Consulting with Christ

We've been working our way through the book of Galatians. Today we'll work like Josiah read 15, 16, and 17, but I thought I'd put it in context so that as we go forward we don't lose sight of what we're doing. Paul said in 11, For I've made known unto you, brethren, that the gospel which I preached, which was preached by me, is not according to man. It was not man's idea. For I neither received it from a man, nor was I taught it, not from man's thoughts, not communicated from man to man to man.

It was directly revealed to him. He received it through the revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure, and I tried to destroy it. and was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for my ancestral traditions. And we talked about ancestral traditions last week. The best of Jewish tradition Paul knew, but he was ignorant of the precepts given to Moses on Mount Sinai for the Jewish nation. So today we're going to talk about, but when God had set me apart, even from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son to me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.

I didn't immediately go with flesh and blood. So, let's see here. I'm a real whiz with this thing. We've talked about this before, but what was this gospel mentioned? When was this gospel first mentioned in Scripture? And before that, what was the focus? Why this focus that we're trying to get our arms around? Why is that so important to us?

And as we talked about in the past, Paul got this gospel from the resurrected glorified Christ. All the other disciples got their information from Christ before he left the planet. All of them. So they don't see what Paul sees from the very beginning. And that's the focus that I'm going to be repeating quite a bit as we continue and go forward, that the resurrected, glorified Christ is where Paul starts. And that's where we should start. We should be aware of it.

Now, next question is, when was this gospel first mentioned in the scriptures? Do you know? It's 1 Corinthians 15. It's the first time it's mentioned. Paul says, now listen to the language. I, for I delivered to you first of all that which I received." From who? The glorified Christ. Isn't that what he's saying? What I'm going to tell you here, I got directly from the glorified Christ. And here's what I got.

That Christ died for our sins according to the scripture. Okay? And that he was buried. Okay? and that he rose again on the third day according to the scriptures and that he was seen by many. What's the focus? It's heaven. Death, burial and resurrection, I see it, if you believe it. Paul's concept now is not that you become a member of a denomination or a church, you now become a member of the body of Christ. The church's source, the very source of the church is in heaven. It is nowhere else but heaven.

And so it's important for us to know, to get clear, that that's where it all starts with us. We start in heaven. We don't start on the earth. And so it changes, I think it changes the way we look at stuff, the way we look at doctrine, the way we look at our lives, the way we look at everything that God has done, has to do with the fact that we're heavenly. We're heavenly.

The church was begun at Pentecost and people began to belong to it then, but the heavenly character didn't happen until Paul met, or the understanding of the heavenly character of it wasn't begun to be laid out until Paul met Christ on the road to Damascus.

The church will return to her home, which is heaven, for a while, and the rapture will all go, the whole church, not just part of it, and every member will have a completed body. The glorious heavenly church has no relationship, no continuity with anything prior to the cross, nor after the rapture. You understand what I'm saying? Our church, the body of Christ, doesn't have anything to do with anything that happened before the cross. or things that will happen after the rapture, because they're all earthly. We're heavenly. We are heavenly. His body will be complete. We will be the spotless bride presented to himself in heaven. Pretty cool what we have to look forward to.

So Paul's heavenly gospel is exclusive to the church, and we don't need to go down to earthly Israel for anything. Now, why should A heavenly citizen blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ. Ephesians 1 says exactly that. That every one of us have already been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. Why would we stoop down and steal some spiritual blessings from comparatively poor Israel? Why would we want to do that? The thought that hit my mind would be like a multi-millionaire person going into Target to shoplift. Why would you do that?

She wouldn't. We're the bridegroom, whether we're in heaven or on earth. The gospel which was preached by me is not after man, and I didn't receive it from man. Neither was I taught it, but by revelation of Jesus Christ. This is a new thing. All the apostles, except for Paul, accompanying the Lord Jesus, all the way to Acts 1.9.

What happened in Acts 1.9? And after he had said these things, he was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received him out of their sight. Paul sees him on the other side of that cloud. He sees him in glory, which characterizes his entire ministry.

So the glorified Lord Directly communicates with Paul, not only the great fundamentals of the heavenly church, the gospel, but totally new revelation concerning his body, with the body of Christ. Truths that he never shared with the nation of Israel. You realize that these epistles that Paul has written to us are all new. As we talked about a few weeks ago, if you took those out of the Bible, what would you be left with? You wouldn't have any of Paul's doctrine, which is exclusively to the church. These truths concern things like we were identified with Christ, crucified, buried, resurrected, and ascended. We have a heavenly position that's already ours. We are co-heirs, co-reigning with our beloved bridegroom, and much, much more.

