The Galatians Defection--Its Gravity

Today we're going to continue on in the Galatians series. We started actually back in December, the first Sunday in December. And at the rate we're going, we're probably going to go through all of 2019, most likely, if the Lord doesn't come, which would be good too. So today we're going to look at kind of continuing on.

We started, you notice I was listening very carefully as As we read 1-9 there basically, obviously there's a sharp contrast that begins in verse 6, where Paul talks about marveling or being amazed. So this is going to be interesting. We're going to see here that Paul's going to use some of the strongest language in all of scripture. For those who would pervert the gospel, the true gospel of Christ, he's going to come down really hard on those. And he's going to talk about himself or an angel from heaven, which is kind of You know, boy, you say, wow, those are awful strong words. And what he says is almost contrary to what we see in the scripture for the believer.

So we need to kind of work through that and try to understand that if we can. So basically last week we looked at the part, I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is which is really not another. And we stop right at the semicolon there. So I just review that part there. Actually, what was great about that, actually, I was asked a question after the service by by Bob here, and so I'm going to hopefully try to answer that question as we go through, but just a couple of points here.

You'll notice as we start into the tough verses, verses 8 and 9, there's comparisons there that Paul makes. He talks about basically, he says, we came to you and preached the gospel, which he assumes to be the true gospel, but if we come back at a later time and give you a different gospel that doesn't match up with the first gospel we gave you, He says he is to be a curse, including himself. Pretty incredible words. Then he goes on and verse 9 talks about, not about Paul and an angel from heaven, it talks about this any man, if you will. I think that any man is referring to what we've been talking about the Judaizers are called, or the legalists, or the false teachers. He's kind of pointing that at those particular people and he gives them the same result happens, he's to be a curse. So those last two verses are A lot of people have struggled through those verses.

I think we have an answer for that, Lord willing, so hopefully you'll agree with the answer I have. Otherwise, you can see me downstairs at the potluck and duke it out, okay, if you don't like that answer. All right, so let's get into it here. So last week, and this is the New American Standard, I just read this, but what I found was, in trying to answer Bob's question, What I found was that actually a couple of prepositions aren't really clear.

The from and the to are not really clear. And actually the King James and also New American Standard. But if you read what's called the interlinear, interlinear is just what they try to do is they take the original Greek language and they do a word for word translation, if you will. So it's a little choppy sometimes, but it does bring out these two prepositions. So if I read the interlinear here, it says, I marvel that you are so quickly being turned Being turned is a word for deserting. From, it's a from and to situation. And boy, that helps immensely.

Because if you don't see that the Galatians are turning from something to to something, you kind of miss the boat on what Paul's all about here. They're turning from one who have called you by the grace of Christ to a different gospel. And we'll find out, as we found out last week, that different gospel is not the true gospel. It's a gospel of works. It's a gospel of Man adding something to the grace of God, adding the law, the Mosaic law, or adding, in that time, circumcision. The Judaizers would have men who were believers in Christ be circumcised if they were Gentiles.

They had to follow the law. And Paul's saying, no, stop, hold it here. That's not part of the grace of God. So they're turning from one thing to another. I have a couple of bullets that kind of talk to that. The Galatians are turning from one thing to another, as I said.

Literally, it's called, actually what I like is, you could better call that, rather than the grace of Christ, which is fine, it's actually the sphere of grace, which I really like because that's what we like to call here at Holly Hills the operating system. If you guys have, obviously, computers are everything today. You got androids, you got, you know, you have all kinds of operating systems. But our operating system as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ is this wonderful sphere of grace. We operate in the sphere of God's grace. And we enter that by faith.

And then lastly, it's a different sort of gospel, and that's the false gospel that Paul is going to talk about a lot. And then just briefly on verse 7, the A part, and this is where he distances himself from the fact it's really not another kind of play on words here. And it's a different gospel, not another of the same sort. And the same sort would be if the gospel is proclaimed as being that Christ died for our sins, he was buried and rose in the third day, that's the true gospel. If you deviate from that, that's a different gospel.

