The Deadly Danger of a False Gospel (Galatians Sermon 1)

Many times in my mind I go back to that incredible account in Acts chapter 16 when Paul and Silas were in the Philippian jail and they were in chains and being persecuted for preaching the Gospel of Christ, and they were singing praise songs to Jesus, giving glory and praise to God.  I think to myself, how much I long for that kind of faith, to be able to face any trial in my life with that kind of supernatural joy, and to be able to understand the root of their joy. It was in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that Paul and Silas knew that even if they were executed for preaching the Gospel, they were going to go to heaven and that they would be perfectly happy. They had every reason to sing and rejoice and delight in the Gospel, but there were also other people listening to them. There were other prisoners that were listening to them and especially there was the Philippian jailer. Suddenly God sent this incredible earthquake and the ground shook and the doors were opened and the chains fell off. The jailer called for lights. He was just about to kill himself because he thought all of his prisoners had run away. And Paul called out a message of life, “Don’t harm yourself, we’re all here.” The jailer called for lights and rushed in and brought Paul and Silas out and fell trembling before them and asked this one question, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

Does that question stand over you today? Do you understand the significance of that question? What must I do to be saved? Can you understand the basic underpinnings of that question? There must be something I can do to be saved. There must be some action I can do. There must be some array of good works I can do to stop feeling so guilty before God, and to stop being so terrified of death and of judgment. Is there something I can do about this? Paul and Silas spoke the Gospel message of liberation, of freedom, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” You will be rescued! There’s nothing you can do to save yourself. There’s nothing you can do to rescue yourself, just believe in Jesus and you will be saved. How powerful is that? How liberating is that message? And that is what I get to preach today, the liberating message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, jump ahead almost 15 centuries to the story of Martin Luther, one of my favorite characters from church history.  He was an incredible man, but he was, similar to the Philippian jailer, terrified to die. He was a lawyer. He was law student in route to go back to school, when he was caught in the middle of a thunder and lightning storm, and the lightning flashed all around, and he fell down into the mud. He was terrified to die. He was afraid that these lightning bolts were sent by Almighty God to kill him and to usher him into hell. The only thing he had to answer those terrors were the errors of medieval Catholicism.  So he cried out in the midst of that mud, rain, lightning, and thunder, “Help me, Saint Anne, I shall become a monk.”

He cried out to a saint to save him. He made her a promise, that he would become a monk if she would just intercede with God to save his life, and he was good to his promise. He entered a monastery, and there he tried to earn his salvation by extended fasting, by labors, by meditations and long prayers, and by endless confessions to his father confessor. He was just trying to find some way to be delivered from a guilty conscience and from his terror of death, his terror of the wrath of God, that when he died he would be sent to hell and there he would suffer forever and ever in extreme torment. And so he was terrified by these things, and the only thing he could do was try to earn his forgiveness by good works, and he became the most extremely zealous monk there was in Germany. Scrubbing floors like no floors have ever been scrubbed before or probably since. He refused the meager blanket that was assigned to him in his monk’s cell there and laid on a cold floor in the midst of a German winter, shivering, thinking that somehow his physical torments there would be a path of escape from the judgments of God.

But no matter how hard he worked, no matter how hard he tried, he could not stop the accusations of a guilty conscience and the terror of God behind all that. Just when things were blackest, Luther was entrusted with the responsibility of teaching the Bible at the University of Wittenberg and it saved his life, it saved his soul. For in that Bible, he discovered the Gospel. He realized that the medieval Catholic system, that barter, that exchange of doing good works to pay for bad, the whole thing was corrupt, it was not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He found in the Book of Romans the way out, that the Gospel pointed to the work of Christ crucified and resurrected and a righteousness that is ours by faith in Christ.

Now, the book of Romans was a centerpiece of that discovery, but the Book of Galatians became a treasured and precious source of truth and strength to him. In this brief Epistle, the Apostle Paul is fighting against some people (we’ll call them the Judaizers), false teachers, who are trying to mingle the work of Jesus Christ on the cross with law. They’re trying to add to the work of Christ. It was Christ plus law equals salvation, that’s what they were doing. And in refuting them, the Apostle Paul has given us a timeless message, refuting works righteousness in favor of a Gospel of grace, a Gospel of forgiveness, simply by faith and by the grace of God and by the work of Jesus Christ.

Luther delighted in this brief, clear, simple, powerful message of Galatians. He loved it. He said, “The epistle to Galatians is my epistle. It’s mine.” I’m grateful he’s let all of us use it too, amen? But it was his. “It’s my epistle.” He said, “To it I am, as it were, in wedlock. I’m married to this book, it is my Katie.” That was the name of his wife, “Galatians is my Katie.” He loved this message, he loved the simplicity, he loved the liberation from legalism, from thinking that somehow our law-keeping can pay for our sins. He loved that liberation. And Luther said, “There is no middle ground between Christian righteousness and works righteousness. There is no other alternative to Christian righteousness than works righteousness. If you don’t build your confidence on the work of Christ, you must build your confidence on your own works, and there’s no middle ground between the two of them.” Amen. So what must I do to be saved? Believe in Jesus, trust in Jesus. So we come to the liberating message of the book of Galatians.

I. The Liberating Message of Galatians

We are going to find in this what some scholars have called “The Magna Carta of Christian freedom.” Or others, “The battle cry of the Reformation,” “The Christians’ Declaration of Independence.” We come in the Book of Galatians face-to-face with the Gospel, that’s what we have here, the Gospel. Many people wrongly assume or think that the Gospel is just for unbelievers or beginner Christians. They think that, as Tim Keller put it beautifully, the Gospel is the ABCs of the Christian life. Well, he says, it is that, but it’s also the A to Z of the Christian life. So again and again we are going to come back to the Gospel message and see how powerful it is for we who are Christians. One of the central observations that Keller makes is one of the most obvious things, Galatians was written to Christians. It was written to people who already believed in Jesus Christ, but they were straying from the simplicity and the clarity of the Gospel message, and they needed to come back again and understand the Gospel. Gospel is for us.

All over the world sin has enslaved people in its power. They are in the chains, just like Paul and Silas were in physical chains, they are in spiritual chains. They are in bondage to sin, in bondage to Satan’s power. They are in chains they cannot see and chains they cannot break. The only liberation from this enslavement is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the power of God.  Romans 1:16-17 says the Gospel is “the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew then for the Gentile. For in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is from faith to faith. Just as it is written, ‘The righteous will live by faith.’”

