No Other Gospel E-Book

Josh Moody

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 518

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

As fallen human beings we are quick to deviate from the true gospel, for, as Pastor Josh Moody writes, "we tend toward human gospels." Believers must constantly battle to maintain the purity and simplicity of the gospel. Paul was acutely aware of this as he wrote his letter to the Galatians. He was writing to an established church—experienced believers who had started to slip in their gospel witness. Moody finds in Galatians particular relevance and parallels to many churches today. Stemming from a series of sermons delivered to his church, he examines thirty-one reasons Paul gives for this gospel. Moody writes this book with a pastor's heart, addressing important topics such as "The Gospel Not Moralism" and "The Use of Gospel Freedom." Paul's message is foundational to the Christian faith, and thoughtful readers will benefit from Moody's exposition.

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“Pastor Josh Moody takes us verse by verse through Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Along the way, he exposes our tendency toward man-exalting ‘gospels’ and then focuses our attention on the good news that exalts Christ. No Other Gospel is a model of compelling biblical exposition and a timely reminder to the church of the unchanging good news.”

Trevin Wax, author, Counterfeit Gospels: Rediscovering the Good News in a World of False Hopes and Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals

“Paul’s letter to the Galatians so strongly and passionately articulates the gospel of grace that it has proved transforming in many generations of preachers from Luther to Wesley and beyond. Here Josh Moody reinforces that heritage for the twenty-first century.”

D. A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“These expositions are clear, well-organized, exegetically careful, and theologically faithful. They’re also filled with good illustrations, personal application, and a proper dose of British wit. These qualities make for very good preaching and a very good book.”

Kevin DeYoung, Christ Covenant Church, Matthews, North Carolina

“Josh Moody’s No Other Gospel blends attention to the text, theological insight, and pastoral application in a model of scriptural exposition. His focus on Galatians is a great choice, since this letter addresses so clearly the nature and importance of the gospel—a critical matter in an age when so many Christians and so many churches are confused about the gospel and its centrality.”

Douglas J. Moo, Kenneth T. Wessner Professor of New Testament, Wheaton College

No Other Gospel: 31 Reasons from Galatians Why Justification by Faith Alone Is the Only Gospel

Copyright © 2011

Published by Crossway

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                    Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Studio Gearbox

First printing 2011

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible

(The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-1567-5

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-1568-2

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-1569-9

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2489-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moody, Josh.

No other gospel : 31 reasons from Galations why justification by faith alone is the only gospel / Josh Moody.

      p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-1567-5 (tpb) ISBN 978-1-4335-1568-2 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4335-1569-9 (Mobipocket) ISBN 978-1-4335-2489-9 (ePub)

1. Bible, N.T. Galations—Commentaries. I. Title. II. Title: 31 reasons from Galatians why justification by faith alone is the only gospel. III. Title: Thirty one reasons from Galatians why justification by faith alone is the only gospel. IV. Thirty and one reasons from Galatians why justification by faith alone is the only gospel.

BS2685.53.M66       2011

227'.4077—dc22                                2010032013

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To Rochelle

Contents

Introduction

9

1

The God-ness of the Gospel

13

2

The Gospel of Grace and Peace

23

3

A Different Gospel

31

4

The Gospel Antithesis

39

5

The God-Pleasing Gospel

45

6

The Relevance of the Gospel

55

7

Gospel, Not Religion

61

8

The Authority of the Gospel

69

9

The Gospel of Freedom

77

10

The Unity of the Gospel

85

11

The Gospel of Second Chances

95

12

The Gospel and Justification

105

13

Answering the Common Objection to the Gospel

115

14

The Gospel and the Cross

121

15

The Gospel, Not Moralism

129

16

The Gospel and Abraham

137

17

The Gospel and Legalism

145

18

Gospel and Covenant

153

19

Gospel and Law

159

20

Living in the Light of the Gospel

167

21

Gospel versus Religion

175

22

The Gospel and Formalism

183

23

True Gospel Zeal

191

24

Gospel Identity

199

25

Maintaining the Freedom of the Gospel

209

26

Defending the Gospel

217

27

The Use of Gospel Freedom

227

28

The Gospel and the Spirit

237

29

Walk by the Spirit

245

30

Gospel and Community

253

31

The Gospel Harvest

261

Epilogue: The Gospel Underlined

269

General Index

277

Scripture Index

285

Introduction

This book is born of a passionate conviction that large swathes of the church have grown used to a gospel that is no gospel. This was the conviction that fueled Paul’s famous letter to the Galatians, and the more I have studied it, the more I have felt its relevance as never before. Yes, commentaries on this book outweigh its contents at a rate far exceeding a book per word in the original manuscript. But this is not another commentary; it is the text preached first in the context of a congregation and then in the wider context of the community, now the readers of these written words.

I make no bones about them originating as sermons. Lloyd-Jones felt that his sermons should be printed fairly close to the original as preached. I feel somewhat the same. Certainly there are references to time and specifics of place that need to be removed, as well as peculiarities of the spoken word that suit ill with the written. But like much of our Christian literature, this began as a dynamic oral tradition, and it is passed on now with that same gleam of ardor.