The same sort would be in this sphere of grace. Okay, so that's kind of a short review of last week. There's a lot more to that, obviously, but that was kind of clearing up a few points there. So they were turning from something to something, to this different gospel. So now we're going to now focus on We're going to look at the last part, the B part of 7, which says, only there were some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. And basically those some or certain ones were doing two things. They were disturbing you and they're distorting the gospel.

So we're going to look at each of those words, each of those phrases, and kind of sort out if we can kind of dig down deep and find out what's really going on here. So I mentioned some have various names, which are kind of synonymous, Judaizers. Judaizers are really only in the time period, and it's hard to imagine Judaizers today. Maybe there are some out there, but that's the people that would have believers come under the law.

Maybe you could talk about, I'm trying to think of the, what is it now? Well, I can't think of it at the moment. But anyway, the legalists is probably the more proper term for today are false teachers. who are disturbing you. Disturbing is to stir up, to trouble, to agitate with words. It's a mental agitation or an emotion. It's an emotional thing.

You can imagine if you were saved and somebody came along and said, well, brother or sister, you're not really saved until you do X, Y, and Z. Until you, some people say baptized. You have to be baptized to be saved. And they misunderstand what baptism does. So they try to add to that.

So this disturbing thing was happening in Paul's day there. And it was continuing action going on. And the same word is used by the Lord Jesus in a very interesting passage in John 12, 27. And the Lord says, my soul has become troubled. That same word, has become troubled or disturbed. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But for this purpose, I came to this hour. So the Lord was emotionally affected by the fact he was going to the cross to pay for the sins of the world.

He was troubled. And that's what was happening in Galatia. They're being troubled by these false teachers that were saying, hey, you missed out. You heard the gospel, but there's actually a little bit more. Paul did a good job, but he missed this extra point here that you're missing out on.

So let's look at, there's another passage that kind of describes, it was a letter about, it was a Jerusalem council, and they sent a letter to some churches in Asia there, and they wanted to point out, and in pointing that out, they point out some of these things that were disturbing the people. So let me just read the first part, it says, and they sent this letter, that was a Jerusalem council, by them, by some men, and it says, you know, in that time they would state, I would say, Roger, to the church at Holly Hills. I would say my name first. So they say, the apostles and brethren who are elders to the brethren in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia, who are from the Gentiles, greetings. Since we have heard that some of our number, there will be three things that they're going to point out.

First of all, to whom we gave no instruction. So they're saying, these men are in your body. They didn't come under our teaching, they weren't instructed by us. That's the first point they had with these men. Secondly, have disturbed you with their words. Same word as we had back in Galatians, they disturbed you with their words. unsettling your souls. So this being disturbed was a real issue in that body of believers. They were unsettling. And you can see that could happen in many body of believers.

That's why when a new person comes in and we talk with them, we try to understand where they're coming from. Because sometimes they come in with motives which are not honest. They don't come to learn. They come to infuse their ideas. And sometimes they're not scriptural.

So that's part of the job of elders to do that. Okay, so we've kind of gone through those who are disturbing you. So let's go on to the next one, who want to distort the gospel of Christ. And this actually is a little bit more intense, a little bit more worrisome. It's a willful act. They want to distort the gospel. It's like they know it, but they're so consumed by themselves that they think, I just have to do this. It's a willful act.

And the idea is, this is a word, metastropho, I think it's pronounced, to transform into something on opposite character. Very similar, we're going to see this idea of going from one thing to another, kind of shows up again here. They distort. This distortion is going from the truth to error in many cases, to a different character, to make something totally different from what it once was.

So I have a couple of verses that talk about Changing from one thing to another and they're not exactly on the topic But they show the the idea of changing from one thing to another first of all in acts 220 the a part It says the Sun will be turned. That's this distort word Into darkness and the moon into blood. So two examples there Sun Sun to darkness dark to light second moon to blood radical changes right and that's what they were That's what they were doing there in Galatia. It was radically different when they're adding these extra things you had to do to be saved.

