Galatians 1

Today’s Passage: Galatians 1

Paul has just heard news out of Galatia, and it has taken the pen out of his hand and put a sword in it. Churches he had planted himself, congregations of Gentile believers who had received Christ with joy, were being taught that faith in Jesus was a fine beginning but not quite enough. To be truly right with God, the newcomers said, a man must also be circumcised and take up the law of Moses. It sounds like a small addition. Paul treats it as a matter of life and death, and this first chapter shows you why. Watch how it opens. Every letter in the ancient world began with the sender’s name, the recipients, a greeting, and then some word of thanks or good wishes for the reader’s health. Paul keeps that shape everywhere else he writes. Here the greeting itself is already an argument, packed with claims about where his authority came from and what Christ has done, and then the thanksgiving simply does not arrive. Instead comes astonishment, and a warning so severe that he says it twice: anyone who preaches another gospel, even an angel out of heaven, let him be under a curse. From there Paul turns to his own story, not to defend his reputation but to establish where his message came from. He did not pick it up from the apostles in Jerusalem. He was not trained into it. It was given to him by revelation from Jesus Christ, to a man who at the time was hunting Christians down and trying to wipe the church off the earth. The chapter ends far from where it began, in quiet Judean congregations who had never seen Paul’s face, giving glory to God over the news that their old persecutor was now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.

As you read, hold this: There is only one gospel, and it came not from men but from God Himself, so it may never be added to, traded away, or improved upon.

Galatians 1:1–5 (BSB)

¹ Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead— ² and all the brothers with me, To the churches of Galatia: ³ Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, ⁴ who gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, ⁵ to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

Read that opening slowly, because Paul has crammed his entire case into a sentence of greeting. He calls himself an apostle, a sent one, and then immediately tells you the two places his commission did not come from. Not from men, as though a committee had appointed him. Not by man, as though some human hand had passed it along to him. His office came straight down from Jesus Christ and God the Father, which means the letter you are holding is not one man’s opinion about a disputed question. And notice which fact about the Father he chooses to name here, out of all the things he could have said: God “who raised Him from the dead.” That is not decoration. The men troubling Galatia were arguing about how a person is brought into a right standing with God, and Paul answers by pointing at an empty tomb. The Father has already rendered His verdict on the Son’s finished work by raising Him. Then, before the greeting is even out of his mouth, he tells you what that Son did. Christ “gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age.” Take those words apart and hold each one. He gave Himself. Not advice, not an example, not a better system of religion. He handed over His own life, and He did it for our sins, taking the exact thing that stood against us. And the aim was rescue. The word carries the sense of reaching in and pulling somebody out of a burning house, and what we are pulled out of is not simply a list of bad habits but a whole age, an entire order of the world under the power of evil, with its assumptions and its rewards and its slow gravity. And all of it, Paul says, was “according to the will of our God and Father.” The cross was not a tragedy God salvaged. It was the settled purpose of the Father’s own heart toward people who had no claim on Him. No wonder Paul cannot get to verse six without stopping to worship: “to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” He has said grace and peace, named the rescue, and broken into praise. Any teaching that would add a requirement to that finished work is not a small correction. It is an insult to the One who gave Himself.

Galatians 1:6–9 (BSB)

⁶ I am amazed how quickly you are deserting the One who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— ⁷ which is not even a gospel. Evidently some people are troubling you and trying to distort the gospel of Christ. ⁸ But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be under a curse! ⁹ As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be under a curse!

Here is where the letter does the thing it is famous for, and you feel it most if you know what is missing. Read Paul’s other letters and you will find that after the greeting he thanks God for his readers, every time. He thanks God for the Romans, whose faith is proclaimed all over the world. He thanks God for the Corinthians, and that church was a scandal. He thanks God for the Philippians with open affection, for the Colossians, for the Thessalonians. Even in a note as short as Philemon he pauses to give thanks. Here he writes to the Galatians and there is nothing. No thanksgiving, no commendation, not one warm word about their progress. He goes straight from the doxology to “I am amazed how quickly you are deserting the One who called you.” That silence is the loudest thing in the chapter, and probably the loudest silence in the New Testament, and it is a mercy rather than a sulk. A physician who chats about the weather when the patient is bleeding is not being kind. Paul is telling them, by what he does not say, that this is not a season of ordinary church difficulty. And notice who he says they are deserting. Not a doctrine. Not Paul. They are deserting the One who called them by the grace of Christ, which means a person, and the desertion is a personal betrayal. The word carries a whiff of the parade ground, a soldier slipping away from his post, or a man changing sides. Then the thing they are turning toward gets named and unnamed in the same breath: a different gospel (εὐαγγέλιον) euangelion, pronounced yoo-ang-GHEL-ee-on. Strong's G2098, good news, gospel. Euangelion did not begin as a religious word. In the Greek world it was what you called the announcement a runner brought back from a battlefield, or the proclamation that went out when an emperor was born or a new ruler took the throne. It was news of something that had already happened, told by a herald to people who had not been there. That is exactly why the apostles seized on it. The Christian message is not primarily advice about how to live, nor a method for improving yourself, nor a set of conditions to be met. It is a report. A man was crucified outside Jerusalem for our sins and God raised Him on the third day, and the news is now being carried to every nation. You do not contribute to news. You believe it or you do not. Watch what happens the moment somebody adds a requirement to that announcement. It stops being a herald’s report of a finished victory and becomes a contract with a clause you must satisfy, and then the joy drains out of it, because now everything depends on you again. Paul will not allow it, not by one syllable, and he is not being narrow. He is guarding the only thing that can save anybody. Give thanks this morning that the message that reached you was news and not terms. , “which is not even a gospel.” Good news with a condition attached to it is not good news at all. It is a demand wearing borrowed clothes.