What do I mean by the many gospels that are not gospels of which the contemporary church has grown accustomed? I mean any gospel that is essentially human in its taste. That seems to be the defining issue for Paul. When Paul distinguishes his gospel as “not by man,” he is far from merely making an intellectual argument that he is an apostle of Christ and got his doctrine by revelation. That is part of his case—at an intellectual level it is fundamental to it—but he is saying something far more profound than that. Why does he begin this way with this epistle designed to be read by all the church down through history? He does so because that is always the first issue and the root cause of our going astray. We tend toward human gospels. Their taste suits our palate. We prefer things that are perhaps masked in novel formulations or interesting speculations but which at the bottom line are basically human. They have the similar feel to all other gospels that are really no gospel at all.

That feel is one of humanness. It is one of looking to please other humans. The gospel of God is by its nature not designed to please humans. It is designed to please God. That is one sign of a false gospel, that somehow it tastes as we should have expected. If the gospel that we are used to is something that we could have made up, then we can be sure that it is not a gospel from God. The gospel requires revelation, and it requires divine illumination for us to see. Every other aspect of gospels that are really not gospels stems from this one basic error. That is why Paul starts there. It is the drumbeat throughout the letter. He is most passionate—throughout this passionate letter!—at any point that seems to diverge from the “God-ness” of the gospel.

So there is that. But then there are many gospels that are God-centered which are not Christian. That of course is obvious to any student of world religions, but it seems necessary to state, for Christians can sometimes feel that they have cornered the market on divine properties. There are other monotheisms. But no, Paul does not stop there, and at the very heart of the letter he identifies the central issue: the cross of Jesus Christ.

All true proclamations of the gospel center on Christ. They do not start there. Christ is the answer to a deep, profound, human problem. Some gospels seem to get God right but miss entirely the cross. Well, actually that too is a human-pleasing gospel, not a gospel of true divine origin. God has designed things to exalt his Son at the cross, and any gospel that does not center on the cross of Jesus Christ is not truly God-centered in a real sense. It is a distortion of God-centeredness. Paul makes all of this very clear at the end of Galatians 2. We are crucified with Christ. Any gospel that has no room for that stark message is no gospel that Paul (or more importantly the Bible or God himself) would recognize.

This brings us to one of the great oddities about Galatians, rarely mentioned if at all, which is its comparative silence on the matter of sin for long portions of its discussion. Of course, Paul here, as in Romans, understands the essential need of humanity in terms of our “sin,” saying as much in verse 4 of the first chapter! Much of chapter 5 is also about living morally. Still, in the book of Romans (the best commentary on Galatians) sin is first declared as the universal sickness of humanity before the solution of Christ crucified is presented. But not here. We have an extended argument about Paul’s credentials as someone who did get this gospel by revelation, and a display of how Paul was right in what had become a well-known disagreement with Peter, and then these statements that center upon the cross. Why no extended theology of sin?

The answer of course is that Paul is dealing with people who were beyond thinking of themselves as sinners. At least in Romans the separation of man from God was a live problem to which Paul presented the solution, but in Galatians they had moved beyond all that. Nothing displays the profound seriousness of the problem in which the Galatians found themselves more than that they seemed to have made themselves immune to the category of being sinners in need of salvation. I suspect that nothing shows the great sickness of much of our Western society more than the same thing.

These were Christians in danger of losing their authentic orthodox Christianity, but at this point still Christians nonetheless. And for our churches today nothing, I think, shows the seriousness of the situation we are in more than that we have birthed a generation that is not used to feeling humbled by the grandeur of the holiness of God and therefore not living in the profound joy of thankfulness to Christ. I speak to myself as much as to anyone. Perhaps the Western church is, above all, a complaining church. We harp on about our difficulties and problems, but rarely do we play the harp in praise to Christ our redeemer in consciousness of our own innate sinfulness.

What do we do with such a situation? We do what Paul did. Within our own context, we claim the divinity of our gospel message, we point to the necessity of the centrality of Christ, and we show how what we have been told is superior is really far inferior, and it is a perversion of the Bible that we hold dear. This gospel that is no gospel is far from breaking down barriers; it raises them up again. It is what caused Peter to separate himself from fellow believers. Why? Because it is human. And humans are tribal. And tribalism is divisive, for it’s a play on endless shifting ground about who is superior.

We must grasp the universal nature of what Paul is talking about. Perhaps that is the key at a technical level for understanding Galatians today. The book of Galatians is really neither about first-century Judaism nor about sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism. It is actually about our common human tendency to think we no longer need Jesus. We have moved on from the cross. We now have a bigger, better gospel—a gospel that is no gospel—that will divide us from God’s people, and that is the common human tendency to self-righteousness.

Yes, sin is not expounded at great length in this letter but self-righteousness instead (even worse). That was the sin of the Galatians, and I suspect it is our sin too. So, as we survey all of Paul’s argument about the right interpretation of the Old Testament in the middle part of the letter, we come to his other great theme, which is the work of the Spirit. Arguments innumerable abound about justification, as if for Paul this was “merely” a dry doctrine, a legal doctrine, a doctrine about position and status and declaration. In reality, it was for Paul a spiritual doctrine. It was connected to regeneration. So, far from being a confusing addition, as so many have thought, Paul’s great treatise on the work of the Spirit in the Christian’s life is inextricably connected to his teaching on justification.

