The Galatians Defection--Its Nature

Well, good morning. Well, I have the privilege of kind of continuing on in Galatians. And boy, you know, it's one of those things a teacher often benefits, you know, a tremendous amount. And I feel I'm really blessed by being able to do this. It's enjoyable. Maybe it doesn't seem that way when I'm up here, but it is enjoyable.

Okay, so we're going to look at actually verses 6 and 7. Actually, we're not even going to finish 7 today. We're going to save the last part of 7 for next week. And then we're going to continue on to verse 10 in my little segment of what I'm teaching. So I want to do a quick review here. The first verse, the A part of the first verse just establishes the nature of Paul's office.

He was an apostle. You know, I think that you don't quite see the impact. Imagine you had no scriptures in your hand. You had no way to know what God has said. In the New Testament church, the apostles were God's instrument to bring his message. So he was the person that spoke God's word.

And what he spoke was, and they wrote scripture, right? Paul wrote 13 books. So what he said, he was speaking scripture, if you will. you know, kind of startling. There are some that have perverted that in today's church, unfortunately. But in New Testament times, he spoke God's Word. So that's important. And some have said that by identifying himself as an apostle as we start into Galatians, he's going to be really tough in the Galatians.

He's going to use some words that really we typically don't hear. You say, well, Christians shouldn't say that. He's going to say, We're going to see it later. I'm going to damn you to hell. I'm paraphrasing that. If you deviate from the true gospel of God, if you go astray from that, He has very strong words for you. And it's in scripture. That's just not Roger saying that. We're going to see that next week. But it's very strong. He's very focused here.

He's upset with the Galatian churches. And there are several Galatian churches, as a picture that Mike showed here recently, go through the path of the missionary journeys in Alistair and Derby and other ones. He was very upset with them. So he establishes who he is to start with. So the nature of his office, he starts off right away. There's actually two points here.

His office was not sent. He was not sent from men. He was sent from God. And actually the word apostle means that sent one. And it wasn't through the agency of men, it wasn't through some committee of men, it was from God himself. And then he goes on to say, and it was through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead. So he ties it directly to the Father and the Son and that defines the authority for his ministry.

And then he kind of continues on in that last part of that verse, and he says, from all the brethren, he had people that traveled with him. He doesn't always delineate who that is. Sometimes we'll see it's Barnabas, sometimes we'll see it's others. To all those churches I mentioned, Lystra, Iconium, Derby, and others. And then he continues on, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And that verse 3 is a very terse and short greeting, if you will. And I'll just read to you the Roman 7 greeting he has there. And Mike pointed this out.

In fact, he has no words. He has no words of exhortation, or he doesn't say, you guys have really Advance, you know the kingdom of Christ. He doesn't say he says none of that What he says is he says zero and but in Romans he commends them So I'll give you an example of that says Romans 1 7 and 8 to all who are beloved of God in Rome called his saints, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." Very much the same. Then A.D. says, first, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you because of your faith in being in proclaiming throughout the whole world. So he commends them for their faith.

Well, here he actually says nothing. He's going to launch right into the attributes of our Savior. He's going to talk about, in 4 and 5, talk about the attitudes. He doesn't say anything about, you know, about the Galatians in terms of what they, you know, he has a problem with them, basically, and we're going to see that.

So first of all, he says, he kind of, he's going to proclaim the significance of Christ's death. And that's, that's kind of core to what all we're going to see in Galatians. The core thing in the gospel is Christ's death on the cross for us. So the first part of this, who gave himself for our sins, so that he might rescue us from this present evil age. That was his purpose.

And actually, evil age, if you look in the scripture, evil age is a long time period. We're still in the evil age, if you hadn't noticed. If you don't turn on your TV set and don't read the papers and don't talk to anybody, you might think things are pretty quiet, but they're not. They're a mess, actually.

And our society attests to that. And lastly, it says, according to God's will, the will of God our Father. And we see that, you know, it was His will. We talked about this at the Christmas gathering, about the fact that the eternal covenant between the Father and the Son. So that was God's will that the Lord Jesus give His life for us.

OK, so that's kind of a short summary of what what Mike took three weeks to teach. But it and Mike did a great job. I want to have some continuity here and that's OK. I'm sure I'll hear from Mike about this. All right. So let's go on to him. And then last part is to him be glorying forever, evermore, evermore. OK, so now this is the part that we read or the last part was read. So this is a new American standard.

I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel Which is really not another Only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ So what we're going to do is we're going to stop believe it or not.

