19. The essence of the Christian religion
Paul has now reached the end of his letter. So far he has been dictating to a secretary, but now, as his custom was, he takes the pen from his secretary’s hand, in order to add a personal postscript. Usually this was just to add his signature as a guarantee against forgery (see 2 Thess. 3:17). Sometimes he would include a final word of encouragement or the grace. But on this occasion he writes several final sentences in his personal handwriting.
See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand! (11). Various suggestions have been made about these large letters. Perhaps he is referring to ‘the sprawling untidy letters’ of an amateur, for he was no professional scribe and was probably more accustomed to write in Hebrew than in Greek. Or perhaps his large letters were due to bad eyesight, to which possibility we have already referred in connection with the ‘illness’ of Galatians 4:13–15. But most commentators consider that he used large letters deliberately, either because he was treating his readers like children (rebuking their spiritual immaturity by using baby writing) or simply for emphasis, ‘to arrest the eye and rivet the mind’, much as we would use capital letters or underline words today. Indeed it was a kind of underlining. J. B. Phillips adds a footnote to his paraphrase: ‘According to centuries-old Eastern usage, this could easily mean, “Note how heavily I have pressed upon the pen in writing this.” So it could be translated, “Notice how heavily I underline these words to you.”’
What, then, does Paul emphasize? He emphasizes the principal themes of the Christian gospel. Once again he contrasts himself with the Judaizers, and so the two religious systems they represented. As he does so, he pinpoints the vital issues at stake. Reading his words, we are lifted out of the controversy between Paul and the Judaizers in the first century ad and are brought right into our own time. We even catch a glimpse of the course of church history down the ages, in which these issues have been continuously debated. Here are two questions about the essence of the Christian religion.
1. Outward or inward? (6:12–13, 15)
Is the essence of the Christian religion outward or inward? We must answer that Christianity is essentially not a religion of external ceremonies, but something inward and spiritual, in the heart.
But the Judaizers concentrated on something outward, namely on circumcision. In verses 12 and 13, they are described not only as those who are circumcised themselves, but as those who are trying to compel you to be circumcised. It comes as no surprise that they are sometimes called ‘the circumcision party’. Several times in these pages we have considered their party cry, ‘Unless you are circumcised . . . you cannot be saved’ (Acts 15:1); so they denied that salvation was by faith alone.
Why did they do this? Paul is very outspoken: they want to impress people by means of the flesh (12) . . . that they may boast about your circumcision in the flesh (13). Notice the repetition of the word flesh. Circumcision was performed on the body. It is quite true that God gave it to Abraham as a sign of his covenant. But it was nothing in itself. Yet the Judaizers were elevating it to a rule of central importance, insisting that nobody could be saved without it. But how could an outward and bodily operation secure the salvation of the soul or be an indispensable condition of salvation? It was clearly ridiculous.
Yet the same mistake is made today by those who attach an exaggerated importance to baptism and teach the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. Baptism is important, as circumcision was important. The risen Christ gave baptism to the church, as God gave circumcision to Abraham. Baptism is a sign of covenant membership, as circumcision was. But both baptism and circumcision, however great and spiritual the truths they signify, are themselves outward and bodily acts. And it is absurd to magnify such things as essential means of salvation and then to go on to boast about them. It was a kind of obsession with ‘ecclesiastical statistics’, as Dr Cole puts it, bragging about ‘so many circumcisions in a given year’, just as we might brag of so many baptisms or confirmations.
What, then, is of central importance? Verse 15 gives us the answer: Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation. What matters primarily is not whether people have been circumcised (or baptized) or not, but whether they have been born again and are now a new creation. Circumcision was, and baptism is, an outward sign and seal of this. The circumcision of the body symbolized the circumcision of the heart (see Rom. 2:29). Similarly, baptism with water symbolizes the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And it is a dreadful tragedy when people become so topsy-turvy in their thinking that they substitute the sign for the thing signified, magnify a bodily ceremonial at the expense of a change of heart, and make circumcision or baptism the way of salvation instead of the new creation. Circumcision and baptism are things of the ‘flesh’, outward and visible ceremonies performed by people; the new creation is a birth of the Spirit, an inward and invisible miracle performed by God.