Those three subjects form the heart of what is, and therefore what is not, the gospel. It is God-ness—in origin, subject, feel, taste, and honor—all to him and from him. It is cross-centered understanding of justification by faith alone. The cross is at the heart of all this, and then the work of the Holy Spirit, who breathes through the book and is inextricably connected with the one true gospel.

I suppose we should not be surprised that Paul’s theology of the gospel is Trinitarian. Nor should we be surprised that his announced intention, the gospel of grace and peace, is what he provides through the atoning work of Christ on the cross—peace with God, according to the grace of Christ.

The God-ness of the Gospel

Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia.

GALATIANS 1:1–2

In the heart of everyone lies an atheist. Not perhaps the kind that thinks in a strict literal sense that God does not exist. There may be some in church like that. When Christians gather, we are never to assume that all believe; rather, we are to hope that those who do not believe come so that we might present the truth of God in word and deed.

There may be some reading these words who struggle with the reality of God when difficult things are happening and times are tough. But the kind of atheist I am talking about, which lies in my heart and in yours, is the kind which believes not that God does not exist but that God is not able. We are practical, not theoretical, atheists. We come to church. We are busy in God’s work. We serve. We talk the talk; we even walk the walk. But we tend to act as if God and the gospel are not sufficient to achieve what needs to be achieved. We are people who have the gospel but for whom the gospel has become a starting point rather than the reference point for all our efforts. We are religious; we may call ourselves evangelicals, but the evangel (that is, the gospel) does not impregnate every aspect of our theology nor every part of our lives.

In short, we are tempted to believe that what happens in church on Sunday morning is a human event. That is why Paul begins his letter with such a fierce denial—“not from men nor through man” (v. 1). As we notice that, we realize that straight away, unlike many of his letters, Paul seems to feel the need to begin by establishing his authority. Why does he do that? It is just one of the many puzzles that Galatians presents to the Bible student. But for all its complexity, and we will gradually unravel some of those knots together, Galatians is a book of fire and ice. It reminds me of the story of the young man who was first being set aside for the ministry. He was asked whether he was zealous. He said that he was but that he was not the kind of person who set the Thames River on fire. The man interviewing him said, “I don’t want you to set the river on fire. What I want to know is, when I throw you in will there be steam?”

Despite all the complexities in which Galatians has been tied up throughout the years of human interpretation, it still sets up steam whenever it is read. It, of course, was the book that really kicked off the Reformation. Martin Luther called it the love of his life; it was “Katherina Von Bora,” his wife. He studied it repeatedly and found in it the release of the gospel to free him from his legalism. It has done that to many another since. It was John Wesley who, through the reading of Luther’s preface to the book of Galatians, found that “his heart was strangely warmed.”

In fact, I think we may take it as a rule that Galatians is one of those books of the Bible that the Devil loves to try to blunt. It is a sharp sword, and my suspicion is that today as never before it needs to be unleashed to our world and to our church, yet scholars know that there are many head-scratching moments that it produces and that people ponder over. Our task will not be to enjoy scratching our heads together over its difficult bits but to clarify and then unleash. Like any part of the Bible, it does not need defending. “Defend the Bible,” Spurgeon said once, when asked about his approach to answering difficult questions of Scripture, “I’d sooner defend a lion.” As no other, this is a lion, and together we simply need to study it carefully so that we can clearly listen to it roar.

In this chapter we are dealing with just two verses, so we don’t need to tackle all the questions at once; these two verses will be quite enough for now. What I want us to learn here is that it is absolutely essential that we have our religious authority in the right place.

I’m a parent of three young children. Before I was a parent, there were certain things I thought I would never do as a parent. One was lick the corner of a handkerchief and wipe the face of my child. I remember seeing someone do that and thinking, I’ll never do that. Another was resorting to the cop-out, “Because Daddy says so.” Why are we going to do this, why that? “Because Daddy says so.” But there are times when that assertion of parental authority is not only necessary but essential. “Don’t cross the road. There’s a car coming. Stop!”

That’s what Paul is doing. Not by man, but by God. In fact, the whole first two chapters of this letter are really taken up with Paul’s asserting his authority as an apostle. He interweaves complex doctrine, especially at the end of chapter 2, a long story about how he became an apostle, and about when he confronted Peter, and it’s all saying, “Not by man but by God.” Then in chapters 3 and 4 he outlines in more detail the message of the gospel as against those who had agitated the Galatian Christians with their message of the necessity of law. The agitators were saying that Jesus was not enough; you also needed lots of rules. Paul denies it there and explains why that is nonsense theologically as well as experientially. Then in chapters 5 and 6 he gets very practical and explains how his gospel (God’s gospel) actually does what the agitators said the law could do. His gospel reconciles. His gospel produces moral fruit. His gospel has the power of the Spirit and frees people from the bondage of habits that self-destruct.

Paul is saying, “You’re asking why. I’ve heard you’re off on the wrong track. Okay, I’m going to explain, but you’ve got to get this first, partly because the apostle says so.” It’s a straightforward, bold authority claim.

I want you to understand from these first two verses, as we begin to get into Galatians together, that it’s very important that we have our religious authority in the right place. If we are crossing the road and about to get hit by a massive truck because we’re looking the wrong way, we need to have that voice say, “stop,” so he begins with this claim to his apostolic authority, “not.” What we need to learn at the outset is this: believe the message of God’s messenger. Paul gives us three reasons why we should do that.