Picture in your mind Paul and Silas in those physical chains. Then picture sinners, apart from the grace of Christ, at this point not having believed in the Gospel, in the same kind of chains. They are enslaved, they are in prison. Charles Wesley pictured it this way in the hymn And Can It Be, and I just love that verse that talks about salvation in those kinds of terms, that enslavement, the chains, “Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature’s night. Thine eye, [Jesus’ eye] diffused a quickening ray. I woke, the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off. My heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed thee.” That’s liberation, Amen. And only the Gospel can set you free. Now, this is not an escape story, we are not talking about an escape story. I love escape stories. I’ve watched a number of movies that are about great escapes, like The Great Escape, that’s one. Seventy-six POWs escaping from a German POW Camp through a 102 meter tunnel. That’s a great movie. That’s a great story. I’ve watched a movie about an escape from Alcatraz, how this one guy cleverly finds a way how to get off that island and makes his escape. Clint Eastwood was in that one.  Moving on. Then there’s Harry Houdini, I watched a movie about him, how he used to do the Chinese water torture thing upside down in a cell of water. But here is the thing with an escape story. In every case, the escape artist is celebrated.

The Gospel is not about escape, it’s about rescue! It’s about rescue. And it’s right here in Galatians 1 in the verse that you just heard read, in verse 4, Christ “gave himself for our sins to rescue us.” Amen. We’re going to get into that verse but I just want you to see it’s a rescue mission. And the whole thing with rescue is the one being rescued can’t deliver themselves. And to God alone be the glory for the deliverance. To God alone be the glory, to Jesus alone. We cannot save ourselves. Self-salvation through law-keeping is no Gospel at all. It does not work, and even if it did we would spend eternity insufferably praising ourselves and glorifying ourselves for our own great escape. Instead we’re going to be glorifying Christ for His great rescue of us, His deliverance of us. It’s a rescue. And so, we are going to celebrate this Gospel of rescue, this Gospel of liberation for many weeks together in the Book of Galatians.

“The Gospel is not about escape, it’s about rescue! “

Now, let me set some historical context, the apostle Paul wrote this book. He was an apostle, we are going to talk about his apostleship. He was a church planting missionary who went through various regions, including what we now consider modern-day Turkey, and he went through that area and he planted churches. The name “Galatians” is linked to the word Gaul, linked to the history of France. So there were some Gauls that came apparently from that area and settled in Asia Minor. After terrorizing the Greeks and the Romans they settled there and the Roman Empire made Galatia, the place of the Gauls, a subset of Asia Minor, part of the Roman Empire. Paul visited this region with Barnabas on his first missionary journey. Acts 13 and 14 tells the story of how he planted these churches in Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, it tells the whole story about all of that. He was stoned and left for dead by hostile Jewish leaders who followed him from Antioch and Iconium to Lystra and they stoned him and left him for dead. But he wasn’t dead. God raised him up out of that pile and he continued to preach. And at the end of that first missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas revisited the small churches they had planted.

II. False Teachers Enslave the Church

They showed that shepherding heart and that concern for the works that they had done. It was out of that concern that he writes this epistle, because some time after Paul and Barnabas left, some other teachers came along, some false teachers. They were Jews who claimed to believe in Jesus and they believed that a combination of trusting in Christ plus obedience to the laws of Moses equaled salvation. They are who we will call the “Judaizers,” and they were preaching a false Gospel. In so doing, they also undermined the Galatians’ confidence in the apostle Paul as a faithful teacher of the Word. And so they said negative things about Paul. We’ll get into what those negative things were, but it seems to me that they were saying that he got his message and his mission from the apostles in Jerusalem, but he messed it up. They were saying that he didn’t get the whole thing correct and so he himself had to be corrected. And they were adding to the message the rest of the ingredients of the recipe of how it is sinners get saved.

So they are questioning Paul, undermining him, and saying he is, to some degree, a second hander. That he’s not a first-generation leader and his authority is less than that of the apostles in Jerusalem, and that he wasn’t teaching accurately the Gospel. So these Judaizers came and they were telling these Gentiles, these recent converts to Christ, these things and they (the Galatians) had no means with which to fight back. They didn’t understand the law of Moses as well as these Jewish people did, and they couldn’t resist.  So pretty soon after Paul and Barnabas left, they started believing this false Gospel and going off in a wrong direction, and so Paul writes this epistle. So look at Paul’s apostolic greeting.  He’s writing to correct their false understanding of the Gospel. He begins in 1:1-2, “Paul, an apostle–sent not from men nor by a man but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead–and all the brothers with me, to the churches in Galatia.”

So it’s not written to just one church, like Corinthians (which I think was written to just one church), or one individual, like 1 and 2 Timothy, or Titus. This is written to a region of churches. So he meant for this letter to be read to all of these churches. He calls himself an apostle here, he’s asserting his authority.

Apostle literally in the Greek means ‘sent ones,’ an emissary and an ambassador, someone sent out with a mission. Sometimes in the New Testament, the word is used of people like Barnabas or others that were basically the equivalent of missionaries, and so you do see that use. That would be an apostle with a lower case “a.”  Then there is this kind of use; Paul is an Apostle we could say, with an upper case “A.” And he is one of those original pillars on which the church was built, or the foundation on which the church was built as it testified to Jesus Christ, eyewitnesses and authoritative teachers of doctrine, that’s what Apostle with capital A means. And so he wants them to know that his role as an Apostle, as a teacher of the Gospel, was given him by God Himself.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with pastors receiving a commissioning from other people to serve. As a matter of fact, that’s all we have these days. Churches like you give people like me the right to preach and to teach, generally by a congregational vote. But Paul didn’t get his authority and his right to teach or his ministry from any congregational vote or from anybody at all. He got it directly from God through Jesus Christ, and so he has the authority to teach the Gospel, that’s what he’s claiming here. He was called into his ministry directly by Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. Saul, Paul had been a bitter enemy of the Gospel and of Jesus Christ.

He makes his appearance in the Bible as a young man who is consenting to the martyrdom, the killing of Stephen at the end of Acts 7. He then (in Acts 8) begins a career or bitterly persecuting the church, dragging off men and women and throwing them in prison. There are implications that he perhaps may have even killed some of them. He was a violent man, and he at least consented to their deaths, if he didn’t actually himself do it. That’s the kind of man he was. Meanwhile, he was also an excellent law-abiding Jew who was climbing the ladder of careerism and Judaism. He was getting greater and greater as a Jew and being recognized by the authority figures, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, all of these audiences seeing his greatness and Judaism and his law-keeping. And then he became an emissary from them to persecute the church, even getting letters from the authorities in Jerusalem to go to synagogues in Damascus to persecute the Christians there.