Verses eight and nine must not be softened, and there is no honest way to do it. Paul says that if he himself, or an angel come down out of heaven with light around him, should preach a gospel contrary to the one they received, “let him be under a curse (ἀνάθεμα) anathema, pronounced ah-NATH-eh-mah. Strong's G331, accursed, devoted to destruction. Anathema is a heavy, old word. In the Greek Old Testament it translates the Hebrew term for something placed under the ban, a thing devoted to God for destruction and therefore untouchable, like Jericho and everything in it. It is not the word for an insult or a bad temper. It means handed over to God for His judgment, put outside the camp, left in His hands. That is why Paul can use it and still be doing something more solemn than losing his patience. He is not saying “how I dislike these men.” He is saying that anyone who corrupts the message by which sinners are saved has placed himself under the judgment of the God whose message it is, and Paul refuses to pretend otherwise. Hear also what it protects. Every soul in Galatia who believed the false teaching was being cut off from the only ground on which a person can stand before God, and the man who did that to them was not doing them a favor by being pleasant about it. There is a kind of tolerance that is really indifference to whether people are saved. Paul had none of it. But keep the aim of the word in view: he pronounces it on the corrupters of the gospel and leaves the sentence with God, and then spends five more chapters pleading with the deceived. .” Then he stops, tells them he has said this before, and says it again. Nobody repeats a sentence like that by accident. He includes himself in it first, which is the proof that this is not self-defense; his own person is worth nothing next to the message he carries. But now be careful and precise about what these two verses do and do not put into your hands, because they have been misused for centuries by people who enjoyed the sound of them. Paul is not handing any believer a weapon for policing every difference among Christians. He is not talking about disagreements over the shape of church government, or the details of prophecy, or the songs we sing, or a hundred honest questions on which faithful readers of Scripture have always differed. The line he is defending is drawn around one thing: the gospel itself, the announcement that a crucified and risen Christ has done everything necessary and is received by faith. Add a requirement to that, and you have not offered a variation. You have replaced it. Everything else must be handled with patience among brothers. And notice, so that no one mistakes severity for coldness, that the same apostle who writes this will later in the same letter call these very people his little children and say he is in the pains of childbirth over them all over again.

Galatians 1:10–14 (BSB)

¹⁰ Am I now seeking the approval of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ. ¹¹ For I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached was not devised by man. ¹² I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. ¹³ For you have heard of my former way of life in Judaism, how severely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. ¹⁴ I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.

Verse ten is a searching verse, and anyone who teaches or writes or leads or opens their mouth for God at all should let it search them. “Am I now seeking the approval of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” Some in Galatia had apparently accused Paul of being a crowd-pleaser, a man who dropped the circumcision requirement because it made his preaching go down easier among Gentiles. Paul’s answer is the letter itself. A man angling for approval does not skip the thanksgiving and open with astonishment. A man managing his reputation does not pronounce a curse twice in two verses. Whatever else you say about this letter, it was not written to make friends. And the principle underneath it is one of the plainest tests there is, because these two masters cannot be served at once. The moment human approval becomes the thing you cannot do without, the message will begin to bend, quietly, in small places, at exactly the points where it offends. This is not a call to be harsh, and Paul is anything but indifferent to the people he writes to. It is a question about which face you are watching when you speak. Then he moves to the source of his message, and the claim is enormous: the gospel he preached “was not devised by man.” He did not receive it from any man, and he was not taught it. It came by revelation (ἀποκάλυψις) apokalypsis, pronounced ah-pok-AL-oop-sis. Strong's G602, revelation, an unveiling. Apokalypsis means an unveiling, the pulling back of a cover so that what was always there is suddenly seen. It is the word behind the English title of the last book of the Bible, and it always carries this shape: the reality does not come into being when the veil lifts, it becomes visible. That is precisely what Paul claims happened to him on the Damascus road. He did not work out a new theology by hard study, and he did not receive it from a teacher who had it before him. Something was uncovered. The Jesus he was persecuting stood before him alive and glorified, and in one stroke every category in his mind had to be rebuilt around a crucified Messiah whom God had raised. Notice what this settles for the Galatians. If Paul had learned his gospel from Jerusalem, then Jerusalem could revise it, and whoever spoke loudest in Jerusalem could revise Paul. But a message given by unveiling from the risen Christ Himself cannot be amended by anyone, and that is the point of his whole autobiography here. And there is a quieter comfort in the word for the rest of us. Nobody reasons his way to Christ unaided. The veil has to come off, and it is God who takes it off, in His kindness, for people who were not looking for Him. from Jesus Christ. And to prove how impossible it is that he invented it, he tells them what he was before. He persecuted the church of God severely and tried to destroy it. He was outrunning his own generation in Judaism, blazing with zeal for the traditions of his fathers. That is not a man who was drifting toward Christianity. That is a man riding hard in the opposite direction, with letters in his hand and blood already on his conscience.