Believe God’s Messenger Because God Sent Him

First, believe the message of God’s messenger because God sent him. “Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father”(v. 1).This looks like a traditional ancient greeting, but, like all of Paul’s greetings, this is the summary of the message of his letter. It’s like an e-mail heading: From, To, RE. This is what this letter is about. There are three practical implications for us.

1) If God can use Paul, he can use you. There is a unique aspect to Paul’s sending, which we will get to, but Paul’s conversion is also constantly used in Scripture as a model for what God can do. He was Saul. He was the religious terrorist. He was converted. He became a church planter and preacher, an evangelist and missionary. We are practical atheists if we limit God’s usefulness of us to our personality. God did not so greatly use Paul because he thought Paul had all the right credentials. It was not “Oh, Paul, he knows the Bible and has good connections; let’s get him.” No, it was the religious terrorist. How unlikely is that? God delights to take unlikely people and use them because then the focus is on God, not on the unlikely people.

I’ve heard Billy Graham preach live two or three times. I was never impressed with his rhetorical skills, but I was deeply impressed with the power of the Spirit. I’ve met powerful religious leaders, and then I’ve met the dear old lady with the faraway prayerful look in her eye. I know that “the friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him” (Ps. 25:14), and that the lady is moving heaven and earth for the Billy Grahams of the Lord. She will be at the front of the line to the throne of heaven. There are lots of talented people around church today, and I don’t despise that. We used to joke when I pastored near Yale that we were probably the Baptist church with the highest average IQ in America, and at the church where I worked in Cambridge, one practically needed a PhD to run the overhead projector. Fine, God can use our talents. He’s given them to us. But as soon as we think our talents are why God chose us, rather than that God delighted to use us, the chief of sinners, I suspect that God may begin looking for another weeping widow or broken man, for God raises up the humble, and pride comes before a fall. It is the Sauls that God makes Pauls. That is a statement of practical theism, not practical atheism.

2) If Paul was an apostle, we are not. There are two kinds of apostles in the New Testament. There are the apostles of the churches, those sent by the churches for various tasks, and then there are the apostles of Christ, those sent by Jesus himself. Of course, Paul is claiming here to be the latter sort of an apostle of Christ. But where does this word apostle come from? Some have said that it was a Jewish term used of an official position. That is possible, but the evidence for it is later than this, and those positions were different in some ways from this anyway. Others have said the word was just taken from the Greek, but in Greek it was rarely used in this way; sometimes it was used of a naval expedition or of a boat. The answer is that the word comes as used by Christ, and he is picking up on the word from the Old Testament, all of which is fulfilled in him. So Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). He called them to himself and designated some apostles. That word apostle in the Greek translation of the Old Testament is used repeatedly of Moses and his sending by God and of Isaiah and his sending by God. “Here I am, send me. . . . Go, I am sending you.”

The apostles were God’s sent people, uniquely authorized, as were the prophets in the Old Testament, specifically following on Christ’s sending into the world by God the Father, carrying on that mission. This was a special sending, no longer in existence, that Paul had uniquely “as to one untimely born” (1 Cor. 15:8) through his Damascus road encounter with the risen Christ himself. Therefore, our authority must be, practically speaking, taken from Scripture, not from tradition or culture or what humans of any kind, dead or living, say. They can help, but they can never go toe-to-toe with Scripture, and when they do, the Bible must win. When preaching, I want people flicking through the pages, staring down at the Bible, believing the Word that comes through me, not just the human speech. When we plan, it is the Bible that must guide. Our worship must be Bible-centered in order to be God-centered.

3) If Paul was not from man nor by man, we who minister God’s Word must at least be not from man if we are also necessarily by man. Ministers of the gospel are called by churches. They are “by man” in that sense, but they are also to be from God ultimately, that sending which the church confirms. No one is to be in the pulpit—ordained as a missionary, church planter, pastor, elder, or otherwise set aside by God for Word ministry—unless he is in an ultimate sense put there by God, even though that calling must be confirmed by the church in a regular and proper fashion to keep the lunatics out, and because there are no apostles in Paul’s sense any more today.

No one in his right mind signs up for God’s work for the fun of it. There are better ways to get beaten up. “Paul, you’ve got to go and do this, and let me show you how much you will suffer for my name.”

“Moses, you want to go.”

“Actually, no, I don’t.”

“Well, you’ve got to anyway.

“Isaiah, will you go?”

“Here I am, send me”

“Oh, and by the way, no one’s going to listen.”

“Jeremiah, you’re on, but your ministry will have no impact, and the people will go into exile, and you’ll be known as the weeping prophet.”

“Thanks, God. Sign me up.”

First you’ll be spit out, then you’ll be beaten up. Some people will hate you. They’ll twist your words. People like the Galatians, for whom you have given your heart and soul, will line up to get circumcised if you turn your back for five minutes. Sounds like fun. If God wants you, he’ll get you, and you’ll need this burden that you are there because God wants you there. Even Augustine was made a bishop against his initial desire. We should serve willingly but not willfully. God is real, and he gets his people where he wants them. That is practical theism.