And then in James 4.9, be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into gloom. So another pair there, we have laughter to mourning and we have joy to gloom.

So this is just to reemphasize the fact that this distortion was significant. It wasn't just a subtle change, it was a significant change. Okay, so we've covered now the B part of the verse, only there were some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. So I was thinking here, as I was listening and studying, how can the gospel be distorted? And I tried to think about things in our modern day. How do we distort the gospel? And Chester McCauley had some things that I've kind of incorporated here.

First of all, denying that Christ really died. This is kind of an old, have you heard about the swoon theory? You know, Christ really, he didn't actually die on the cross. He just was maybe unconscious. And somehow he lived through that, which is miraculous. And somehow he was put in the tomb and he had the same body, he just woke up from this being out of sorts. That's the swoon theory. He didn't really die.

That distorts the gospel. The gospel says that Christ really died and he really was buried. So that's one. Next one is rejecting the scriptures kind of outright. We say, well, the Bible is just fairy tales and it's just myths. It's not really truth. Well, if you don't think the scriptures are accurate in God's word, that could certainly distort the gospel. Misunderstand its content.

Here's a couple that you probably come across if you talk, when talking with people. Christ died in the example. I was thinking of the, let's see, is it WWJD? What would Jesus do? Right? So, I'm going to live my Christian life, I'll find out what Jesus did, except when he goes to the cross, and you probably skip, you won't go do that one, obviously, because that's going to be kind of painful. Okay, another one is Christ died as a martyr. And some people, you know, I've heard people try, well, Christ suffered. I'm going to beat myself up, so to speak. I'm going to self-flagellation. That's going to make me, you know, saved possibly, I don't know, in a while. And the last one I think is a problem that the Galatians had, adding conditions other than faith. And that's what I think the Judaizers and Legalists did. They had to add things. They had to add the law. They had to add circumcision.

And today, we could put baptism in there, church attendance, reading your Bible, a hundred things that will make you more acceptable to God, rather than believing that once you put your faith and trust in Christ, you are already accepted. Okay. So now, as I mentioned, we're going to get into the hard verses here. They're going to show God's attitude toward adding something to the gospel, and it's rather severe. As I mentioned before, it's the strongest language. I don't think there's no other place in the scripture where Paul actually uses the fact that a person, that he is to be accursed or let him be accursed. And so we'll see about that. Okay. So it starts off, but even, let me just read it first. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, then he is to be accursed.

So you'll notice I put in blue there, kind of a dark blue. I kind of highlighted the if and the then. It's what's called a conditional sentence. And we're going to find out that in verses 8, the conditional sentence is different than the conditional sentence in 9, that they vary. And that's going to help us, I think, kind of interpret what's going on here.

So he says, if we are an angel from heaven, so he has we, Paul includes himself, his team, Barnabas, Silas and Timothy and others possibly, and then an angel from heaven. The angel from heaven was kind of problematic because You know, we have two classes of angels, right? The angels that didn't rebel against God, that stayed with God, and they do God's bidding. There's no issue of them not doing his bidding. So it would be impossible for them to preach a gospel contrary to what... But the fallen angels... Satan at the head of that, they disguise themselves as an angel of light, so it's a possibility. So Paul starts out and he clues himself.

He says, you know, I might come back to you, and I might give you something that was different. I came to you, I gave you the true gospel, I come back and I give you... Well, I didn't quite tell you the whole story. He says, well, if that's the case, the result is pretty amazing what he says could happen. Okay, so let's keep going here.

Should preach to you a gospel, It's the gospel, I think it is, use of the good news about Christ proclaimed in the gospels. Present tense, but it has this subjunctive mood, this mood of probability. So it says, and we're going to kind of see that when we get to the sentence classification, this is a probability. It may happen and it may not happen, but it could happen.

It's to the Eugalations. And so, okay, so the big issue is, if you look out in the middle of this verse here, it says it's contrary. That what's being said to you the second time around, they preach the good news to you first, accurately, and they come back and they preach something that's contrary.