We're going to stop at the a part of seven there We're going to spend the most of our time talking about Paul's issues with the Galatians his amazement with them. We're going to talk a lot about the gospel We're going to talk about maybe you haven't actually thought about this, but there is a there is the gospel of salvation But there's a gospel that was uniquely given to Paul his whole ministry was a gospel in a sense of good news in a sense We're going to talk about that because if you think about his problem was to Christians to believers and they had gone astray So he wasn't so much Certainly he was focused on their coming to the Lord, but he was more even more focused upon the fact they're living their life under the law Under a legal system. He was more concerned about that. So that's I want to cover that as well as we go through here I had this extra little thing here to kind of point out his strong emotions for the Galatian believers And there are two words that he uses amazed which is the idea to be astonished or to wonder He wondered what in the world are you guys doing? deserting or basically to actually literally to be a turncoat going AWOL of defection. So those are some of the words he used. And there's a kind of a parallel verse to show Paul's heart. It's important to point out that Paul in Galatians and probably in Corinthians, where he corrects the church, he's more emotionally involved with these believers than other ones.

And this kind of indicates it in Galatians 4.19. My children, with whom I again, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you.

But I could wish to be present with you, with you now, and to change my tone, for I am perplexed about you. So if he talks about changing his tone, it's the idea to convince you. If you're with a person, you can, well, I'll talk with them and I'll improve the situation. Hopefully many times you'll talk with people. A face-to-face meeting many times accomplishes a lot. Emails and texts can be misleading, but face-to-face many times. He says, I want to change my voice or change my tone to show you what's happening. And then perplexes the idea, I stand in doubt about you. I don't know what in the world to make of what you're doing. Why would you do this?

And we're going to see what that is shortly. Okay, we're going to look at I Am Amazed. Like I said, it's to wonder, to marvel at, to be surprised by the unexpected. And actually it's in the present tense, so unfortunately he just wasn't surprised once. He continued to be surprised. It's like maybe with your kids. You're surprised, oh you did this, oh it wasn't just that, it was this, and it goes on. He didn't stop, he just kept going. I'm amazed at this and it's not getting better.

If you look at that, there was at least four churches that I could identify there. So this is a group letter, if you will, epistle. He doesn't exactly call names and numbers. He just says, he writes this generally to four churches, at least four churches. the problems that they had.

So to kind of get an idea of this, the word amazed, there's several passages I have here. One is in Luke. It's a familiar one about Mary and Joseph when they take the Lord Jesus as a teenager. And it says they were amazed at the things which were being said about him that were reported back. He was having dialogue with the rabbis in the temple.

And they were amazed by that, the same word. And that way, that's a positive amazement. The one we're seeing now is like a negative amazement, if you will. Here's another kind of, this is kind of maybe both. This is like in the disciples in the boat with the Lord Jesus.

They were fearful and amazed that he commands even the winds and the waters, and they obey him. So they couldn't quite grasp how he could do that. They just, all of a sudden, it would be pretty amazing if you were, a big storm was happening and he just says, stop, and it stops. That's pretty amazing.

I'm using the word again here. So that's another example. And the one I like the best probably is when he talks with Nicodemus. He tells him, you must be born again. He says, do not be amazed. Don't let it overwhelm you. So there's three examples of how that word is used.

So the next part is, I'm amazed that you are so quickly So this this kind of has a multiple parts. What's interesting is obviously the use of Galatians. And so quickly kind of couples with it's a kind of intensifier, if you will, or it shows a degree. They were quickly something was quickly happening. They were quickly departing from. from the Lord, basically. Actually, the Weiss translation has it that in such a manner, so it kind of takes that so quickly, in such a manner suddenly. And it's the idea that it's with rashness, quickly, speedily, with haste, with rashness.

Often we see, you'll tell a person that that was a rash decision you made. You didn't have all the facts, you didn't take in all the facts. So he's telling the Galatians, you have rashly come to this conclusion about your relation with the Lord Jesus and the good news that I brought to you.

Just an aside, it seems like that in study, I think Mike probably mentioned it too, I'll mention it more, Paul was attacked mostly on the fact They couldn't attack him on his teaching. His teaching was from God. They had a hard time doing that. They attacked him on, well, are you really an apostle? So they would attack him on that.

And he doesn't necessarily talk about that here, but that's kind of, if you look through all the, in Acts and in Corinthians, other places, you kind of see that it was his office they questioned many times. In fact, I think in Corinthians class, which we taught, a couple of times ago, they constantly came back to the fact of being an apostle over and over and over again. So that was part of the way they approached his going after Paul. And then there's kind of an amplifying verse here that talks about this word so quickly.