And it was while he was on his way to Damascus that suddenly a blinding light from heaven flashed. We’re going talk more about this, God willing, next week. But he fell to the ground and he heard a voice saying to him (Acts 9:4-5), “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus.” Oh, those words changed his life. “I am Jesus. I am the resurrected one. I am the savior. I am the God of the universe.” “Who are you, Lord?” “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now, get up and go into the city and you’ll be told what you must do.” So from the very beginning his own salvation is linked with his calling to work for Jesus as an apostle. So he did not get his commission from any human beings or from any human source at all. The Lord told Ananias who was sent by Him to baptize Paul, the Lord said to Ananias, “Go! this man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer from my name.” So he’s going to be a messenger to the Jews, but especially to the Gentiles.

III. Paul’s Apostolic Greeting

And notice what he says. “Paul, an apostle–sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead.” And so the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is central to this message, how fitting is it? Do you see how fitting it is for us to finish the Gospel of Matthew and go right over into Galatians. Amen. For us to go right from the account of Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection and commissioning of the Apostles into Galatians, which very accurately teaches what message it is that should be preached to the ends of the earth. What Gospel message is it that these Apostles should preach, and that is still with us today. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is central to everything, and it is God the Father who raised Him from the dead. It was a living Christ, it was a living Jesus that appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus and changed his whole life. The resurrection of Christ from the dead was the centerpiece of the Gospel and it was Paul’s own joy and hope.

Then he says, “Grace and peace to you,” it’s a standard apostolic greeting. But in Galatians, I think it takes on an extra significance. Later he’s going to say that they had fallen away from grace, and we’ll talk about that difficult phrase. Basically there’s a principle of grace by which we are saved and it’s over against law or works, self-righteousness. We are saved by grace. We can’t say it enough. We’re saved by grace. What is grace? Grace is a disposition in the heart of God toward us. Start there, it’s in the heart of God. It’s God’s attitude toward us. A disposition of love and benevolence and generosity toward us, to lavish on us, every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, to us who deserved eternal condemnation because we’d broken His laws. So to understand grace, it’s in the heart of God. It results in gifts and good things flowing out from God to us. It comes to us through Jesus Christ. We receive it by faith and it’s directly contrary to what we deserve.

Now, the last part is probably one of the more famous aspects of the definition of grace, unmerited favor. That is so weak and pale compared to the full-blooded understanding of grace. Unmerited favor is when you go find a total stranger and give him a $20 bill. Alright. Friends, eternal life is no $20 bill, and we were not total strangers. We were enemies. We were murderers. We were law breakers and we deserve condemnation, and God is giving us a river of blessings by grace. “Grace and peace to you.” Not by works but by grace we are saved. And in direct opposition, throughout this book they are going to be in direct opposition. You’re either going to be saved by grace or you’re going to be saved by works/law/self-righteousness. So in Galatians 2:21, he says, “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” And later he says in Galatians 5:4, “You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.”

Then he gives us a marvelous quick synopsis of the Gospel message. If you know what to look for, these are sweet, sweet words and they’re in the hymn, one of the verses of the hymn that we just sang. I leaned over to Christy, I said, “Do you realize that the rescue theme and Christ interposed his blood?” That’s right from Galatians 1:3-4, it’s beautiful. Look what it says, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” verse 4, “Who gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father to whom be glory forever and ever, amen.” That’s a very brief, quick summary of the Gospel message. It focuses on Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who gave Himself for our sins. This is the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Jesus interposed His precious blood. He stepped in between us and the lightning strike of the wrath of God. He took that strike for us. On the cross He died in our place. He interposed His precious blood, He laid down his life, He gave Himself. Why? For our sins. The Gospel is incredible. The Gospel tells us it was far worse than you could’ve possibly imagined about yourself and the answer is far more glorious and the future is far brighter than you possibly could have imagined for yourself.

It’s really, really bad news and really, really good news. The really bad news is we were sinners, we were violators of the law of God and God’s wrath was against us because of that written code that stood against us and was opposed to us. Jesus took that guilt on Himself. He took the condemnation that those sins deserve. He died in our place. He did it, it says, “to rescue us from the present evil age.” As I’ve said very plainly, we could not save ourselves. This is about rescue. We could not rescue ourselves, and so God sent His Son with deliverance and He rescued us, it says, from this present or the present evil age. Well, this is something that can only really be seen by faith, you can only see it with eyes of faith, this evil age that we live in. But many verses talk about it, don’t they? Colossians 1:13, says, “He, God the Father, has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us or brought us into the Kingdom of the beloved Son.” That’s a rescue mission.

Jesus was sent by the Father to take us up out of Satan’s dark kingdom and bring us into the beloved Kingdom of Christ. And so Ephesians 2:1-3 talks about how it was for us before we were Christians. It says, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live.” You were living dead spiritually. You were the living dead. You were dead in your transgressions and sins as you lived. As you walked, it says, “And followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air.” That’s Satan. He is “the ruler of the kingdom in the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath”. But God, because of His great, rich mercy and grace to us in Christ, delivered us and rescued us by Jesus’ blood. Amen? Hallelujah.

That’s the rescue. We were enslaved to Satan’s kingdom and could not save ourselves. So God sent His Son to rescue us from this present evil age. We are free now, we’re free! We are free sons and daughters of the living God. We are free. We’re free from sin, we’re free from the law and its power to condemn us and send us to hell. We’re free from hell itself, we’re free from condemnation. But that freedom is not to be used for lust. It’s not to be used for evil. We are now free to serve God as Jesus did. And Paul is going to get into that in Galatians 5. It’s not freedom in the libertarian sense, it’s a freedom to please God, and now we can do it by the Spirit. That is not a message of self-salvation, is it? That’s a rescue in which Jesus has freed us, and so, therefore, to God be the glory, amen?

“We were enslaved to Satan’s kingdom and could not save ourselves. So God sent His Son to rescue us from this present evil age. We are free now, we’re free!”