And once again, the same theme kind of comes through. It goes beyond. It's not just the basic gospel, but it goes beyond that. It adds something to it. So Paul keeps coming back to this theme over and over again. So this is going to add contres, goes beyond. Or as Weiss has it, using the Ion Galizzo, evangelizes you beyond that which we were evangelized. Kind of hard to say that. Evangelizes you beyond that which we were evangelized. So it's going beyond adding to. And then we just had that in verse 7. They transform the gospel of Christ into something of opposite character.

So very much in line with what Paul is trying to teach us here. Okay, so it would probably be good just to step back for a second. We did this last week. So what was the true gospel message that Paul preached? What was he telling people? And it's really, you know, in studying and preparing for this, I kind of re-remembered, if you will, There's really two aspects to the gospel. So I'm going to show that to you here. The gospel in the narrow sense. The narrow sense is just the basic raw facts. Four verbs there. Christ died. He was buried. He was raised. He appeared. Those four verbs tell us what Christ did to accomplish our salvation. He did those four things.

And we're asked to believe that by faith. That's the core or narrow sense of the gospel. But there's a sense of the gospel which is large. And actually, it includes Paul's teaching on the Christian life, or what we call sanctification sometimes. And actually, it includes basically everything that Paul penned.

If you think about Paul was uniquely chosen, Paul says, and this verse says that, my gospel is the gold standard. It is the absolute gold standard. If you deviate from that gold standard, you're in peril, right? Because he's going to say he is to be accursed. So it's a gold standard.

So it really helps you to see that all of what Paul penned is really the good news for salvation and then for our Christian walk. And that's what part two of the broad sense. So that helps us actually, because Paul goes to the Galatians, they're believers, right? So he's not arguing that Maybe someone believed wrongly, but his big thing is they're trying to live their Christian life by the works of the law or by circumcision. So he's focused on the broad sense. So that really helps you understand what's going on in Galatians, I think.

Okay. So now we get to the $64,000 question here. Then, I added then there. It's not in the text, but it kind of helps you see how the if statement goes. He is to be accursed. And a curse is anathema, cursed or condemned, being given over to or devoted to divine condemnation. Okay. So, I thought it was so interesting. If you look at that verse and say, wow, this is a toughie.

Lord, how do I interpret this? I mean, I know a lot about scripture, but that doesn't seem to fit. I thought I was saved eternally. Well, did Paul ever do this again? Did he ever use this kind of thought process? And he did. In Romans 9.3 he said, For I wish that I myself were accursed, same word, anathema, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen, according to the flesh. So Paul did use a very similar logic.

He said he would wish, could that wish be fulfilled? The answer is no. So the question is, can this verse here be fulfilled? That's going to be key. Can this verse be fulfilled for a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ? It's not denying. This verse will tell us that you can do that. I can say something up here that's contrary to the gospel. But it's my faith he is to be accursed, is his question. He says he would be accursed for his brethren, but that can't be accomplished.

OK, so let's go on. Kind of a summary ideas here. So this is kind of a techie point, if you will. Verse 8 is what's called a third class conditional sentence in the original language. It presents a condition as uncertain of fulfillment, but still likely.

So it's likely that any one of those three, we or the other brethren or an angel from heaven, could add to the gospel, something contrary to the gospel. Why would Paul, why would he do that? But it's still possible. He wouldn't do that knowingly, right? But we might do it unknowingly.

And then lastly, holy angels certainly cannot do it, but fallen angels could preach a gospel contrary. So I'll have more to say about this, but I'm going to leave it to the end. So we're going to look at part two of this. We're going to look at verse nine, which is going to address, I believe, the false teachers and the Judaizers and the Legalists. So we have some facts about this.

We've kind of seen the comparison with Romans 9.3. So let's go on to verse 9. So this verse looks very similar, but he starts out with this opening statement here.