And in 1 Timothy 5.22, do not lay hands upon anyone too hastily.

And this actually is talking about elders. So don't put your hands on me too quickly. It actually means... That didn't come out too well. OK, if you look at the context here, the context here is that that in choosing an elder, they would lay hands on them. So it's not like they're going after him. He was a bad guy. This is is choosing the elder.

So anyway, I guess I will have that joke again. All right. OK, so the second part deserting to transpose two things, one of which is to put in place of another. puts something in a place of another. And actually, in the classical Greek, it's the idea of a turncoat.

And I wanted to read the Jude passage in Jude 4. It's only one chapter. It says, for certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long before marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our Lord into licentiousness, deny our only master and Lord. Jesus Christ.

So basically, the word is to turn, to replace something with another. And this also is a continuous action. We notice here that the Galatian problem was an ongoing problem. They were continually, in this state, continually being taken in by the false teachers, the legalists.

The kind of three names that we throw around here, we'll see that we talk about the Judaizers, And that's pretty specific to the time period because I would say there's not too many Judaizers today. We would call them legalists. We also might call them false teachers. So those three terms are Judaizers, legalists, and false teachers are somewhat synonymous.

But this was an ongoing problem. It wasn't just something that came for a moment and left. It continued on. These people were continually going down the wrong path, continue to listen to these false teachers and legalists. So it's in the process of deserting. I kind of talked ahead a little bit, meaning that the process was ongoing, but it was not yet complete.

And as Macaulay points out, the letter is written to halt the desertion. Paul wants to write this letter to these churches to say, hey, look at what you're doing. Look at where you're going. And one additional point, if you look at the verb tense here of deserting, it's actually this It can be a couple of possibilities, but one of the possibilities is something called the middle voice.

Believe it or not, they thought that this was beneficial. They were deserting for their own benefit. And I haven't really sorted the whole thing, but it's interesting that it is in the middle voice. There was some benefit to them. They thought there was some benefit to them.

Okay, deserting him. So it's interesting, if you read this again here, I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting him. So it talks about, in their desertion, are they deserting for a person or a message? Or what are they deserting for? So let's just think about that for a second.

It's desertion of Him, the Lord Jesus. When you desert the truth, you're deserting the source of truth. As we know from a very familiar passage, Christ says, I am the way, I am the singular way, I am the singular truth, I am the singular life. So he is the standard for truth, right? So when they desert him, they desert the source of truth.

And so I have the source of truth, and this is going to be critical as we're going to see, because Paul's going to really hit heavy on this. The source of truth is critical in Paul's gospel. It is a true gospel because the source is from God, not from men. So if you go astray on where the source is, it's not from God, it was from men.

If men have ideas about keeping some kind of regulation or rules to obtain God's favor, they're going astray. "...deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ." So called is this word to call anyone, invite, to summon. And it's used particularly, and this is from Vine basically, it is used particularly of the divine calling, partakers of the blessings of redemption. And it could be in or by, the source is Christ, the basis is grace.

So what I like to say, there's two kind of, and actually that should be Ephesians 1.3. Of course it's hard if you don't have the handouts. I'll talk about that in a second. The source is Christ, the basis is grace.

So every believer, we know is called. But every believer must exercise faith. So we have two truths that in our minds seem to be at odds, but God says they're both true. He says that if we look at the riches of God's grace in Ephesians, we see that being called is one of those many riches we have. We're seated with Christ in heavenly places, and the whole list goes on. So one of them is that we're seated with Christ in heavenly places. We're also called.

But then we see in Ephesians 2.8, for by grace you are saved through faith. So we're called, but we have to exercise faith. So what I've done here is, for a different gospel, so if you go back here, it says, I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ.

Comma, for a different gospel, and that goes into verse 7, for a different gospel, which is really not another. Kind of confusing, if you look at this. For a different gospel, which is really not another, a lot hinges upon that word different and another. There are a couple of special words in the original language. So hopefully, we can work our way through that. So it's for, or to, or into. Different here is a Greek word heteros, expresses a qualitative difference, denotes another of a different sort.

So you could read it, for a different gospel, For you are deserting him for another of a different sort of gospel. And then he's going to say, the gospel was not the true gospel. So you're deserting him for this gospel that's not true. The different gospel is not another.