God’s people have tended to repeat this same mistake throughout history. They have degraded a religion of the heart into a superficial, outward show, and God has repeatedly sent his messengers to reprimand them and to call them back to a spiritual and inward religion. This was the great fault of Israel in the eighth and seventh centuries bc, when God through the prophets complained, ‘These people come near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me’ (Isa. 29:13). Jesus applied this scripture to the scribes and Pharisees of his day and exposed their hypocrisy (e.g. Mark 7:6–7). A similar religious formalism marked the medieval church before the Reformation, and eighteenth-century Anglicanism until Wesley and Whitefield gave us back the gospel. And so much contemporary ‘churchianity’ is the same – dry, dull, dismal and dead, largely an external show. Indeed, it is natural to fallen humanity to fall back from the real, the inward and the spiritual, and to make up a substitute religion which is easy and comfortable because its demands are only external and ceremonial. But outward things matter little in comparison with the new creation or the new birth.
This is not to say that the bodily and the external have no place, for what is in the heart needs to be expressed through the lips, and what is inward and spiritual in religion needs to have some outward expression. But the essence is the inward; outward forms are worthless if inward reality is lacking.
2. Human or divine? (6:13–14, 16)
Our second question is whether the essence of the Christian religion is human or divine. In other words, is it basically a matter of what we do for God or of what he has done for us?
In their concentration upon circumcision the Judaizers made a second mistake. For circumcision was not only an outward and bodily ritual; it was also a human work, performed by one human being on another. More than that, as a religious symbol, circumcision committed people to keep the law: ‘The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses,’ the Judaizers said (Acts 15:5). They insisted upon obedience to the law because they believed that our salvation depended upon it. Their idea of the way of salvation was that the death of Christ was insufficient; we still have to merit the favour and forgiveness of God by our own good works. So their religion was a human religion. It began with a human work (circumcision) and continued with more human work (obedience to the law).
Paul challenges this teaching vigorously. He even questions the motives of the Judaizers and calls their bluff. They cannot seriously believe that salvation is a reward for obedience to the law, he argues, because not even those who are circumcised keep the law (13). So they know that salvation cannot be earned. Why then do they still insist upon good works? Paul’s answer is that their sole object is ‘to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ’ (12). See also 5:11.
And what is it about the cross of Christ which so angers the world and stirs people up to persecute those who preach it? Just this: Christ died on the cross for us sinners, becoming a curse for us (3:13). So the cross tells us some very unwelcome truths about ourselves, namely that we are sinners under the righteous curse of God’s law and we cannot save ourselves. Christ bore our sin and curse precisely because we could be set free from them in no other way. If we could have been forgiven by our own good works, by being circumcised and keeping the law, we may be quite sure that there would have been no cross – see Galatians 2:21. Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, ‘I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.’ Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross. All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.
And of course people do not like it. They resent the humiliation of seeing themselves as God sees them and as they really are. They prefer their comfortable illusions. So they steer clear of the cross. They construct a Christianity without the cross, which relies for salvation on their works and not on Jesus Christ’s. They do not object to Christianity as long as it is not the faith of Christ crucified. But they detest Christ crucified. And if preachers preach Christ crucified, they are opposed, ridiculed, persecuted. Why? Because of the wounds which they inflict on human pride.
The attitude of the apostle Paul was totally different: May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world (14). The cross for Paul was not something to escape, but the object of his boasting. The truth is that we cannot boast in ourselves and in the cross at the same time. If we boast in ourselves and in our ability to save ourselves, we shall never boast in the cross and in the ability of Christ crucified to save us. We have to choose. Only if we have humbled ourselves as hell-deserving sinners shall we give up boasting of ourselves, fly to the cross for salvation and spend the rest of our days glorying in the cross.
As a result, we and the world have parted company. Each has been crucified to the other. The world is the society of unbelievers. Previously we were desperately anxious to be in favour with the world. But now that we have seen ourselves as sinners and Christ crucified as our sin-bearer, we do not care what the world thinks or says of us or does to us. The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
So, then, Paul has contrasted false and true religion. On the one hand was circumcision, standing for the outward and the human, a formal external religion and our own efforts to save ourselves. On the other is the cross of Christ and the new creation, the finished work of Christ on the cross to redeem us and the inward work of the Spirit in our hearts to bring us to new birth and to make us holy. These are basic to the gospel. No-one has understood the gospel who has not grasped that Christianity is first inward and spiritual, and, second, a divine work of grace.
