As For Those Troublemakers …
AS FOR THOSE TROUBLEMAKERS …
GALATIANS 5:7-12
How can our faith go wrong if we start keeping a list of regulations?
The essence of Paul’s Christianity is found in 5:6b: faith expressing itself through love. The evidence of a faith union relationship with Christ is the way in which that fellowship works itself out in love—to God supremely, and to our neighbor no less importantly (Matthew 22:37-39; Luke 10:25-37). Which passage in Romans is Paul’s commentary on Christ’s teaching (Romans 13:8-10)?
The argument merges, as before, into a personal appeal, which alternates between outright pessimism (5:7-9) and unbounded optimism (5:10). Only on the gospel principles which have been expressed can, first, Paul’s ministry with its incessant conflicts as the Judaizers dog his footsteps and, secondly, the meaning of the cross of Christ, be understood (5:11). If these mean anything worthwhile in the eyes of God and humanity, the Judaizers are like “troublers of Israel” (5:12)—see 1 Kings 18:17-18—and deserve the fate accorded to the prophets of the false god, Baal (1 Kings 18:40).
Notes 5:7: see 2:2; Philippians 2:16; 1 Corinthians 9:24-26; Hebrews 12:1: the New Testament often uses this metaphor taken from Greek games. 5:8: there was evidently one particular troublemaker whom Paul had in mind (see 5:10); and the use of the metaphor of yeast in a lump of dough is a reminder that one man’s wrong influence spreads far beyond himself and his own circle, as at Corinth (1 Corinthians 5:6) and in other churches (Titus 1:10-11; Hebrews 12:15). 5:11 qualifies 5:6: circumcision for the Jew was part of his ancestral heritage (Romans 3:1-2; 1 Corinthians 7:18-20), but it could be dangerous if a Jew clung to the rite as a hope of securing salvation (Romans 2:25-29). But Paul was missionary to the Gentile peoples, and it was a travesty of the grace of God to insist on the rite for them. Therefore the report that Paul’s preaching was anticircumcision, and therefore the virulence of the Jewish attack on him. But the stumbling-block of the cross, ie that salvation is offered in grace, to be received by faith, still had been insisted on (1 Corinthians 1:23). 5:12 “suggests that those who are so fond of surgical operations for religious motives should imitate the eunuch priests” (J.N. Sanders) and get themselves castrated. Paul doesn’t mince his words.