It's this word, alas, another. I expressed a numerical difference and denotes another of the same sort. So the emphasis here is saying that it's not of the same sort. So I probably really confused you there. So I probably successfully have done that. So we basically have, he's saying the different gospel is of a different sort. It's not like the true gospel.

And he explains that by the rest of verse 7, the first part of verse 7 where he says, which is really not another. another of the same sort. So let's give some examples and see if it makes more sense here. The first example, and this is pretty easy, when Christ was going to go away, he talked about sending the Holy Spirit and says, Christ promised to send another comforter, alas, another like himself, not heteros. He said, I'm going to send you another of the same kind as I am, from God. He's going to behave the same as I am. So that's a use of alas.

Okay, Romans 7.23, after Joseph's death, another king arose, Heteros, one of a different character. So the king that came in after Joseph's death, he's speaking of the Old Testament, the Old Testament Joseph, was one of the different characters. All right, well, hopefully that's helpful. So I wanted to kind of switch gears here just a little bit.

In Paul's day, it was Judaizers. In today's, we say legalists. And I found a really good definition of legalist. Legalism may be defined as a mental attitude that man can do something to merit the blessing of God, either in salvation or in sanctification, our Christian walk. So legalism, and the Judaizers taught this too, it says that man Through man's efforts, I can do something to procure my salvation, or to maintain my salvation, or my Christian walk. But we find scripture is very clear. So what are some examples? What I found out looking at here, I wanted to see examples.

So are there some examples in Galatians that we can look at that talk about this different gospel? This gospel which was really not the true gospel. Then I want to look at the fact, well, what is the true gospel? So let's look at some passages that talk about other gospel that was being preached. And this other gospel had the following characteristics. This different gospel, which is no gospel, does the following.

It brings men into bonding. No flesh will be justified by the works of law. Nullifies the grace of God if righteousness comes through the law. You're going to see kind of a common theme here as we go through these. I have another page too, is that the law, if you look to the law for your obtaining righteousness to justifying yourself, that's contrary to the grace of God. God doesn't operate that way. So that's kind of a common theme here. If righteousness comes through the law, Christ died needlessly. Some of these I probably should have flipped around.

For as many as are the works of the law are under a curse. This different gospel subjects you to the yoke of slavery. This different gospel severs you from Christ if you're seeking to be justified by the law. This different gospel you have fallen from grace.

Actually, what's needed is we're going to cover all these. In this coming year, we're going to cover all these verses. And this last one here, it seems kind of you've fallen from grace. In the context, you've fallen from grace to the law. You've gone back under the law. So let's look at it. I thought now would be appropriate. Let's look at what is the true gospel. Before we look at it here, we're going to say there's two parts to it. Paul makes a bold statement, and we're going to see that next week. that I don't care if an angel from heaven comes and talks to you and gives you a gospel that's different than what I told you.

He's a curse. He should be a curse. He is stating that he is God's messenger for the good news about Jesus Christ. Totally. That's his mission. And he will not have that gospel be perverted. Gospel is a word, euangelion, is the form of that word, to bring or announce good tidings or good news.

So Paul uses it in two ways. He used it in a narrow sense for the plan of salvation, which we're going to see here. And then he's going to use it in a broader sense. For basically, his ministry, if you will, his 13 epistles were the good news, because he talked about things that no other writer of the New Testament talked about. And that's one of the things we notice.

If you subtract Paul from the New Testament, you have very little for the church to live on, basically. So gospel in the narrow sense. This is pretty straightforward. It's what we taught, we taught this on the Christmas service. The four aspects of the gospel, Christ died, Christ was buried, he was raised, and he appeared to men. So that's the essential gospel, and we see that, you know, and that's critical.

He died of his own will, on his own behalf. on behalf of our sins. And sin separates man from God. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That separates a man from God. And the affirmation of Christ's death is that he was buried. That proved that he was buried by men. He didn't bury himself. He just didn't show up in the grave. Men buried him. They got a tomb, a new tomb, and they buried him. And then the other couplet here we have, he was raised and he appeared. He was raised by God the Father. And he says the Father raised him up. It was the Father who did that. And he appeared to men, Cephas and the Twelve and others.

So that's the Gospel. But here's the important part. So that's the essential thing were to understand and believe. And when you dig into that, there's a lot more to understand. About that. There's a lot more we can dig into but I think that we need to focus on what what does God say about salvation and the best the best verse for this that I think really kind of encapsulates it I Quoted part of it already for by grace yours you have been saved through faith. So it's God's grace God's extends grace to all men and it and what is your part in that your part in that is faith you exercise faith in that and And then he has some disclaimers, if you will. And it's not of yourself. You can't bring anything to the table. You bring nothing to the table. You don't say, well, I have good parents. My parents went to church. You can name every human merit and it counts for nothing before God.