Believe God’s Messenger Because God Raised Jesus from the Dead

Second, believethe message of God’s messenger because God raised Jesus from the dead. “Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him [that is, Jesus] from the dead” (v. 1). People wonder why Paul mentions the resurrection at this point. They think it’s strange that it comes before the cross, which we find in verse 4. The resurrection is mentioned here because it’s part of Paul’s establishing his authority. God raised Jesus from the dead, and Paul received his commission as an apostle by seeing the risen Jesus on the Damascus road. So we may guess that the Galatian agitators—those who were in one way or another causing difficulty in the churches in Galatia—were saying that Paul’s experience was just a mystical one, a personal conversion experience. Paul is going to show that he received it all from Jesus, not from man, as he goes on throughout this first section of the letter. Right here at the beginning he includes that God raised Jesus from the dead. Paul is saying, “I did not have a personal mystical experience—I actually saw Jesus.”

Why does that matter for practical atheists like us? It matters because Jesus is alive. We don’t worship a dead hero; we worship a living Lord. Jesus rules the church, and he rules by his word. Prayer makes a difference. Private repentance is the bit of yeast that makes a difference to the whole batch of dough. So is the private sin. This is a spiritual reality. We are not playing at church. Heaven and hell stand on the brink, eternal decisions are being made in the secrets of all our hearts, and I want you to know that Jesus is alive. He has the power to rescue you. He breaks you that he might remake you. He has put you here reading for this very purpose, that your theft at work may stop, that your marriage may be healed, that your life may be turned around. The church is not a tomb for a dead Lord; it is a vehicle for a living Savior, vibrating with his Holy Spirit.

He is God. Notice how Paul just assumes Jesus’ divinity here. It’s not by men but by Jesus. Jesus is not just a man. He is God. He and God the Father are one. It’s important to notice the internal logic of Scripture, as John Stott is said to have called it. Jesus is alive. He is God. He is Lord. He knows the secrets of your heart. He knows your pain. He knows all. He is not distant and dead; he is present by his Spirit, and there is a unique moment now when Christ, as you receive him by faith, can come and do his renewing work in your heart.

It seems to me that the great difference between practical theism and practical atheism is the church of the living God. Jesus is alive, and we can’t keep that a secret. It is not okay to think, When they get to know us, they’ll realize that Jesus is alive. It has to be front and center in our worship, our smiles, our greetings, our interaction, our preaching—in everything we do, Jesus is alive. Church is not an evangelical golf club. It is the church of the living God, and we need to indicate that. We don’t want to give the impression that Jesus died and went to heaven in 1950. He’s still alive and doing things today. A church that decides it has “arrived” is a breath away from dying. Pride becomes a fall. We need practical theism, a resurrection theology, the power of the Spirit through the Word of God.

Christ’s resurrection confirms and establishes Paul’s authority and therefore the authority of the Bible. Christ’s resurrection means that he is alive today and here by his Spirit, and his Word is a living word. It means that preaching is not merely lecturing. Preaching is teaching, but preaching is to be logic on fire, as it’s been called. It is to have what I call a “prophetic edge.” One time when Charles Spurgeon was preaching, he looked up into the gallery and said, “There is a man there with a pair of gloves in his pocket that are not his.” It was true, and the man was converted. This is not weird enthusiasm; it is the working of Christ by his Spirit through his Word. Another time Spurgeon was sounding out the acoustics in a building and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” The janitor was converted on the spot.

I don’t know what sadnesses you carry with you, but God does. Jesus does. Not man, but Christ. He is risen. He is here for you to take him and embrace him anew, to break down that brick wall of defense between you and the power of the Spirit and to be renewed in his likeness.

Believe the Messenger Because God’s Family Agrees

Third, believe the message of God’s messengerbecause God’s family agrees. “And all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia . . . ” (v. 2). First, notice that though Paul unashamedly asserts his authority, he is still humbly a part of the family. It is “all the brothers who are with me.” He has a special calling as an apostle, but he is also one of the brothers. They are all mentioned here in general to indicate that they support this letter. Their support is not theologically required for Paul; all that’s required is his authority as an apostle. But their support is noted. There may be times when, like Athanasius, we are to be against, it feels, the whole world in our support of the core message of the gospel, but, by and large, even the apostle, and especially servants such as we, are to be humbly aware of the support, the counsel, and the checks and balances of good brothers and sisters around us.

Notice also that Paul is not writing to the church of Galatia but to the churches of Galatia. There is a long, old debate about exactly which part of Galatia Paul means, and the answer to that debate doesn’t matter as much as sometimes thought. (We will look at it when we get to those places in the text where it has some bearing on chronology.) But it is interesting that he does not talk of the church but of the churches. There are places in the New Testament where the church is mentioned as the universal church, but that same church always has a local manifestation. It is the constant assumption of Scripture that, to be a member of the universal church, one must be a member of a local church. Here were several local churches all alike affected by the confusion that Paul seeks to counter with the clarion call to the centrality of the gospel. Each of these churches is important, and every Christian is assumed to be a part of one of the local fellowships or congregations or churches.

Common in the Western world is the feeling that as long as we are Christians, we don’t really need to be a part of a local church. Obviously some of the mechanics of the local church today are just part and parcel of life in the twentieth-first century, things we can’t find in the text of the New Testament itself, any more than we can find church architecture explicitly discussed. Having said that, the New Testament knows nothing of a Christian who is not a part of a local church. So, if you’re a Christian but not a part of a local church, find a biblical church where you can get involved in order to be securely and confidently a member of the universal church.