Look what it says, “According to the will of our God and Father to whom be glory forever and ever, amen.” In self-salvation, you get the credit, you get the glory. You rescued yourself. But in salvation by grace, God gets the glory and we are going to go up there in Heaven when we’re done and we’re going praise Him forever and ever for saving us. It’s good to do it now, don’t you think? Just thank Him, say, “Thank you for saving me. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for your grace. I didn’t deserve it. Thank you.” Then Paul turns and it’s like night and day here, or really day and night, praising God for the glory and then we go into bitter astonishment here.

IV. Paul’s Bitter Astonishment

Verses 6-7, “I am astonished that you were so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different Gospel, which is really no Gospel at all.” Paul’s usual pattern is warm thanksgiving and greetings. He thanks God for the Ephesians. He thanks God for the Philippians, richly and warmly thanks God for them. He thanks God for the Thessalonians and all the ways that God worked in their lives. He even thanks God for the Corinthians, for goodness’ sakes. They were a messed up church. They had all kinds of problems, every problem you can have in pastoral ministry, the Corinthians had. They were all there and yet he thanks God. Listen to this, 1 Corinthians 1:4-6, “I always thanked God for you because of His grace given to you in Christ Jesus, for in Him you have been enriched in every way in, all your speaking, in all your knowledge, because our testimony about Christ was confirmed in you.”

Galatians didn’t get that. Galatians didn’t get any box with a ribbon handed. No gift. They get, “I am astonished at you.” Why? Why so different? Why does he treat the Galatians so differently than everyone else? Well, because they’re turning away from the Gospel itself and he is in deep concern about them. He’s not sure if they genuinely, finally turned away from the Gospel of grace. If so, he says, “Then you aren’t really Christians,” and this is incredibly grievous to him.

He is astonished. He says that they are so “quickly deserting the one who called them by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different Gospel, which is no Gospel at all.” There’s two issues here. There’s a sense of sadness, a sense of shock for him, a sense of bitter disappointment. You could say, “Well, it’s personal. He did all that work and it’s turned out so badly.” I don’t deny that that might have been in his mind, but that’s not what’s motivating him to write here. Oh, it is personal, but it’s not about Paul. It’s about God. You’re abandoning God, the one who called you. You’re turning your back on Him.

And what’s so amazing is that it’s happened so quickly. This isn’t second and third generation now. This isn’t your grandkids. This is you. I don’t get the sense of decades here. I get the sense of months, if not a couple years. After such a short time they have turned their backs on God and on the Gospel of grace. And they’re turning to what he calls “a different Gospel which is no Gospel at all.” What does he mean by that? The word ‘gospel’ means good news. How is it good news that you can save yourself if you’re perfectly obedient to the law of God? How is that good news? That’s bad news. As a matter of fact, it’s a yoke, that it says at the Jerusalem Council neither we nor our ancestors were ever able to bear. No one can bear it. You must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. Can you bear that yoke? It’s a crushing burden.

It’s no good news, it’s no Gospel, it’s no good news here, it’s no Gospel at all. Grace and law are opposites. The law couldn’t save. We looked at that in the Book of Hebrews a year or so ago. The law held no salvation. There was no cleansing of the conscience from law. There was no way it could deliver anyone from sin. And so Paul then utters a curse on the false teachers in verses 7-9. Look at verse 7, “Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion, are trying to pervert the Gospel of Christ.” Trying to reverse the Gospel. “They’re trying to revise it, which means to reverse it,” says Tim Keller. I love that image.

They’re turning away from the full Gospel here. They’re turning away from the truth and they’re being thrown into confusion. There are some people that are confusing you. Now, isn’t it beautiful, the clarity of mind that saving faith brings. Suddenly you can see things. You understand who God is. You understand the world that God made. You know how you fit into it. You understand your sins. You get it all. You see it clearly. That’s why I think John 9, that man born blind that Jesus spits and makes mud and then he washes and he can see, is not just a physical miracle, an actual miracle, but it’s a metaphor, a spiritual image of our own salvation. John Newton thought it so when he wrote Amazing Grace. “How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found. I was blind, but now I can see”. But now these false teachers come and things are confusing, they’re throwing you into confusion. Satan is the god of confusion. And things aren’t so clear anymore. Now they don’t understand and now they’re depressed and discouraged. Later he’s going say, “What happened to all your joy? Remember how happy you were. You’re not happy anymore.”

V. Paul’s Curse on the False Teachers

Confusion has come in and so Paul utters a curse on them or on anyone that preaches a false Gospel. “Even if we or an angel from Heaven should preach a Gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned.” What an incredible statement. Let him go to hell forever and ever. Let him burn in hell forever, if he comes and preaches a false Gospel. He reaches for a lofty language, “Even if an angel from Heaven should come.” Radiant, shining like lightning, like the angel that came and rolled back the stone and sat on it and his appearance was like lightning. If you ever saw an angel like that come and he stands in all this radiant glory and he preaches a Gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned. Because Satan, you know, he can masquerade as an angel of light. He can do that, and so his messengers can look like servants of righteousness too. Paul uses that language. So even if you get a bright shining angel telling you another Gospel, let him be eternally condemned. But he actually adds himself to that.

“If I should come back later in two or three years and say, ‘I think I’ve come to a new understanding of the Gospel. I’ve got a whole new way of understanding this and I start… I realize now the way that we harmonize the Old Testament and the New Testament is Christ plus law equals salvation.’ If you ever hear me say that, then let me be eternally condemned.” Doesn’t matter who says it. What matters is that the Gospel itself can never be changed. And he says it again. He repeats it. He says, “I’ve already said. So now I say again if anyone is preaching to you a Gospel other than the one you accepted, let him be eternally condemned.” It doesn’t matter. So he says it twice. Paul’s ultimate goal here is to please God and not men. He said, “I’m not trying to be popular here.” I wonder if the Judaizers said that about him. “Paul’s just trying to make it easy, easy believeism, don’t have to keep any of these laws, he’s got a big following in every Gentile city he goes. He’s just trying to be popular.”

VI. Paul’s Ultimate Goal:  To Please God

Paul says, “No, I’m not, I’m trying to be faithful, trying to be faithful to the God who gave me this Gospel, that’s what I’m trying to be. Am I now trying to please men or God? Am I trying to win the approval of men?” Now, that is such a temptation, isn’t it? Do you feel that pull on your hearts? Trying to please people, trying to please human, a human audience. The irony with whole Judaizer-legalism thing is, the shoe is on the other foot. They’re living for a human audience. They’re living for the Sanhedrin or the Pharisees, with legalists that taught them their legalism to try to please them. There’s always a human audience with legalism, always. “So I’m not trying to please men, but I’m trying to please God. If I were trying to please men I would not be a servant of Christ.” That’s his ultimate goal.