So when did Paul first hear about Christianity and salvation and that kind of thing. I think he heard it when he was listening to Stephen take it to the Sanhedrin right before they stoned him to death. He laid it out. He laid out who the Messiah was and that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and that salvation was to be before him. And so when Paul was on the road to Damascus and the Lord Jesus says, you're pushing against the goads, in other words, you're resisting me, those thoughts that he picked up from Stephen The Spirit of God was poking them with them. And I don't know about you, I met the Lord when I was 35. The Holy Spirit poked at me for a long time. And I would turn the radio up louder so I wouldn't have to listen. But He was poking at me all the time. I know about those goats.

After Stephen was stoned and he saw Christ, he was the first man to see Christ in the heavenlies, comes this marvelous conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus where he sees the glorified person. From then on a series of revelations by the Lord himself to Paul take place. In Acts 26, we talked about last week, that the Lord Jesus said to him, now Paul, I'm appointing you a minister, a witness of what I have shown you today and the things that I'm going to show you going forward. All revelations.

I think we as believers, we run the risk of failing completely if we attempt to account on natural grounds for Paul's conversion. There's nothing natural about that. It was all heavenly. His call to apostleship and to his profound writings was all heavenly. So then he says in verse 15, but when it pleased God, who set me apart from my mother's womb and called me through his grace. It was God who had separated him, set him apart for the work of the ministry.

I'll give you some other examples of where you see this kind of language. If you look in Acts 18.9, for the Lord said to Paul in night by a vision, don't be afraid any longer. But go on speaking, and don't be silent, for I am with you. And no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in this city." That didn't come through a man.

It came from Christ in glory. Christ also spoke to him when he was in Jerusalem. In Acts 23, he said, But on the night immediately following, the Lord stood by his side and said, Take courage. For as you have solemnly witnessed to my cause at Jerusalem, so you must witness in Rome also." And then even instructions. You know, we do the Lord's Table here once a month.

How does that start, that 1 Corinthians 11.23? What's the very first line?

Paul says, For I received from the Lord that which I delivered to you. He doesn't say, I got it from the apostles, or I read it in a book someplace, or it was in the Old Testament. I got it directly from the Lord. So his entire existence as an apostle is heavenly, gets his information from heaven. And that's why his epistles are so important to us as believers, because that's where we get our information. When any man receives instructions from the Lord firsthand, He can say with the apostle, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood. If Ralph had a revelation from the Lord Jesus, he wouldn't come and ask me what I think about it, because I don't know, I didn't have it. He had it directly from the Lord. So Paul's attitude is, well, I'm not going to go talk to anybody, or these apostles or anybody, because I got it directly from the Lord. Who can I talk to about it? to reveal his son in me that I might preach among the Gentiles. So that was the basis of Paul's calling. How, if you could use one word, what's the basis on which Paul was called? What's the basis? What was the motivation? What was the reason?

It's grace. It's unmerited, unlimited God's favor to Paul. God did the calling. Paul was totally unworthy, as we've discussed last week. It's grace only that God calls him and says, look, what you're going to do is I'm going to reveal my son to you and you're going to teach this amongst the Gentiles. So the word separated here, let's drill down a little bit into verse 15. The word separated here means to mark off from a boundary or a line. The verb of that word means to place a limitation upon or to fix limits.

It's used in Romans 1.1, Paul, a bondservant of Christ Jesus, called an apostle set apart for the gospel.

God set him apart. The impression one gets from rendering the King James or the New American Standard is that he refers to the physical separation of a child from his mother's womb, which idea was not really in the apostle's mind. The idea is that who set me apart who dedicated me to a special purpose from before my even being born and before I had the impulses and principles of my own. God determined what was going to happen with me.

I'll show you in the Old Testament where that happens. Judges 16, 17 talking about Samson, for I have been a Nazarite to God from my mother's womb. before he even thought about being a Nazirite, he was already one because God called him to be one. Isaiah 44, Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer and the one who formed you from your womb. Do you realize that every one of us can say that?

Paul's scripture says that God knew you in Christ before the foundations of eternity. Every single one of us has been called of God to be his own. He's the one that decided. Now, you agreed with them and had faith in the person and work of Christ, but it was his calling, his calling.

In Isaiah 49.1, listen to me, O islands, pay attention, you people from afar. The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother, he named me. So this idea has also, in these instances where a child's destiny is clearly fixed by God before he's born. John the Baptist, same way.

Luke 1.15 says, For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and he will drink no wine or liquor, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet still in his mother's womb. He's filled with the Spirit before he's even born. So, the idea then is that in this Greek word, there's a preposition called ek. It means from.