We have only just begun. As you can see, the book of Galatians is very relevant. The message of Galatians as a whole is simply that a “Jesus-plus” gospel is really a “Jesus-minus” gospel; if you add to Jesus, you are really detracting from Jesus, from his centrality, from his sufficiency, from his glory. Galatians is a call back to the centrality of the gospel in all things. It is a challenge to us to realize that the gospel itself makes us grow holy, not the law but the Spirit of the risen Christ. Chapter by chapter we are going to soak in these things.

In these first two verses, we have seen Paul set out his subject by means of a bold claim to his authority. He is watching the young Christians in Galatia enthusiastically embracing an addition to the gospel in order to become more mature, but that addition will be a subtraction and supplant their trust in Christ alone. Paul is worried for them. He is up late at night caring for them. He loves them. They are his children. He has fought battles for them. He is writing this letter at a frenetic pace. It’s possible that he wrote this letter personally, not using a secretary, and wrote at great pace. As he did so his letters got larger and larger as he wrote faster and faster over page after page. He longs for them. He sees a sixteen-wheeler trailer truck bearing down the road, and they are crossing into its path while looking the other way, misled, smiling, but in real danger. He says, “Not by man but by God—by Jesus Christ and God the Father—stop! Don’t cross that road! Rest in Christ alone.” He is alive. He commissioned Paul. It is the Bible. It is the gospel. There is no other way, and to this centrality of Christ and the gospel, Paul is calling us.

This is what it’s got to be. At the very heart of it is the gospel. If you’ve come for anything else, you’ve come to the wrong book. Nothing else do I have to offer. There is nothing else. You’re going to read about Christ, about faith in him, about the gospel of Jesus, and that is it.

The Gospel of Grace and Peace

Grace to you and peacefrom God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the presentevil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

GALATIANS 1:3–5

When you write a letter, you begin a certain way. Typically, letters in English begin with “Dear so-and-so.” If you were instant-messaging on your Facebook page, it might just be “Hi.” Other languages have different traditions. In French, a formal letter typically begins simply, “Monsieur,” and the more intimate equivalent of “Dear” is reserved for someone one knows. We don’t think of how affectionate our traditional greeting is in English. We don’t normally go up to someone we hardly know and say, “My dear, let me talk to you about something.” But it is the form to begin letters with “dear.”

There was protocol in the ancient world too. Typically, letters in Greek began with “Greetings” or a wish for joy to the recipient. We find this traditional greeting at the beginning of James’s letter in the New Testament. A common form of well-wishing among the Hebrew speakers was “Peace,” or shalom. What we find in Paul’s letters, and a few other places in the New Testament, is that the traditional greeting has been infused with Christian doctrine and pastoral application. So here we have, “Grace to you and peace” (v. 3).

Grace is very close to the traditional greeting, but here it is slightly changed, and it carries the weight of the Christian doctrine of grace. Peace is there as what grace achieves. So, at the very start of his letters, Paul says, “This is the gospel,” grace and peace. Here, more than in any of his letters, Paul immediately feels the need to clarify that this greeting is not simply “Hi” on his instant-message Facebook, or “Dear” in a letter. This grace and peace is about the one “who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age” (v. 4). Right up front he puts forth what he is going to write about. This is it—grace and peace. Martin Luther said about grace and peace that they “embrace the whole of Christianity. Grace forgives sin, and peace stills the conscience.”

This is important because there is great danger that we can lose sight of what all this is actually about, which is what was going on with the Galatians. They thought that grace and peace were just words. They had lost the meaning of the words; they were supplementing the gospel with various ceremonies. Of course, this was leading to friction. Some were on the inside track and others felt on the outside. There were divisions between Jews and Gentiles. They had begun to think that something other than grace and peace lay at the heart of their fellowship, because they had begun to think that something other than grace and peace lay at the heart of their salvation.

When we say “good-bye,” we just say the word without thinking that we are actually saying, “God be with you.” There’s nothing wrong with just saying “good-bye,” but there is something wrong with thinking that grace and peace are just religious words and not about the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ for our sins. If we don’t keep that clear, we’ll soon lose our way and have friction about other things, as well as an uneasy conscience. When Paul says, “Grace to you and peace,” he is not just wishing them peaceful feelings. He is referencing the death of Jesus for our sins, which means we can have peace with God for all eternity.

Good novels and stories have diverse elements, but one thing they all have in common is a tight plotline. The Galatians had lost the plot. Paul’s words were designed to serve as a compass, their guiding star, their GPS telling them the way to go. Those involved in political campaigns are always saying to each other, “You’ve got to stay on message.” Paul does that with the Galatians, and he says the same to us. In our last chapter we looked at Paul’s authority as an apostle and that we should believe his message because God had sent him. Now he is beginning to tell us what that message is. He is urging us to stay on message.

Stay on Grace

Paul writes, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen” (Gal. 1:3–5). Every word of that is grace.

First, it is grace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Our salvation does not start with us. We do not initiate the process. We did not come up with the plan. We did not start it. God did. This is the very central point and greatest truth that distinguishes Christianity from other religions. I have travelled around the world. I have worked with people of different religious faiths, and I can tell you that all the religions I have come across are human in their view of salvation.