I've got it way ahead of my notes here. Okay, it says, as we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you have received, then he is to be accursed. So Paul says here, he's saying, you know, I told you this in the past, and I get the impression that this is not just the previous verse, this is times he's talking about, he mentioned this many times in the past, I told you in the past, And I'm still telling you now and up into the present. That's called the perfect tense. The repeated message of verse 8, but there's some differences. When he repeated this message, he had some differences because he's talking to this any man person, if you will.

Any man, I take it as being focused mostly on the Judaizers, the legalists, and the false teachers. A gospel contrary to what you, the Gentiles, received, You notice here that in the previous one, it was Paul said, I preached, and then I may return to you and preach something. This time he says, you may have heard, you may have heard this from the Judaized legalist.

I'm sorry. You received the true message. I got it flipped around. You received the true message, but then you heard something contrary to that. So it's basically preaching versus receiving, whereas the previous one was two different messages on preaching.

And this one happens to be a third-class condition, a first-class condition, which is assumed true for the sake of argument. Sometimes you'll see people will kind of take a shortcut and they'll say, we can say sense rather than if. Better to think of it as an argument, you know, it's assumed true. So Paul is saying, this is true for any man that would preach a gospel contrary to what I have preached.

Okay, so, all right. All right, so now, let's have a few thoughts that kind of close out here. You know, it appears that verse 8, you know, talks about the three categories. It talks about Paul, it talks about his brethren, and it talks about the fallen angels.

You know, if you think about that, if you think about Romans 9, where it talked about wishing to be accursed for my brethren, it seems like You might be able to categorize as he is putting up a case for what might call hypothetical. Even though it's possible for him to do that, it seems like that fits better with thinking about he's trying to, for emphasis, he's trying to show that Paul's gospel is the standard, and if you deviate from that, there are severe consequences. For the believer, there's good news, right? Because we look at all of Scripture, we see that a man is saved by faith, and that is a fixed, a done deal, if you will.

It can't be changed. We also see that, you know, the word anathema is condemnation. He's under condemnation. Well, if you just turn to your Bibles to Romans 8, chapter 8, verse 1, There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.

So you'd have to go through and challenge all these verses that talk about the security of our salvation for that verse 8 to be something that could happen to a believer. Now, it's not to say that he might suffer consequences for that in terms of maybe, you know, His ministry wouldn't be blessed, I would say. If he starts out with the true gospel and deviates, I doubt the Lord is going to bless his ministry.

But anyway, so it seems like hypothetical kind of fits that category of verse 8. But verse 9 seems to be a different animal. Verse 9 seems to be a severe warning to those legalists and Judaizers and false teachers that going against the standard, God's standard, which Paul was given, and that was God's choice, is you're in peril. you're in tremendous peril.

Okay, I have one couple more things here. And actually, this is a statement I like to state. This is from our brother Hal. I read it last week. I think it's really interesting. It says, there's a probability that any one of us could pervert the gospel by believing that we need to perform some human effort for our Christian walk. And I think it happens to us that we think, well, Lord, if I just do If I'm extra good, you know, we still have the old man. If I'm extra good, if I read my Bible extra this week or whatever, that's going to give me a better standing. Well, the Lord doesn't want us to do that. He wants us to remember that we already are complete. We don't have to do anything additional. We just have to believe in what we already have. not to try to add something to it. And that's why he's so upset, why Paul's so upset with the Galatian believers. Why do you want to add something to God's marvelous grace? Why do you want to do that? It doesn't make any sense.

But, you know, we may go on that path erroneously. And by God's grace, and that's why I believe that verse 8, it really is hypothetical. Okay, one more thing. And then lastly, our focus must be on the truth of the gospel, not on a person teaching it, regardless of their credentials or popularity or whatever. So our focus should be on the truth, the truth of God's word. Okay, so let's close in.

We thank you, Father. We thank you for the blessings we have, Father. We thank you for your love for us, Lord. Thank you for your wonderful gospel. We thank you that you've divinely appointed Paul to give us that wonderful message and to tell us in his wonderful epistles about how we are to live our life that's pleasing to you. In Christ's name, amen.