VII. Application

Now, what applications can we take from this beginning as we begin to look at Galatians? First, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a gift from heaven to us. You’ve heard it preached this morning, how God sent His Son, Jesus, who lived a sinless life perfectly obedient to the law we could not keep.

He kept it perfectly, and he is offering to you and to me a gift, a free gift of perfect righteousness, like a beautiful robe. He’s just saying, “Here, put this on. It’s my righteousness. I get all the credit, but you get the glory and the beauty and the salvation that comes. Put it on and you give me all that nasty, wicked sin and I will take the wrath and the punishment that that sin deserves.” That’s the exchange of the Gospel. Trust in Him, trust. Don’t leave this place unconverted, unconvinced, because there is no other message. If you reject this Christ righteousness gift, the only thing left to you is your own works righteousness and it will not save you. Trust in Him. And if you’ve already trusted in Christ and been a Christian for years, understand what I said a number of minutes ago, the Gospel is still for you. “It’s not the ABCs,” as Tim Keller said. I love this, “It’s the A to Z.” Again and again you’re going to come back to this, I am forgiven in Jesus. I’m forgiven in Christ. I can’t use my good works to calm my conscience. That is such a thing we struggle with, right? Whenever you’re guilty, whenever you violate God’s law in some way and you are guilty and you’ve done something sinful, works righteousness says, “God demands some kind of works, a list of things and once you do those seven things you can start feeling good about yourself again.” That’s works righteousness. Throw it away. It is wickedness.

You come back again to the cross, you come back again to Jesus and say, “I’m a sinner. I’m a sinner, you know who I am. Thanks be to God that you saved me by your grace. Forgive me, cleanse me, renew me and restore me.” And then when He does that, get up and walk in the power of the Spirit and serve God in righteousness and holiness, and live in that pattern the rest of your lives. We have a lot more to say in Galatians, but we’ll stop right here. Let’s close in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the things that we have learned. We thank you for the Gospel message. We thank you for the power of the Gospel to transform us. I thank you for the example of the Apostle Paul in preaching it to us. God, I pray that we would realize there’s no middle ground between Christ’s righteousness and self-righteousness. I pray that we would embrace by faith the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross and embrace by faith the gift of perfect righteousness and embrace by faith the gift of the Holy Spirit who empowers us now to walk in newness of life. Help us to understand this true Gospel we pray in Jesus’ name.

These are only preliminary, unedited outlines and may differ from Andy’s final message.

The story of Martin Luther’s spiritual deliverance through the gospel of Jesus Christ is well known to any who study church history

Here was a super-conscientious monk who lived in daily terror of death and hell; he was terrified of the righteous judgment of God on him for his sins

He began his spiritual pilgrimage in a terrifying electrical storm, face-down in the mud, pleading for his life. He was a law student at that point, but all he wanted was to save his soul from the fires of hell. He was terrified the lightning was sent by God to finish his sinful life and hurl him to hell. So he turned to his defective medieval Roman Catholic theology, and pleaded for his life with the patron saint of miners—St. Anne: “Help me, St. Anne… I shall become a monk!”

This was the standard barter system of Roman Catholicism… trading some pattern of works, of obedience, to pay for sins. He entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt and began trying to earn his salvation by a scrupulous life of being an exemplary monk. But no matter how much he prayed and fasted and beat his body and confessed his sins to his priestly confessor, he just grew more and more terrified of the righteous wrath of God against sinners. Nothing could liberate his soul from the bondage of fear… nothing except the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

Just when things seemed the blackest, Luther was entrusted with the responsibility of teaching the Bible to students at the Wittenberg University… and the daily exercise of searching the scriptures became eventually the avenue of salvation for him.

He rediscovered the doctrine of justification by faith alone… that sinners are made righteous by faith in Christ and not by what they do! It was especially the study of the Book of Romans that taught him the gospel and liberated his soul.

But the Book of Galatians was in some ways even more precious to Luther. In this brief epistle, the Apostle Paul fights against the legalism of the Judaizers, some people who said that faith in Christ was not enough… that you had to add the works of the Law of Moses on top of faith in Christ. Luther was convinced that this is exactly what the false teachers of Roman Catholicism had done with the true gospel of Jesus Christ… added extra burdens on the souls of those Christ came to save… the burdens of religious requirements that were essential to salvation

Luther delighted in the brief, clear, simple, powerful message of Galatians:

“The epistle to the Galatians is MY EPISTLE. To it, I am, as it were, in wedlock. Galatians is my Katie.” (that was his wife’s name)

Every time he read it, it breathed FREEDOM for him… freedom from SATAN’S dark kingdom, from SIN’S CHAINS, from his own guilt and the righteous judgment of God; freedom also from the faulty religious systems that Satan has thrown up to enslave the conscience either to PRIDE on the one hand, or DESPAIR on the other

Luther poured out his convictions in his incredible, history-changing COMMENTARY… one of the most significant Scriptural studies in church history.

Over a century later, John Bunyan, the future author of Pilgrim’s Progress discovered Luther’s commentary on Galatians and it set his soul free from the guilt that had plagued it…

Bunyan wrote: “I do prefer this book of Martin Luther upon the Galatians, excepting the Holy Bible, before all books that I have ever seen.”

I.   The Liberating Message of Galatians

A.  This Morning, We Begin a Study in Galatians

1.  Called “Magna Carta of spiritual freedom”

2.  The “Battle Cry of the Reformation”

3.  The “Christian’s Declaration of Independence”

B.  The Gospel is the Power of God for Salvation

1.  All over the world, sin has enslaved people in Satan’s power

2.  People are in chains they cannot see and cannot break

3.  The only liberation from this enslavement is the gospel of Jesus Christ

Romans 1:16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.