C. S. Lewis was once walking past a room of academics arguing over what is unique about Christianity. He walked into the room and told them that the answer is grace. It is grace in that God is the initiator. Christianity is not a religion of pulling yourself up by your boot straps. It is a faith in God’s grace. A. W. Tozer liked to say that “God is always previous.” We are never the initiator. God is. He was before us—better, he is before us. Everything comes from him, and salvation is by his grace.

Second, it is grace that Jesus gave himself for our sins. The phrase “gave himself” means that he died on the cross. Jesus was not made to do it. One idea is that God the Son’s death was forced upon him by the God the Father. But Jesus did it willingly. He gave himself. This is a wonderful grace. He did not have to. He chose to. And he chose to because he loves his people. He loves you. Soak in that truth of grace. Let nothing and no one take that away from you. Enjoy it. Celebrate it.

There is a debate over the Greek word “for” in verse 4. The word “for” might refer back to the sacrificial system in the Old Testament, thereby rendering the image of the sacrificial lamb slain for our sins. It could also simply mean “on account of” or “in the place of,” an idea that is also conveyed via the theological truth of the sacrificial system that lies at the back of this in the Old Testament. Either way, it is for your sins. That is the very thunderclap against all guilt.

I know what it is to have a guilty conscience. Pastors are sinners too. I’ve screwed up in my life, and I will again. We come as broken people to a broken Savior who gave himself for our sins. Can’t you see it? Can’t you stay on message? I need no reminder of the standard that I am to reach, and every day I feel my failure to attain it. What I need is a Savior. There he is “for our sins.” When the Devil asks, “You are a sinner and how can you be forgiven?” we are to say, “I am a sinner. That is why I need to be forgiven.” This is a word of grace.

Third, it is graceto deliver us from the present evil age. The New Testament expresses consistently that we as Christians are people of a new age while still living in the midst of this age, which is going to pass away and is under the control of the Evil One. Paul is not telling us that we have been taken out of the world but that we have been taken out of the influence of evil.

So, the cross of Jesus Christ does not just forgive our sins; it also gives us the power to live in a holy way. Because of grace I can break that habit. I am free. Holiness does not come from law. It does not come from more rules. Holiness comes from the cross of Christ, the Spirit of Christ, the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus did this for us in principle at the cross, and as we walk in the Spirit, we increasingly realize that potential within us, all by grace.

Fourth, it is grace by the will of God our Father and to his glory forever and ever.Because this is all from God, it is therefore something from which God alone gets the glory. People have often wondered why there is no thanksgiving at the beginning of Galatians, as was typical in Paul’s letters. I do not think it is because Paul was mad, or did not care. He calls them his children later in the letter, so he obviously cared. I think he was worried for them, much like a dad over a child who hasn’t come home by 3 a.m. Paul is concerned about where they are and what they are doing. He is praising God because he knows it is by grace, and he has to trust, and in all things he will give praise to God. That too is grace. “I long for your salvation, prodigal son, in a distant land, checking out Christianity by chance, apparently. I long for it. I’ve been up late for you, longing for you, and I’m praising God that he is able.”

People ask me, “If you think salvation is all by God, why do you bother to preach?” I tell them that if I didn’t think salvation was all by God, I’d never dare get in the pulpit. This isn’t me. It isn’t my message or power. It is his, and I know that he is able to deliver you from the trap, from the bondage, from the pain, from the bitter root that no amount of skilled pastoral care can dig out. Christ, who gave himself for your sins to rescue you from the present evil age, Christ by God’s will—to him be glory. He has the power.

It is all grace. Paul didn’t begin his letters saying, “Hard work, discipline, moral improvement, church structure, certain kinds of music, law, and ceremony.” It is all grace. Stay on message, which means stay on grace.

Stay on Peace

Stay on message also means stay on peace. There is a great confusion in some circles about what is objective and what is subjective. Some say this message is all objective. “Don’t get all gushy with me. Don’t get all touchy-feely. This is an objective declaration of fact. It’s not about what I feel; it’s about what God has done.” Others say it’s about a changed life, a relationship; it’s about a subjective experience. The great wonder and truth of Christianity, of course, is that it is about both. The objective reality of God’s salvation through the death of Jesus Christ becomes grace and peace to you for our sins according to the will of our God and Father.

The grace of God means that we who believe have peace of conscience. I beg you not to move away from the message of grace. If you do, you will move away from the experience of peace. I see a man who is always torturing himself over some sin he committed ten years ago. It was a very terrible thing. He has been to counselors. He has prayed. And, as people say, he cannot forgive himself. My friend, you are proud. Who are you to think you need to forgive yourself? What matters is that God has forgiven you. Don’t be so arrogant. You are playing at God with your conscience. You are not the judge; God is. It is for our sins. It is peace to you. It is the will of our God and Father. If Paul can say, you, our, our to these Galatian Christians who were an inch away from getting circumcised and going back to the basic principles of this world, don’t you think he can say the same to you?

I see a woman who was greatly sinned against. It was many years ago. She carries the wound like a badge. You can’t see it, but she thinks you can. It is always with her. She won’t let it go. She thinks she cannot let it go. She holds on to what he did, and now the sin is multiplied by years of spoiled years after the original great sin against her. Sister, you who were so greatly sinned against, be free. Stand firm on peace. It is for freedom that Christ has set you free; don’t let yourself be burdened anymore. It is for our sins, and our God and Father, and it is peace to you. There is no shame. There is no dirt.