Further, these two principles of the gospel are always and everywhere the same, not only in first-century Galatia, but in the whole church of all time. Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule – to the Israel of God (16). Here Paul teaches three great truths about the church.
a. The church is the Israel of God
All who follow this rule and the Israel of God are not two groups, but one. The connecting particle kai should be translated ‘even’. The Christian church enjoys a direct continuity with God’s people in the Old Testament. Those who are in Christ today are ‘the circumcision’ (Phil. 3:3), ‘Abraham’s seed’ (Gal. 3:29) and ‘the Israel of God’.
b. The church has a rule to direct it
God’s people, God’s ‘Israel’, are said to follow this rule. The Greek word for rule is kanōn, which means a measuring rod or rule, ‘the carpenter’s or surveyor’s line by which a direction is taken’. So the church has a ‘rule’ by which to direct itself. This is the ‘canon’ of Scripture, the doctrine of the apostles, and especially, in the context of Galatians 6, the cross of Christ and the new creation. This is the rule by which the church must walk and continuously judge and reform itself.
c. The church enjoys peace and mercy only when it follows this rule
Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule – to the Israel of God. How can the church be sure of God’s mercy and blessing? How can the church experience peace and unity among its own members? The only answer to both questions is ‘when it follows this rule’. Conversely, it is sinful neglect of ‘this rule’, the apostolic faith of the Bible, which is the main reason why the contemporary church seems to be enjoying so little of the mercy of God and so little internal peace and harmony. ‘Peace upon Israel’ is impossible when the church departs from its God-given rule.
3. Conclusion (6:17–18)
From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus (17). The Greek word for marks is stigmata. Medieval churchmen believed that these were the scars in the hands, feet and side of Jesus, and that Paul found the same scars appearing in his body by sympathetic identification with him. It was said that as Francis of Assisi contemplated the wounds of Christ, there appeared in his hands, feet and side ‘blackish, fleshy excrescences’, exuding a little blood. Some accounts even said that nails like iron had grown out of his flesh, black, hard and fixed. Up to the beginning of the twentieth century no fewer than 321 claims to such ‘stigmatization’ had been made, in some of which, in addition to the five wounds in hands, feet and side, it was said that marks appeared also on the forehead (where Christ wore the crown of thorns), on the shoulder (where he bore the cross) and on the back (where he was scourged), some being accompanied by acute pain and profuse bleeding. Those cases which seem to be well attested would today be termed ‘neuropathic bleedings’, caused by subconscious autosuggestion. B. B. Warfield gives a full account of claims to stigmatization in his Miracles, Yesterday and Today.
It is most unlikely, however, that the stigmata of Jesus which Paul bore on his body were of this kind. Undoubtedly they were instead wounds which he had received while being persecuted for Jesus’ sake. According to 2 Corinthians 11:23–25 he had received countless beatings – five times the thirty-nine lashes of the Jews, three times beaten with rods and once stoned. Some of these sufferings may already have been endured before the time of his writing this epistle. Certainly he had already been stoned in Lystra, one of the Galatian cities, and left in the gutter for dead (Acts 14:19). The wounds which his persecutors had inflicted on him, and the permanent scars they left behind – these were the marks of Jesus.
The word stigmata was used in secular Greek for the branding of a slave. It is possible that Paul had this in mind. He was a slave of Jesus; he had received his branding in his persecutions. The word was also employed for ‘religious tattooing’ (Arndt–Gingrich). Perhaps Paul was claiming that persecution, not circumcision, was the authentic Christian ‘tattoo’.
This was what lay behind his plea from now on, let no one cause me trouble, or, as J. B. Lightfoot interprets it, ‘let no man question my authority’. Paul longed to be left alone by these false teachers. As a Jew he had on his body the mark the Judaizers were emphasizing; but he had other marks too, proving him ‘to belong to Jesus Christ, not to Jewry’. He had not avoided persecution for the cross of Christ. On the contrary, he carried wounds on his body which showed him to be a true slave, a faithful devotee of Jesus Christ.
Finally, verse 18: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen. Paul had begun the epistle with his usual greeting of grace (Gal. 1:3) and gone on to express his astonishment that the Galatians were ‘so quickly deserting’ the God who had called them ‘in the grace of Christ’ (1:6). Indeed, the whole letter is dedicated to the theme of God’s grace, his undeserved favour to sinners. So he ends on the same note.
Thus the authentic characteristic of the gospel is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the gospel preacher, the marks of Jesus. This is so for all God’s people. Paul bore the marks of Jesus on his body and the grace of Jesus in his spirit. And he desired his readers to have the same, for they were his brothers and sisters – the last word of the epistle – in the family of God.