4.  Charles Wesley spoke eloquently of this bondage:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,

Fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray— I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee. My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee

5.  But this liberation comes only through faith in the deliverer, Jesus Christ

6.  There are many thrilling “escape” stories in history…

a.  Escape from Alcatraz: epic and mysterious, how three convicts were able to slip out of a maximum security prison, get to the water’s edge, and float in a manmade raft across frigid, treacherous, shark-infested waters

b.  “The Great Escape”… from a German POW camp in WWII; March, 1944, 76 Allied POWs escaped through a 102 meter long tunnel; it was made into a hit movie with Steve McQueen

c.  Harry Houdini was known as an astonishing escape artist… his most daring escape was the famous “Chinese Water Torture Cell” in which he was held upside-down in a glass tank, in full view of the audience, with his feet manacled in steel stocks…

7.  But these escapes are all thrilling stories that leave us astonished at the people who do the escaping… the stories are told to the glory of the prisoner who escapes

8.  Self-salvation through good works is exactly the same: the story would be told eternally of how we saved ourselves from Satan, sin, death, and hell by this or that act of kindness, or courage, or cleverness, or obedience

9.  Jesus Christ liberates sinners from Satan’s power and from their sins and from the hell that they deserve… but He does it in such a way that He alone gets the glory

10.  So, God ordained justification by faith as the centerpiece of the gospel

Romans 1:17 For in it God’s righteousness is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.

11.  Galatians was written to refute a false gospel that was based on human works of obedience, not on faith

C.  Galatians Emphasizes the Liberation by Christ… it is the Epistle of Freedom

1.  Vs. 4

Galatians 1:3-4 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

2.  Galatians 2:4

Galatians 2:4 This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves.

3.  Galatians 5:1

Galatians 5:1 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

4.  Galatians 5:13

Galatians 5:13 For you are called to freedom, brothers; only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love.

D.  Context: The Churches of Galatia

1.  The name “Galatians” is derived from the barbarian Gauls or Celts who settled in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) after centuries of plundering the Greeks and Romans

2.  The Roman Empire made the province of Galatia a part of Asia Minor

3.  Paul visited the region on his first missionary journey with Barnabas, going to the cities of Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe; while Paul had been in Galatia, he almost died for the work of Christ; he was stoned and left for dead by hostile Jewish leaders who followed him from Antioch and Iconium to Lystra

4.  At the end of that first missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas revisited the small churches he had planted and strengthened the disciples to continue in the faith

5.  Before his second missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas took part in the Jerusalem Council on the circumcision controversy (Acts 15)

6.  That controversy is a HUGE part of the issue in the Book of Galatians, and we’ll get to that in a moment

7.  After the Jerusalem Council, Paul and Silas visited the Galatian churches, delivering the decrees of the Council for all the believers to obey… Acts 16:1- 5 says the churches in that region were strengthened in the faith and were growing daily in numbers

8.  Paul wrote this letter to ALL the churches in Galatia, not just one church (like in Corinth)

9.  He was writing because, after he’d left, some false teachers had come and were disturbing their faith

II.   False Teachers Enslave the Church

A.  Consistent Warnings in Scripture

1.  Jesus’ warnings

Matthew 7:15 “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.

Matthew 24:10-11 At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, 11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.

2.  Paul’s warnings

Acts 20:29-30 I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. 30 Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them.

3.  Peter’s warnings

2 Peter 2:1-3 But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them– bringing swift destruction on themselves. 2 Many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. 3 In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.

4.  John’s warnings

1 John 4:1 Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

B.  Who Were the Judaizers?

1.  They were enemies within the camp… Jews who claimed to be Christians but who were really preaching a so-called gospel of good works mixed with faith in Christ

2.  The trigger issue: circumcision as a doorway to a full life of obedience to the Laws of Moses

Acts 15:5 Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses.”

THAT SUMS UP THE JUDAIZER’S MESSAGE

Circumcision was a doorway into a life of comprehensive obedience to the Laws of Moses… a burdensome life that no one has ever been able to handle

James 2:10 For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.

3.  Jerusalem Council made their views clear… and the apostles and elders came to a clear decision

Acts 15:6-11 The apostles and elders met to consider this question. 7 After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. 8 God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. 9 He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. 10 Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? 11 No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

4.  Paul mentions them in Philippians…

Philippians 3:2-3 Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh. 3 For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh-

5.  Galatians is the clearest exposition of the false doctrine… and of its remedy, the true gospel of justification by faith in Christ alone

Galatians 2:14-16 When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? 15 “We who are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’ 16 know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.

C.  Opposite Enslaving Dangers: Legalism and License

1.  False teachers in the NT generally go two directions

2.  In Galatians and Colossians, they are teaching legalism: that only by obeying the laws of God can we be saved; present obedience to the law will cover past disobedience

3.  In Peter, the false teachers are saying that salvation means you are free to live however you want… they preached freedom from all of God’s laws—license

2 Peter 2:18-19 For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. 19 They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity– for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.

D.  The Most Popular Religion in the World: Self-Salvation

1.  Other than genuine Christianity, all other religions in the world are offering some form of works salvation… self-salvation

2.  Islam is the most legalistic religion in the world… it’s all about the five pillars of Islam: the reciting of the creed, the five times of prayer, the giving of alms to the poor, the fast at Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca… this is how Muslims expect to go to Paradise

3.  Buddhism is about self-salvation through meditation and self-denial

For a Buddhist salvation is reaching Nirvana. Nirvana is a transcendental, blissful, spiritual state of nothingness–you become a Buddha.

To reach Nirvana you must follow the Noble Eightfold Path. The Noble Eightfold Path is:

1.  Right Understanding: accepting the Four Noble Truths. (The existence of suffering; the cause of suffering; the end of suffering; and the end of pain.)

2.  Right Resolve: renounce the pleasures of the body. Change your lifestyle so that you harm no living creatures and have kind thoughts for everyone.

3.  Right Speech: do not gossip, lie or slander anyone.

4.  Right Action: do not kill, steal or engage in an unlawful sexual act.

5.  Right Occupation: avoid working at any job that could harm someone.

6.  Right Effort: heroically work to eliminate evil from your life. Through your own effort develop good conduct and a clean mind.

7.  Right Contemplation: make your self aware of your deeds, words and thoughts so that you can be free of desire and sorrow.

8.  Right Meditation: train your mind to focus on a single object without wavering so as to develop a calm mind capable of concentration.

Following the Noble Eightfold Path requires that a person do the above eight things. Salvation is through what a Buddhist does. It is through human works.

4.  Hinduism:

Salvation for a Hindu is called Moksha. Moksha is when an enlightened human being is freed from the cycle of life-and-death (the endless cycle of death and reincarnation) and comes into a state of completeness. He then becomes one with God.