My mother's womb is used at times to mark temporal points in fact, but Paul here states that he was set apart and dedicated by God to the apostleship before he was born. Here again he shows his apostleship is independent of men. that his whole apostleship was from God himself.

Now, another kind of difficult, it says, what does Paul mean that God called him in order that he might reveal the Lord Jesus to Paul or in Paul? Most of your translations, I think, in. Don't they say in me? I looked at that and I spent some time with it. Would it mean that the purpose of God was to reveal Christ through Paul or to Paul? Because they're not the same thing.

I think the answer can be found in the word reveal. There are two kinds of revelation that you can see in the word. One is subjective, which this one, God would reveal the Lord Jesus to Paul. And the other is objective, in which God would reveal him through Paul to others. This word that refers to revealing the school that refers to the disclosure of something by the removal of that which was previously concealed. In other words, Paul didn't know what was before because it was a mystery. And it refers especially to the subjective revelation of an individual whose subjective revelation would use the word to.

A public disclosure of the Lord Jesus through Paul would necessitate the fact that the Lord had been previously hidden from public knowledge, which was not the case, such as he had already been preached in the world by the other apostles, hadn't he? He wasn't hidden. But he had been previously hidden from Paul. Paul didn't know, which points to a subjective revelation of the Lord Jesus to Paul within Paul.

Furthermore, if you were an objective revelation through Paul, the Greek word would have been dia, which would mean through. So I would say that the entire context has to do not with how Paul preached the gospel, but how he received it. Important point. He makes a distinction between a call and a revelation. cannot then be identified with the previous vision of the Lord Jesus which Paul had in the road to Damascus. That vision was by his eyes. He saw Christ. The revelation of which he's speaking of here is an inward one, apprehended by a spiritual sense possibly given to Paul, maybe during the three days that he was in Damascus, maybe in the desert in Arabia.

So Paul, whom God from before his birth had set him apart to be a preacher of the heavenly gospel, to the Gentiles in whom God had called into salvation and his service could not have been dependent upon men for his commission or subject to his control. I think that's why to is a better word because it shows that he didn't get any of his information from other men. He got it directly from the Lord. So he says to reveal his son to me that I might preach him among the Gentiles. The word here is ethnos, which really means anybody who's not really a Jew who could say heathens. We use the word Gentile. He said, when I got that call from God, I didn't go talk to flesh and blood. I didn't confer with them.

This word confer means to be consulted or to consult with. It is a word that means to take oneself to another for the purpose of consulting him. If I wanted to know something about drilling a well, I would go consult with Courtney because he knows about wells. If, you know, I wanted to know something about computers, I might go talk to Randy. We would consult about it.

But this revelation that Paul gets directly from the Lord, who's he going to go talk to? There's only one. It's the Lord Jesus himself. He can't go talk to the other apostles. They wouldn't know what he was talking about. So pagan writers would use this word for consulting soothsayers and the like. And Paul said, I didn't consult with anyone in order to learn the opinion of others as to this revelation I received or to obtain instructions from them or guidance or advice of any kind.

The word flesh and blood obviously refers to mankind in weakness, frailty, ignorance. So Paul asserts that his commission and his message came to him directly from God and that neither was affected in any way by any human intervention. I can't overemphasize the lack of human intervention and the fact that it starts with the with the revelation of the glory of Christ, it's critical for us as believers because if we don't grasp that and don't receive it to ourselves, we're always going to look for something else other than Christ to hold us up in our faith. An expanded translation of this verse would be, but when it was the good pleasure of the One who set me apart before I was born and called me by His grace to give me an inward revelation of His Son in order that I might proclaim Him as glad tidings among the Gentiles. That was the call.

Immediately, I did not put myself in communication with flesh and blood for the purpose of consultation. I didn't do that. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia and returned once more to Damascus. So why did he go to Arabia? What was the purpose? It's a stated purpose that he had. It affected what he was thinking and what he was going to do.

One could say, well, he wanted to be alone with the Lord Jesus Christ. I can sure appreciate that. Arabia is an arid, sparsely populated place where if you look at the Arabian Peninsula, it's got the The Red Sea on one side and on the other side is the Gulf of Tonkin. I mean, nothing grows out there. So he goes out there to be with the Lord. And did he need to be alone with Christ, do you think? I think so. I do. Did he need time and isolation to sort of think through what had happened? I think that's true also.

The revelation of the Son of God had blasted away the foundations of the pharisaic thought process that he had and its whole structure. It just blew it all away. And he had been earnestly and zealously building up with flawless skill and energy and zeal and it all came tumbling down in one revelation, the whole thing. The revelation also furnished him with another whole foundation now, this is brand new, upon which he was going to build a new structure, which was the body of Christ.