Not of yourself. It's a gift of God. And it's important here to realize it's not saying that the faith is a gift. Some people have gone on the path saying, well, I don't have the gift of faith. It's not the it here, even though it's in italics, it's not in the original. The implied it here is salvation. Salvation is the gift, not the faith. And it's not a result of works.

No amount of works, no amount of good deeds you can do will merit you salvation before God, so that no one may boast. God, you know, maybe sometimes you think, deserves all the glory. All the glory goes to him. Man's part in salvation is putting their faith and trust in our Savior.

So that's the essential gospel. And Paul didn't want that to be distorted. But Paul also didn't want his teaching, which he taught for his whole lifetime, his 13 epistles, to be distorted either. So that's kind of part two. The true gospel in the broader sense, the plan of sanctification, that's kind of a Confusing word sometime. It just basically means our Christian life You're being sanctified or are being conformed to the image of Christ over your entire lifetime. So in your Christian life That's a good news. There's good. That's a good news, too. That's the gospel too.

So it's all the wonderful doctrines and that we see in Scripture. If you look through the 13 epistles of Paul, it's mind-blowing. You have redemption, justification, and so on. And you look at all the wonderful promises. We could stack up lists. It's amazing. If you're carefully looking, that's all part of something uniquely given to Paul.

And then we have the identification truths. We were identified with Christ in his death, in his burial, his resurrection, his ascension, and his seeding. And the cool part here is maybe you think identification sounds like kind of a big word. It's the fact that when Christ died, I died. When Christ was buried, I was buried. When Christ rose, I rose with him.

So this identification is critical to our understanding of the good news. And then the positional and growth truths, our life with Christ above, the old man abiding in death on the cross, the new man abiding in the risen life of Christ, and that we're complete in Christ.

Nothing to be added, nothing to be done. And looking as we go forward through Galatians, looking at the narrow sense of the gospel and the broader sense I think is very helpful because Paul is going to be very hard on the Galatians. And we're going to see that as we go forward in this in the study.

I had just a couple of summary comments, which I didn't include here. A good part of this is from a brother, Hal. I just thought, you know, he spent eight years teaching Galatians. So I I felt that I that I could at least glean a couple of jewels out of that. And I actually after looking through this, she took all these notes.

And so I have all these files full of page after page after page of my I'm getting blurry-eyed looking through all this, and I said, I just can't take it all in, but I could take in little gems here and there, so I tried to do that. So just a couple of little summaries, and this is from Hal as well.

God will not tolerate one iota of human effort to be added to His grace. Doing so reverses grace and substitutes human effort for God's power. This is an interesting one, I thought. there's a probability that any one of us could pervert the gospel by believing that we need to perform some human effort in our Christian walk.

I was thinking about that, you know, and I would put myself in that category. Sometimes I feel, well, if I do this particular thing, God will be more pleased with me. Well, you've got to be careful about that. Now, that doesn't mean that you say, well, that you do something wrong, but you realize that you are already pleasing to God. You're totally pleasing to God. You need to operate from that mind perspective. So, I'm already pleasing. Yes, I've gone astray. Yes, I've missed the mark. I've done something wrong. But you start off with the fact that He's already pleased with you. Wouldn't it be great if your parents were always pleased with you? And that's absolutely right. God is totally pleased with us, right? Isn't that true? He really is. But we mess up, we go astray. Anyway, let me read a couple more here.

Paul's Gospel, all 13, is a believer's standard of truth regarding living the Christian life. and who we are in Christ. All of man's teaching is to be tested against it. I was kind of thinking, you know, I'm up here, I'm telling you, hopefully, what Scripture says, but you should test what I say against Scripture. Don't let me off the hook, please. Don't follow men, follow the truth.

Our focus must be on the truth of the gospel, not the person teaching it, regardless of his credentials, popularity, or charisma. Paul's gospel concerns a person of Christ and what he has done and will do for the believer. There's absolutely no human effort involved. The believer is to simply abide in Christ and walk by faith.

All right, so let's pray. Dear Father, we thank you, Lord, for our time in Galatians. Father, thank you for just the wonderful truths about your good news, about how it It's critical for both our salvation and for our walk by faith. We thank you for our Savior. We ask in his name. Amen.