I once knew someone who had been a terrorist before his conversion. He was late on in life and he felt terribly depressed that so many years had been wasted. Then he read, “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten” (Joel 2:25), and he knew that the Lord would give him back the wasted years.

At the cross of Jesus Christ we can not only be forgiven but also learn to forgive. The great truth is that every sin will find its judgment either at the cross or in hell, and the great truth of life is that if we let the sins that people have done against us build in bitterness, we are only hurting ourselves. We are letting a seed of hell—sin dealt with but not at the cross—grow in us. Take that sin that was done against you to the cross. Look at the blood and gore. There is violence there, yes, but it is the outpouring of God’s love, the breaking of his heart that you, dear sister, might not carry that burden any more. Be free. Stay on peace.

Within a Christian movement of students a theological controversy arose. In the end, the leaders from the two groups got together to hash it out. I don’t know all the details of the conversation, and I suppose they were not recorded, but it is a matter of record that at one point the leader of one group asked the other this question: “Is the cross of Jesus Christ central to your message?” The leader of the other group replied, “It is very important but not central.” Friends, there are many matters over which we may—and must—this side of heaven disagree, and others over which we give ground in gentleness and humility. Some of the current theological discussions in Western Christendom appear to the rest of the world not that dissimilar from the infamous medieval debate about how many angels you could fit onto the head of a pin. But we are not to go to the other extreme either. We must stay on message. The liberal group in that discussion was, at the time, much larger and more powerful, but it dwindled. The evangelical group stood firm. It looked marginalized, but then it grew in strength and numbers and influence.

We must preach grace and peace, not just as “Hi” or “Dear so-and-so.” We must preach in reality and power with the cross at the heart of our message. That is the only hope for peace for sinners like us, for guilty consciences, for broken families, for sleepless nights, for the next generation, for life now and for eternity. By his grace may we be given peace now and forever.

As we get a sense of this gospel of grace and peace, in many ways a summary of the whole of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, we are prepared for his next foray as he outlines the one true gospel. He has greeted them, but he invested in that greeting a summary of the true gospel. Next he comes to show them that this gospel is the only gospel, and there is no other.

A Different Gospel

I am astonished that you areso quickly desertinghim who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

GALATIANS 1:6–7

The verses before us, Galatians 1:6–7, are worth spending time looking at because we have a tendency to lose track of the path we’re meant to walk when there are so many other seemingly appealing paths offered to us. None of us finds it easy to stick to the straight and narrow. As the poet puts it, “The best laid schemes of mice and men go often astray.” This is a general rule in life, where entropy tends to bring disorder, requiring our constant energy to maintain, let alone move forward. But this tendency is especially the case in spiritual matters, for not only is there a natural leaning toward the chaotic, but there is a gravitational pull toward the rebellious. Of course, we are not in the situation of the Galatian churches exactly, where there was one distinct group of agitators that had come to offer a different gospel. Today, the situation is more like a supermarket of religious options. The result is that the Christian church is getting confused.

If you are new to Christian things, you will have noticed it. Which church do you go to? There seem to be more brands of Christianity than there are fast-food chains. After a while we tend to think that it’s all just food, and we can choose whichever brand we happen to like. But part of what the apostle Paul says is that it really does matter. “There is no other gospel.”

That’s at least as difficult for us to believe as it was for the Galatians. There is this great cacophony of voices. I’ve got a couple of images in my mind of what this is like. You’re listening to some piece of music on your iPod when you happen to walk through an industrial building site. The loud noises, the drilling, and the pure volume of other sounds make it hard to keep track of the tune. There are so many alternatives today—different takes, slightly different emphases—that in the midst of the din of human gospel production (the “industrial building site”) we can lose track of the biblical gospel that comes from God.

In The Hobbit there is a scene in which the dwarves and Bilbo are meant to stay on the path through a dark wood. Eventually they get hungry and go off into the trees, and then they can’t find their way back to the path again. It’s a bit like that. There is a lot of pressure to leave the straight and narrow, the sole path that exists through the dark leaves of Mirkwood.

The Galatian churches had the gospel, the evangel; they were evangelical. But these agitators, “some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ” (v. 7), had come and were saying, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (see Acts 15:1). This other message was confusing them; it had troubled and confounded them. They were losing track of the tune of the real gospel. They were being led off the path.

In my view, it makes best sense to see what was happening here historically as referring to the churches in South Galatia, which we know from Acts that Paul had planted, and that this controversy arose immediately before the Jerusalem Council, which comes later in Acts 15. It seems to fit best there. However you put it together, they had come down “from James” (Gal. 2:12), claiming implicitly the authority of the Jerusalem church, adding to the potential for confusion. Many from prestigious schools seem to like finding a way to put that affiliation on their latest book; similarly here, in terms of the kudos it gave the false teachers, they said they were “from James.” They were proposing that law was necessary for salvation on top of the free grace that produces the peace that Paul has just summarized as the entire gospel (1:3–5).

This was obviously a powerful confusion. The Gentile Christians were presumably told that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and that therefore they needed to become fully Jewish to be saved. Those who did not get circumcised and adopt the whole Mosaic Law were barred from table fellowship with Jewish Christians. These non-Judaized Gentile Christians were, then, practically speaking, excommunicated, not part of the fellowship, and therefore symbolically declared in a public fashion as not part of the saved community.