Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
You are about to read the hottest letter Paul ever wrote. Every other letter that comes down to us from his hand begins the way a warm man begins: the greeting, and then thanksgiving, Paul telling a church how he thanks God for them, how he remembers them in his prayers, how he longs to see their faces again. He does it for the Romans he has never met, and for the Corinthians, who were quarreling and suing one another, before he corrects a single thing. Galatians has no thanksgiving at all. Paul writes the greeting, and then the floor drops out. He goes straight from grace and peace to I am amazed how quickly you are deserting the One who called you, and he does not slow down for six chapters. Something had happened in the young churches of Galatia. Men had arrived after Paul left, teaching that the Gentile believers there had come part of the way but not the whole way, and that to be full members of the people of God they must be circumcised and take up the keeping of the law of Moses. It sounded reasonable. It sounded like reverence for Scripture. And Paul saw straight through it to what it actually was. He does not treat this as a difference of emphasis between brothers who agree on the main thing. He calls it a different gospel that is not even a gospel, and he pronounces a curse on anyone who preaches it, angel from heaven included. Read this letter and you will understand why. What was at stake was not a ceremony. It was whether the death of the Son of God was sufficient, or whether something had to be laid alongside it before God would receive a person. On that question Paul had no ability to be moderate, and thank God for it.
As you read, hold this: When men came telling young Gentile churches that faith in Christ was not quite enough, Paul answered with the one announcement nothing may ever be added to, that a man is justified by faith in Jesus Christ, and that the freedom this gives is not licence but the Spirit’s power to love.
The name and what it means
The word that governs this whole letter, the word Paul defends with his life in it, is εὐαγγέλιον (euangelion), pronounced yoo-ang-GHEL-ee-on (Strong’s G2098). We usually translate it gospel, an old English word that has gone soft in our mouths from long use. What it plainly means is good news, and more exactly, the announcement a herald brings. In the Greek world this was not a religious word at all. It belonged to messengers and battlefields and thrones. A runner came in from the front with an euangelion: the enemy is broken, the siege is lifted, the war is over. A city heard an euangelion when an heir was born to the emperor. The Greek Old Testament had used the verb form of it for the watchman in Isaiah who lifts up his voice on the mountains and cries that God reigns and that comfort has come to His people.
Now hold that picture, because everything in Galatians turns on it. A herald does not negotiate. He does not arrive with terms, a set of requirements the citizens must satisfy before the victory can be applied to them. He announces something that has already happened, out on a field, without them, while they waited inside the walls with nothing to contribute but their fear. The battle was fought and won by someone else. The herald’s only job is to say so.
That is why Paul cannot be calm. Add a requirement to an announcement and you have not improved the announcement. You have destroyed it. You have turned news into terms. The moment the runner says the war is won, and here is what you must do to make it count, he is no longer a herald and the thing in his mouth is no longer good news. It has become an offer, and an offer can fail. This is the exact nerve Paul touches when he says that the message being preached in Galatia is not even a gospel. He is not saying it is a poor gospel or a partial one. He is saying it is not that kind of thing at all any more. And it is why, when he wants to name what Jesus did, he keeps reaching for finished verbs: gave Himself, redeemed us, was crucified, set us free. The herald has come in from the field. Listen to him.
The world of the book
Galatia is a name with two meanings, and that is where the difficulty begins. Centuries before Paul, tribes of Celts had swept out of Europe into Asia Minor and settled the high inland country around Ancyra, the plateau at the middle of what is now Turkey. Their neighbors called them Galatians, kin to the Gauls, and the region kept the name. But when Rome organized the area into a province in 25 BC, the province of Galatia reached far south of that ethnic homeland and swallowed up cities on the great trade roads: Antioch of Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe. Those southern cities are exactly the ones Luke describes Paul and Barnabas evangelizing on the first missionary journey in Acts 13 and 14, where Paul was stoned at Lystra and dragged out of the city for dead. So when Paul writes To the churches of Galatia, honest readers who love this letter divide over whom he means. Many hold that he writes to those southern cities of Acts, which would make Galatians very likely his earliest surviving letter, written before the Jerusalem council of Acts 15 had publicly settled the matter, and that would explain a good deal about its temperature. Others hold that he means ethnic Galatia further north, which would place the letter later, alongside Romans. Destination and date are both genuinely disputed, and neither can be settled from the letter itself with certainty. Nothing Paul actually argues depends on the answer. Take the disagreement as a mark of honest scholarship rather than a crack in the foundation, and let the letter speak.
