped the gospel of Christ crucified, that Christ did everything necessary for our salvation on the cross, they would have realized that the only thing required of them was to receive the good news by faith. To add good works to the work of Christ was an offence to his finished work, as we saw in 2:21.
Paul now exposes the senselessness of the Galatians. They should have resisted the spell of whoever was bewitching them. They knew perfectly well that the gospel is received by faith alone, since their own experience (2–5) and the plain teaching of Scripture (6–9) had told them so.
1. The argument from their own experience (3:2–5)
I would like to learn just one thing from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? (2). Have you experienced so much in vain? (4). Paul assumes that they have all received the Spirit. His question is not whether they have received him, but whether they received him by works or by faith (2). He assumes also that this is how their Christian life began (beginning by means of the Spirit, 3). What he is asking concerns how they received the Spirit and so began the Christian life. What part did they play in the process?
It is important to be clear about the possible alternatives, which the apostle terms by works of the law (i.e. by obeying the law’s demands) and by believing what you heard. The contrast, already set out in 2:16, is between the law and the gospel. This is the difference between them: the law says ‘Do this’; the gospel says ‘Christ has done it all’. The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ’s achievement. The law makes demands and tells us to obey; the gospel brings promises and invites us to believe. So the law and the gospel are opposed to one another. They are not two aspects of the same thing, or interpretations of the same Christianity. At least in the sphere of justification, as Luther says, ‘the establishing of the law is the abolishing of the Gospel’.
In verse 5 Paul uses the same argument in a second way – not now from the point of view of their receiving the Spirit, but from the point of view of God giving the Spirit: Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? The verbs ‘give’ and ‘work’ do not necessarily refer to a continuous activity of God. It seems more probable that they are timeless, referring still to Paul’s visit when they received the Spirit, but that now he is speaking of their experience from God’s point of view. When Paul visited Galatia, God gave them the Spirit and worked miracles through him (‘the marks of a true apostle’, 2 Cor. 12:12). The question is the same: ‘How did God do these works among them?’ And the answer is the same: Not by the works of the law, but by your believing what you heard. God gave them the Spirit (5) and they received the Spirit (2), not because they obeyed the law, but because they believed the gospel.
This, then, was a fact of their experience. Paul had come to Galatia and preached the gospel to them. He had clearly portrayed before their eyes Jesus Christ as crucified. They had heard the gospel and with the eye of faith had seen Christ displayed upon his cross. They had believed the gospel. They had trusted in the Christ revealed in the gospel. So they had received the Spirit. They had neither submitted to circumcision nor obeyed the law, nor even tried to. All they had done was to hear the gospel and believe, and the Spirit had been given to them. These being the facts of their experience, Paul argues, it is ludicrous that, having begun by means of the Spirit, they should now expect to complete by means of the flesh. This is another way of saying that, having begun with the gospel, they must not go back to the law, imagining that the law was needed to supplement the gospel.
2. The argument from Old Testament Scripture (3:6–9)
So also Abraham ‘believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness’ (6). Paul’s reference to Abraham was brilliant. His Judaizing opponents looked to Moses as their teacher. So Paul went centuries further back to Abraham himself. His quotation is from Genesis 15:6. Let me remind you of the circumstances. Abraham was an old man and childless, but God had promised him a son, and indeed many descendants. One day he took Abraham out of his tent, told him to look up at the sky and count the stars, and then said to him: ‘So shall your offspring be.’ Abraham believed God’s promise, ‘and [God] credited it to him as righteousness’.
Consider carefully what happened. First, God made Abraham a promise. Indeed, the promise of descendants was paraded before Abraham’s eyes, much as the promise of forgiveness through Christ crucified was paraded before the eyes of the Galatians. Second, Abraham believed God. Despite the inherent improbability of the promise, from the human point of view, Abraham threw himself on the faithfulness of God. Third, Abraham’s faith was credited as righteousness. That is, he was himself accepted as righteous, by faith. He was not justified because he had done anything to deserve it, or because he had been circumcised, or because he had kept the law (for neither circumcision nor the law had yet been given), but simply because he believed God.