There are four ways to Moksha:

1.   The Way of Action: This involves carrying out certain religious ceremonies, duties and rites. The objective is to perform works without regard for personal gain.

2.   The Way of Knowledge: This requires using your mind and philosophy to come to a complete comprehension of the universe.

3.   The Way of Devotion: Salvation is reached through acts of worship, based upon the love for a God (there are thousands of gods in Hinduism).

4. The Royal Road: The use of meditation and yoga techniques. This method of reaching salvation is typically only used by wandering monks.

Each of these ways to salvation in Hinduism requires that a person do certain things. Salvation is through what a Hindu does. It is through human works

5.  Cults: Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. all basically works- righteousness

6.  Other philosophies and approaches to life all emphasize moralism—being a good person by some standard, helping others

7.  Only Christianity teaches justification by faith alone

III.   Paul’s Apostolic Greeting (vs. 1-5)

A.  Paul Establishes His Apostleship: Sent Not from Men

Galatians 1:1-2 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 in Galatia:

1.  “An APOSTLE”: Paul here asserts his authority and right to teach doctrine and correct false patterns of thinking and living

a.  An apostle is one who is sent from a higher authority… an emissary, an ambassador

b.  This is the bone of his contention with the false teachers, both here and in Corinth: by discrediting his authority, they discredit his message

c.  Paul wants them to know that his role was given him directly by God and by Jesus Christ

d.  Even more importantly, he wants them to know that the gospel he preached is the TRUE gospel from God… the only message of salvation for the entire human race

2.  Paul did not get his apostleship from any human source… he wasn’t recruited by any people, he wasn’t trained by anyone

3.  Paul was called into this ministry directly by Jesus Christ, and through him, by God the Father

a.  Paul (Saul) was a bitter enemy of the gospel and of Jesus Christ

b.  He makes his appearance in the Bible as a young man who approved of Stephen’s death by stoning

c.  He then goes around destroying the church… dragging off Christians and throwing them in prison

d.  He gained letters of authority from the Sanhedrin to go to Damascus and arrest Christians there

Acts 9:3-6 As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” 5 “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. 6 “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”

4.  When Paul arose, he was blinded; Paul began praying fervently for God to spare him; Christ made his mission clear to him

Acts 22:21 “Go, I will send you far away to the Gentiles.”

Acts 26:16-18 I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. 17 I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them 18 to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’

5.  This was confirmed to Ananias

Acts 9:15-16 the Lord said to Ananias, “Go! This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. 16 I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

6.  When Ananias went to heal his blindness and baptize him, he said:

Acts 22:14-15 ‘The God of our fathers has chosen you to know his will and to see the Righteous One and to hear words from his mouth. 15 You will be his witness to all men of what you have seen and heard.

7.  This is what Paul means by “Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by men but by Jesus Christ

8.  The RESURRECTION is essential to this calling:

Galatians 1:1 Paul, an apostle– sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead

a.  Because a living Christ appeared to him on the Road to Damascus, that was conclusive evidence that Jesus was truly the Son of God

b.  The resurrection of Christ from the dead was the centerpiece of the gospel and of Paul’s own joy and hope

B.  “Grace and Peace to You”

1.  Standard apostolic greeting, but in Galatians, it takes on a little more significance

2.  Grace = more than unmerited favor, but it is God’s determination to do us infinite good, we who deserved infinite punishment; this determination to save us and give us eternal blessing is always given us IN CHRIST

3.  There is salvation by GRACE vs. salvation by WORKS

4.  Grace will be the operative principle that Paul will be preaching in this epistle

Galatians 2:21 I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”

Galatians 5:4 You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.

C.  The Deliverance of the Gospel

Galatians 1:3-5 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 for ever and ever. Amen.

1.  A brief summary of the saving work of Jesus Christ

2.  Jesus “GAVE HIMSELF FOR OUR SINS”

a.  Substitutionary atonement… he died in our place

b.  He laid down his life for us…

3.  “To rescue us from the present evil age”

a.  This is the deliverance I was mentioning at the beginning of the sermon

b.  We were slaves, in bondage to sin and Satan and death… headed for hell

c.  Christ DELIVERED US from all of that by his death

d.  “this present evil age” = the world of rebellion and sin under Satan’s dominion

Colossians 1:13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves

Ephesians 2:1-3 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.

4.  Think of the POWER of that statement!!!

a.  Christ by his death on the cross… by his giving himself for our sins HAS DELIVERED US from the present evil age

b.  ALL ACCORDING TO THE WILL of God the Father… it was God’s WILL for Christ to rescue you

c.  That deliverance is from Satan’s power, sin’s power, death’s power, hell’s power

d.  That defeats legalism AND license

e.  We are free from sin, so that we are now free to serve God fully

f.  This “freedom” is not the freedom the libertine teachers Peter was writing against claim it is… it is the power to do what is right in God’s sight

D.  To God be the Glory

Galatians 1:4-5 according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

1.  This is the point of it all

2.  Salvation by law results in human boasting

3.  Salvation by grace through faith in Christ means God gets all the glory!!

IV.   Paul’s Bitter Astonishment (vs. 6)

Galatians 1:6-7 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel– 7 which is really no gospel at all.

A.  Paul’s Usual Pattern: Warm Thankfulness

1.  Paul usually begins by thanking God for the people he’s writing to

Romans 1:8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world.

Ephesians 1:15-16 ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, 16 I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.

2.  He does this in every single case BUT THIS ONE!!

3.  Amazingly, he even thanks God for the Corinthians, who were screwed up in so many ways…

1 Corinthians 1:4-6 I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. 5 For in him you have been enriched in every way– in all your speaking and in all your knowledge– 6 because our testimony about Christ was confirmed in you.