What is not disputed is the question tearing at the early church. For fifteen hundred years the people of God had been marked off from the nations by circumcision, the sign given to Abraham, cut into the body of every male in Israel on the eighth day. It was not a private preference. It was the covenant boundary, the visible line between the people God had claimed and everyone else, and it had been defended with blood; under the Greek persecution a century and a half earlier, mothers had been executed for circumcising their sons rather than abandon the sign. Then the Messiah came, and Gentiles began believing in Him by the thousand without ever taking that sign, without the food laws, without the calendar. Every instinct a devout Jewish believer had, every instinct trained by Scripture itself, said that these Gentiles were welcome and should now come in properly, the way converts had always come in. That is what the men who came to Galatia were teaching, and it is important to see that they almost certainly thought they were being faithful, not treacherous. The church wrestled it out at the council in Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15, and Peter and James and the elders concluded that God had given the Spirit to the Gentiles just as He had to them, cleansing their hearts by faith, and that no yoke should be laid on their necks. But a council decision does not stop a movement, and the pressure was social as much as theological: it decided who ate with whom, whose home you could enter, who was truly in. Paul had watched even Peter buckle under that pressure at Antioch. This letter is written by a man who has seen how fast a church can be reorganized around the wrong line.
The shape of the book
- Astonishment, and a curse on any other gospel (1:1 through 1:10). No thanksgiving. Paul is amazed at how quickly they are deserting the One who called them, names the agitators as men distorting the gospel of Christ, and twice pronounces a curse on anyone, angel or apostle, who preaches another one.
- A gospel received by revelation, not from men (1:11 through 2:10). Paul tells his own history to make one point: he did not get this message secondhand. The persecutor of the church was arrested by God Himself, and years later, when he laid his gospel before the pillars in Jerusalem, they added nothing to it and gave him the right hand of fellowship.
- Peter confronted at Antioch, and the heart of justification (2:11 through 2:21). Peter had eaten freely with Gentile believers until men came from James, and then he drew back and others followed. Paul opposed him to his face, because a table can preach, and out of that confrontation comes the letter’s great confession: crucified with Christ, justified by faith and not by works of the law.
- The argument from the Spirit, from Abraham, and from the law as guardian (3:1 through 4:7). O foolish Galatians, Paul says, and then reasons from their own experience and from Scripture. Did the Spirit come by law-keeping or by believing? Abraham was counted righteous by faith centuries before Sinai. The law was a guardian for a season, not a parent, and in Christ the heirs have come of age and cry Abba, Father.
- The appeal, and Hagar and Sarah (4:8 through 4:31). Paul stops arguing and pleads, remembering how they once received him, asking whether he has become their enemy by telling them the truth. Then he takes the two mothers of Abraham’s household as a picture of two covenants, slavery and freedom.
- Freedom, and a hard warning (5:1 through 5:12). It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. But if they take circumcision as the ground of standing, they are obligated to the whole law and Christ will be of no value to them, because they will have severed themselves from the only ground there is. What matters is faith expressing itself through love.
- The flesh and the Spirit, and the fruit He grows (5:13 through 5:26). Freedom is not a licence for the flesh. Paul lists soberly what the flesh produces, and then names what the Spirit grows, one fruit beginning with love and ending with self-control, and against such things there is no law.
- Burdens, sowing and reaping, and boasting only in the cross (6:1 through 6:18). Restore a fallen brother gently. Carry one another’s burdens. A man reaps what he sows, so do not grow weary in doing good. Then Paul takes the pen from his scribe, writes in his own large hand, and finishes where the letter has been going all along.
The one thread to carry
Carry this one sentence through all six chapters and you will not lose your way: a man is justified by faith in Jesus Christ and not by works of the law, and the freedom that gives is not permission to do as he pleases but the Spirit’s power to love. Those two halves are held together in this letter with a grip of iron. Paul will not let anyone add a single requirement to the front of the gospel, and he will not let anyone treat the gospel as a licence at the back. The same cross that frees you from earning also crucifies the flesh that wants to run wild. Watch how he says it at the hinge of the whole argument, standing in front of Peter, in front of everyone.
"know that a man is not justified by works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified." Galatians 2:16 (BSB)
Three times in one verse: not by works of the law. Paul is not being repetitive by accident. He is driving a nail. And then he shows what this is at ground level, because justification in his mouth is never a cold transaction filed somewhere in heaven. It is a death and a life.
"I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me." Galatians 2:20 (BSB)
Sit with that a moment. Who loved me and gave Himself up for me. The man who wrote that had held the coats of those who stoned Stephen. If anyone ever had a debt no law-keeping could touch, it was Paul, and he says the Son of God loved him and handed Himself over. Nothing gets added to that. Nothing can. And out of it comes the word that has rung down every century since, the reason this short, furious letter has kept setting prisoners free.
"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be encumbered once more by a yoke of slavery." Galatians 5:1 (BSB)
Free for freedom. Not free to drift, not free to be nothing in particular, but set at liberty on purpose, so that a people bought at that price might love God and one another out of a full heart rather than a frightened one. Paul knows how tired hands get. That is why, at the very end, he takes the pen from whoever was writing for him and finishes the letter himself in big, blunt strokes, telling them plainly to look at the size of the letters he is making with his own hand. It is the flourish of a man who wants no misunderstanding about who is speaking. And with the pen in his own fist, the last thing he says he will boast in is not his labors, not his sufferings, not the churches he planted, and certainly not any mark cut in anybody’s flesh. It is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Learn the Word, refuse every gospel but the one the herald brought, and give thanks.