Paul now links this promise of God to Abraham with another and earlier promise:
Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: ‘All nations will be blessed through you.’ So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
(7–9)
Here Paul is quoting from Genesis 12:3 (cf. Gen. 22:17–18; Acts 3:25). We must examine what this blessing was, and how all nations would come to inherit it. The blessing is justification, the greatest of all blessings, for the verbs ‘to justify’ and ‘to bless’ are used as equivalents in verse 8. And the means by which the blessing would be inherited is faith (God would justify the Gentiles by faith), which was the only way in which Gentiles could inherit Abraham’s blessing since Abraham was the father of the Jewish race. Perhaps the Judaizers were telling the Galatian converts that they should become the children of Abraham by circumcision. So Paul counters by saying that the Galatians were already the children of Abraham, not by circumcision but by faith.
Both verses 7 and 9 affirm that the true children of Abraham (who inherit the blessing promised to his descendants) are not his offspring by physical descent, the Jews, but his spiritual children, men and women who share his faith, namely Christian believers.
All this, the apostle says, the Galatians should have known. They should never have been so foolish. They should never have fallen under the spell of these false teachers. Indeed, they would not have done so if they had kept Christ crucified before their eyes. They should have realized at once that the Judaizers were contradicting the gospel of justification by faith alone. They should have known it, as we have seen, from their own experience and from the Scriptures of the Old Testament.
We too should learn to test every human theory and teaching by the gospel of Christ crucified, especially as it is known to us from Scripture and from experience.
3. Conclusion
a. What the gospel is
The gospel is Christ crucified, his finished work on the cross. And to preach the gospel is to be clear in portraying Christ as crucified. The gospel is not good news primarily of a baby in a manger, a young man at a carpenter’s bench, a preacher in the fields of Galilee, or even an empty tomb. The gospel concerns Christ upon his cross. Only when Christ is ‘openly displayed upon his cross’ (neb) is the gospel preached. This verb prographein means to ‘show forth or portray publicly, proclaim or placard in public’ (Arndt–Gingrich). It was used of edicts, laws and public notices which were put up in some public place to be read, and also of pictures and portraits.
This means that in preaching the gospel we are to refer to an event (Christ’s death on a cross) to explain a doctrine (the perfect participle ‘crucified’ indicating the continuing effects of Christ’s finished work), and to do so publicly, boldly, vividly, so that people see it as if they witnessed it with their own eyes. This is what some writers have called the ‘existential’ element in preaching. We do more than describe the cross as a first-century event. We actually portray Christ crucified before the eyes of our contemporaries, so that they are confronted by Christ crucified today and realize that they may receive from the cross the salvation of God today.
b. What the gospel offers
Based on Christ’s cross, the gospel offers a great blessing: All nations will be blessed through you (8). What is this? It is a double blessing. The first part is justification (8) and the second, the gift of the Spirit (2–5). It is with these two gifts that God blesses all who are in Christ. He both justifies us, accepting us as righteous in his sight, and puts his Spirit within us. What is more, he never gives one gift without the other. Everybody who receives the Spirit is justified, and everybody who is justified receives the Spirit. It is important to notice this double initial blessing, since some people teach instead a doctrine of salvation in two stages: that we are justified at the beginning and only receive the Spirit at a later stage.
c. What the gospel requires
The gospel offers blessings; what must we do to receive them? The proper answer is ‘nothing’! We do not have to do anything. We have only to believe. Our response is not obeying the law, but believing the gospel. For obeying is to attempt to do the work of salvation ourselves, whereas believing is to let Christ be our Saviour and to rely on his finished work. So Paul emphasizes both that we receive the Spirit by faith (2 and 5) and that we are justified by faith (8). Indeed, the noun ‘faith’ and the verb ‘to believe’ occur seven times in this brief paragraph (1–9).
This is the true gospel, the gospel of the Old and New Testaments, the gospel which God himself began to preach to Abraham (8) and which the apostle Paul continued to preach in his day. It is the displaying before people’s eyes of Jesus Christ as crucified. It offers on this basis both justification and the gift of the Spirit. And its only demand is faith.