4.  Why? It’s because of the seriousness of changing the gospel message itself!!

B.  Here: Abrupt Astonishment; a Severe Rebuke

Galatians 1:6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel

1.  The word translated “astonished” is very strong…

2.  Usually used to refer to a crowd’s reaction to a miracle by Jesus

3.  He’s astonished not only that they are DESERTING GOD (the one who called them by grace), but that they are doing it SO QUICKLY

4.  We have no idea the time frame here, but it seems to have shocked Paul

5.  This isn’t several generations later; this isn’t even several decades later

6.  It’s like a newlywed that sneaks out on her wedding night to go be with another man… the timing is STUNNING to Paul

7.  So also the sense of personal desertion

a.  Paul had invested in preaching the true gospel to these people

b.  And he must have felt a sense of personal wrong

c.  But it wasn’t really him they were rejecting

As God said to Samuel when the people of Israel demanded that he give them a king:

1 Samuel 8:7 And the LORD told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.

C.  Deserting God for a “Different Gospel”

1.  They have turned their backs on God who called them by the grace of Christ

2.  Instead, they are running after a false “gospel”

3.  The word “gospel” literally means “GOOD NEWS”

4.  But Paul says the Judaizers’ so-called “gospel” is no gospel at all

D.  But… that “Gospel” is “No Gospel at All”

1.  How could it possibly be good news that the death of Jesus is just the beginning of forgiveness from God; that His blood shed on the cross is INSUFFICIENT to cover your sins

2.  How could it possibly be good news that you have to save yourself from now on by carefully obeying all the Law of Moses?

3.  What is the GOOD NEWS here? No one can do it!!!

4.  This legalistic message is NO GOSPEL AT ALL!

E.  Grace and Law are Opposites

1.  We’re either saved by the grace of God in Christ or we’re saved by our own efforts

2.  Salvation by law is the way we could save ourselves by our efforts… but only if we have perfectly obeyed the law from childhood on

3.  The law made no provision for genuine forgiveness

Hebrews 7:18-19 The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless 19 (for the law made nothing perfect)

Hebrews 10:4 it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

V.   Paul’s Curse on the False Teachers (vs. 7-9)

A.  Satan Sends Messengers of Confusion

Galatians 1:7 Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.

1.  The beauty of pure biblical teaching is the clarity of mind that it brings

2.  Everything suddenly makes sense!! You understand at last both the big picture of God’s creation and rulership over all things AND how you fit into that

3.  This clarity of mind is a gift of the Holy Spirit that comes when He makes you a new creation

4.  It’s likened to being blind and then being able suddenly to see “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see!”

5.  But Satan is the “god of confusion”… and so his servants spread confusion by raising questions and contradicting sound doctrine

a.  The Greek word here is tarrasso: to trouble or agitate or cause inward commotion, to disturb one’s peace of mind

b.  He does it here

6.  Just as Satan in the Garden of Eden assaulted Eve with three things

a.  Questioning God’s Word: “Did God really say…???”

b.  Contradicting God’s Word: “You will not surely die!”

c.  Telling half-truths in the service of a lie: “God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil!”

7.  So Satan’s false teachers spread confusion in the same way

a.  Judaizers: “Yes, Jesus saves you! Yes, He is the true Messiah! Yes, He is the Son of God…” But you still have to earn your own salvation by keeping the Law of Moses!!

b.  They have fine-sounding arguments, but they leave confusion in their wake

c.  They are PERVERTING the truth and confusing the minds of God’s people

B.  Paul’s Curse on Anyone—Angel or Man—Who Preaches a False Gospel

Galatians 1:8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!

1.  This is the most severe thing that Paul could have said

2.  He reaches for extreme language… even if an angel should come down in blinding light and preach a different message, let that angel be eternally condemned

3.  Remember 2 Corinthians 11

2 Corinthians 11:13-15 For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. 14 And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. 15 It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.

4.  He even includes himself… if WE should return to your town with a new message, may we be condemned

5.  Strongest possible language… OT version was “set apart for destruction” under the wrath of God

6.  Like Joshua and the City of Jericho under the “herem” of God… the ban

Joshua 6:17 But the city and everything in it are set apart to the LORD for destruction.

7.  So any teacher of a false gospel is liable to eternal destruction!!

C.  Paul Repeats His Curse for Emphasis

Galatians 1:9 As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!

VI.   Paul’s Ultimate Goal: To Please God (vs. 10)

Galatians 1:10 Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.

A.  Falsely Accused of Being a People-Pleaser

1.  The Pharisees claimed Paul had abandoned Judaism to be popular with Gentiles

2.  They said he was eating and drinking with Gentile dogs just to win their approval

3.  Paul is about to spend the rest of the chapter proving that he got his message directly from God; even more importantly, the entire purpose of the gospel itself is the glory of God… God is the audience for everything

B.  The Shoe is on the Other Foot: The Judaizers are living for human praise

1.  In actuality, it was the Judaizers who were living to please a human audience… the Sanhedrin was the Jewish audience; the religious power elite who gave out the treats to those who dance according to their tune

2.  Jesus exposed those Pharisees plainly, and how they loved to call the tune for everyone, and woe to you if you refused to dance to it

3.  Later in Galatians, we will see how these legalists even intimidated Peter into changing his behavior patterns

4.  Amazingly, legalists are very attractive to people: they are very certain of God’s favor, very confident that they know what God wants everyone to do all the time; it’s very daunting to appear to be the liberal one, the one loosening the standard

5.  Paul had to be very confident that God was speaking this message of freedom, of grace… “No, you don’t have to be circumcised. No, you don’t have to obey the ceremonial Laws of Moses. No, you don’t have to follow the dietary regulations. Yes, you are free to associate with Gentile non-Christians and to eat with them in their homes.”

6.  The legalists stand off and gasp in horror at each assertion… It takes a real God-centered focus to face the legalists unafraid and say, “God is leading to a new phase of church ministry.”

C.  False Prophets Tickle the Ears… and their Disciples Seek to Please Them

Luke 6:26 Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.

2 Timothy 4:3 For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

D.  Ultimate Goal: Pleasing God

1.    God does everything for the praise of His glorious grace

2.  Legalism is intrinsically man-centered

3.  Paul had to keep his eyes on pleasing God and God alone… he is willing to be persecuted for right doctrine

Galatians 5:11 Brothers, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted?

E.  Yet… a Balance: “All things to all people” vs. “People-pleasing”

1.  Here, he clearly gives pleasing God the top priority

2.  BUT all ministry is built on pleasing people too… no preacher or missionary seeks to anger every person he talks to… they want a favorable response

3.  Note what Paul says in 1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians 9:20-22 To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.

4.  BALANCE: please God first (by not changing the message of the gospel, no matter how offensive it is); then, please people however you can without violating God’s standard

VII.   Applications

A.  Come to Christ!

B.  Treasure the Gospel… the Freedom of Justification by Faith Alone

C.  FBC: Let’s Not Give Up on Sound Doctrine While We Try to Grow in Weak Areas

D.  Learn to Resist Legalism… to Seek to Please God, Not Men E.