Galatians 1:15–19 (BSB)

¹⁵ But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by His grace, was pleased ¹⁶ to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not rush to consult with flesh and blood, ¹⁷ nor did I go up to Jerusalem to the apostles who came before me, but I went into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. ¹⁸ Only after three years did I go up to Jerusalem to confer with Cephas, and I stayed with him fifteen days. ¹⁹ But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord’s brother.

Here is Paul’s own testimony, and what strikes you is how little drama he allows himself. The most famous conversion in history, and he tells it in half a sentence, with no mention of the light, or the voice, or the blindness, or Ananias. He keeps the spotlight where he wants it, on God. Look at where he begins: not with his decision, but with God, “who set me apart (ἀφορίζω) aphorizō, pronounced af-or-ID-zo. Strong's G873, to set apart, to mark off. Aphorizō is built from a preposition and the word for a boundary or horizon, and it means to mark something off, to fence it away from the common use and reserve it for a particular purpose. It is a shepherd’s word for separating sheep from goats, and it is the word used when the church at Antioch was told to set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work. But there is a deeper resonance here that a reader raised on the Scriptures would have caught at once. Paul says God set him apart from his mother’s womb, and in saying so he is deliberately putting himself in the company of the prophets, borrowing the language spoken over Jeremiah and over the Servant in Isaiah. He is not boasting. He is confessing that his life was never his own project. And here is the payoff for anyone reading, whatever their history: God’s purposes for a person do not begin on the day that person starts cooperating. They run back further than memory, further than merit, further than the years anyone would rather not talk about. The man writing this had spent his best strength trying to destroy the church, and God had marked him out before he was born to preach the faith he was destroying. Nothing in your past is too far back or too far gone for the hand that has been at work the whole time. from my mother’s womb and called me by His grace.” Sit with that for a moment. Before Saul of Tarsus had done one good thing or one wicked thing, before he had drawn a breath, God had marked him out for this. The years of Pharisee zeal, the letters to Damascus, the coats laid at his feet while Stephen died, none of it was outside the reach of the purpose God had already formed. And the two phrases sit side by side on purpose. Set apart from the womb, so it was never his achievement; called by grace, so it was never his deserving. If God had waited for Saul to become promising, He would be waiting still. Then the purpose is named, and it is glorious: God was pleased “to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.” Not merely to him, but in him, so that the man himself became a display case for the mercy he announced. And the result was that he did not rush off to consult with flesh and blood. He did not go up to Jerusalem to the men who were apostles before him. He went into Arabia, into the Nabatean kingdom southeast of Damascus, and then came back to Damascus, and only after three years did he go up to Jerusalem at all. Even then it was a fifteen-day visit to get acquainted with Cephas, and of the others he saw only James, the Lord’s brother, a man who had not believed during Jesus’ earthly ministry and now stood at the center of the Jerusalem church. Fifteen days is not a training course. Paul is not being rude about Jerusalem. He is establishing a fact: he arrived there already preaching, with a message he did not get from them.

The word laid over Jeremiah is the same word laid over Paul, and it is worth hearing in full:

"“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”" Jeremiah 1:5 (BSB)

Galatians 1:20–24 (BSB)

²⁰ I assure you before God that what I am writing to you is no lie. ²¹ Later I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia. ²² I was personally unknown, however, to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. ²³ They only heard the account: “The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” ²⁴ And they glorified God because of me.

Paul stops the narrative to swear to it. “I assure you before God that what I am writing to you is no lie.” He does not usually do this, and it tells you how much was riding on the facts. Somebody in Galatia had been rewriting Paul’s history to discredit his message, and against that he puts his account under oath in the presence of God, and moves on. Then the geography: he went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia, which means Antioch and his own home city of Tarsus, years of labor the record passes over in a single line. And meanwhile, back in Judea, he remained “personally unknown” to the churches. Think about what that means. Those were the very congregations he had hunted. There were believers in those towns who could remember the sound of his voice at the door, families with an empty chair because of him, widows he had made. They had no idea what he looked like now. All they had was a report going around, and Paul quotes it in their own words, as though he can still hear it being passed from house to house: “The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” Now hold the two halves of that sentence together and let the weight of it land. The persecutor is preaching. The destroyer is building. The man who dragged people out of their homes for confessing this faith now travels the world confessing it himself and gets stoned for it. And what did those churches do with such news? They did not congratulate Paul, and Paul does not want them to. “They glorified God because of me.” That is exactly right, and it is where this whole chapter has been going. When they heard that their old enemy had been made a preacher, they knew instantly that no human hand does that, and they turned and gave the glory to God. There is the answer to everyone in Galatia who wanted to add something to grace. Grace turned Saul of Tarsus into Paul the apostle. What, precisely, were the Galatians proposing to add to a power like that?