Don’T Be Diverted
DON’T BE DIVERTED
GALATIANS 1:1-9
It’s not true that is doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you call yourself a Christian. We read here Paul’s clear thoughts on what the gospel is.
Right at the beginning of his letter, Paul strikes the characteristic note. He is, by God’s own appointment, an apostle, charged with an authority which no one can dispute. This appointment came to him on the Damascus Road as he both encountered and was commissioned by the living Christ (Acts 9:5,15; 22:14; 26:16); therefore the reference to God “who raised him from the dead.”
The gospel which Paul is commissioned to proclaim has a uniqueness which means that it can tolerate no rival (1:6-7), even though such a false “gospel” claimed a special revelation (1:8-9; see 2 Corinthians 11:4).
Two matters are important in this section. First, the content of Paul’s gospel is clearly stated in 1:3-5. It begins with God’s grace and ends in his glory, and at every intermediate point the initiative rests with him, and the sole human response required is faith in the accomplished fact of God’s redemption in Jesus Christ. “Peace” may be ours because of what he did on the cross, when he freely gave himself because of our sins and so made possible a deliverance from the old order (“the present evil age”) of sin and death, and an entrance into that new world of fellowship with God in the church (Colossians 1:13), in which the powers of evil are broken (1 John 3:8).
Secondly, the background is the false teaching of the Judaizers who sought to impose Jewish ceremonial practices on the new converts as part of God’s requirement for salvation. This “extra” (Acts 15:1) is strenuously rejected by Paul, and branded as “a different gospel, which is not an alternative one” (1:6-7). He writes urgently because of his amazement that the Galatians have been so easily impressed by these false teachers (1:6). They have received them with favor; he puts on them a fearful verdict (1:9), namely excommunication.