But the replacement of the ruined organization with a new one, you can't work that out in a day, a month, a year. It's going to take a while to get that going. So in Arabia, isolated from all human contact and alone with the Lord, how I envy him for that. The great apostles probably looked at his Old Testament scriptures that he had such zeal about and oh wow, he saw them in a whole new light.

The pharisaic traditions and the faulty thinking got really clear in his mind how that wasn't really what God had called him to do. And now he's got a new leader, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit with the central fact of the cross of Christ and the controlling factor of his meditations.

And out of all of this study emerged what we call Pauline doctrine. We call a system of doctrine that you can read about it in the book of Romans because the first eight chapters of Romans just lays it out nice and simple. And the other cool thing about Paul's epistles is that they grow every single one of them. And they begin to... I was having a talk with Vern one day about Romans. I said, you know what's interesting about Romans?

It never leaves the planet. Everything happens here. God comes and saves us and here's the whole... But as you go on in Paul's epistles, you begin to leave. And you end up in Ephesians where he says we've been blessed with every spiritual blessings. Where? In the heavenlies. In the heavenlies. He gradually, through all of these epistles, takes us to the heavenlies and begins to show us what's ours there.

So here you have God himself when he calls a remarkable man to a very special work. Instead of summoning him up to the apostles at Jerusalem, he sends him away into the desert. I think the Lord did that with some other guys, too, like Moses. Moses, you know, at about 40 years old, he kind of thought, well, I'm the deliverer of the Jews. And he messed that up. And so he had to do his 40 years in the desert. It seems that this component that God puts believers through is a sifter. It breaks them down from their own conceits.

And if he's going to be used of the Lord in a really honorable way, There's this desert experience that all of us go through, and I don't have to talk much about that. You know about a desert experience to one extent or another. And the Apostle Paul even wrote Timothy and said, look, Timothy, I'm committing to you these doctrines, and I want you to commit these things to other faithful men so that they can communicate them, and down they come and they end up with us. So, expanded translation of 17, neither did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia, and again I came back to Damascus. Would you say this is an upheaval? Would you say that this is a revolution? Saul himself, instead of having externally pure conscience, He found himself the chief of sinners.

We're going through Romans 7 in a Sunday school class. Very interesting how the Apostle Paul, this man who has this revelation from the glorified Christ, is dealing with the power of the sin nature. But he's realizing that his Lord has been rejected from the world. He's the Son of God, and the world is still rejecting the testimony that Paul rendered through the Spirit.

The old stewardship that he had, the law and the promises made to Israel, had been set aside and instead of these the glory of the Lord Jesus had been presented, that he was alive in heaven and it's revealed by sovereign grace to him. Eternal life was communicated to him.

Eternal salvation through the work and person of Christ was presented to his heart. in a glorified man who had borne his sins, and was now making the work effectual by the operation of the Spirit of God, the Son of God revealed to him." I would say true conversion, wouldn't you, of Paul? Sovereign grace reveals the Son of God to us, the glorified man. And if we have already understood the truth, the Savior who has borne our sins, but it's the revelation of Christ glorified to us that matters and makes a difference.

He who had been so livid against Christ and against Christians, persecuting them, even following them to cities outside of Jerusalem to put them in jail, realizes that for a purpose that God says to him, I have appeared to you for these purposes, to make you a minister and a witness both of the things that you have seen and the things that I'm going to show you. What a difference. So Paul's taken out from the Jews.

He separated from his nation, and now he belongs to Christ. Every one of us belong to Christ. We belong to him. He owns us. The starting point of this new life was a glorified Christ. For the announcing of that which he had seen, and by the power of grace he'd received it in his heart, besides other revelations which afterward were made to him. Always, however, of a Christ rejected by the world, but glorified by God. His mission was from the Lord himself, from a Lord who had not been so glorified as glorified revealed to others.

He's the first one. He was the Lord, it was the same salvation, but it was a special revelation which stamped its character upon the whole ministry of this servant. who knew Christ himself no more after the flesh. Remember where he says that? No more as the Messiah of Judaism on the earth. So to close, a quote. Just think.

Our Father has placed us in eternal and living union with his Son, so that he, not we, may be. Moreover, he has placed his Holy Spirit eternally within us that he, not we, may do. Further, he has given us the necessary faith and scripture that we may rest in his wonderful reality, trusting him to do and to will of his good pleasure. This is a far cry from the futile struggle and frustrating self-effort.

Let's pray. Dear Father, how we thank you. We thank you for your son, the Lord Jesus. We thank you for his servant, the Apostle Paul. And we thank you for the gospel that you and the information that you gave him to communicate to us so that we may live heavenly minded from now on. And we thank you. We pray in your son's precious name. Amen.