Straight to the Heart of Galatians to Colossians

60 bite-sized insights

Phil Moore

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780857215468
• eBook ISBN: 9780857215475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

The apostle Paul wasn't a superhero. He just had God on the inside.

In these letters to the churches which he planted, he tells us the secrets of his fruitful ministry. He shows us that the Gospel means that we can have God on the inside too. He doesn't tell us to admire his fruitfulness. He tells us how we can become like him.

This series of devotional commentaries is now becoming well established. They allow readers to get to grips with the Bible one bite at a time, and their combination of sound scholarship and popular tone makes them both stimulating and accessible. Phil Moore focuses on key sections of each book.

Part One – Galatians:

Free on the Inside

One Staple (1:1–9)

If we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!

(Galatians 1:8)

David Nowitz had tried very hard. The Society for Family Health in Johannesburg had never had such a conscientious marketing manager. He had managed to secure government funding for a mass distribution of pamphlets throughout the city to warn people of the dangers of sexually transmitted infections. He had the pamphlets translated into Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Afrikaans. He had paid a distribution company to deliver the pamphlets throughout the city along with a free condom to help people to respond to his warnings. It was only when he visited a home and saw one of his pamphlets that he realized with horror what had happened: the distribution company had stapled the condom to the pamphlet, putting two holes in every single condom.

David Nowitz admitted to reporters that “We made a deal with a low-budget distribution company.” He had entrusted his message to people who thought a single staple wouldn’t make any difference, when in reality those two tiny pinpricks undermined everything. His safe-sex campaign actually increased the danger of sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies across Johannesburg.¹ If you can imagine how David Nowitz felt when he saw his stapled pamphlet for the first time, then you can imagine the horror that stirred Paul to write his letter to the Galatians at the start of 49 AD.

Paul had spent part of 48 AD planting churches in Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe – the cities of Galatia, which is now in southern Turkey.² We are told in Acts 14:3 that he went as God’s missionary to preach “the message of his grace,” explaining that Jesus lived the perfect life which the Galatians had failed to live and that he had died the brutal death which the Galatians deserved to die. Paul’s announcement that human sin provokes God’s judgment wasn’t news to the people of Galatia (the Jews and pagans were agreed on that), but what was news was Paul’s announcement that religious rituals and good behaviour were not enough to atone for human sin. The Galatians tried to stone him to death for preaching that “Through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses.”³ The essence of Paul’s message to the Galatians was grace, which is why Acts 13:43 tells us that he “urged them to continue in the grace of God.” Grace offers us God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. If they forgot this, the Galatians were as foolish as a Johannesburg pamphlet distribution company.

Paul was very agitated when he wrote his first New Testament letter.⁴ Since he does not mention the decisions that the apostles made in Jerusalem towards the end of 49 AD in Acts 15, he must have written to the Galatians earlier that same year while he was staying in Syrian Antioch.⁵ We are told in Acts 15:1 that “Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: ‘Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.’”⁶ Evidently these same false teachers were making inroads into the churches which Paul had planted in Galatia, for he writes in 5:12, “As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!” Circumcision, obedience to the Jewish Law and reliance on a few good works might seem like tiny pinpricks in the Gospel, but Paul could see that it undermined absolutely everything. He warns the Galatians not to be “fools.” If Jesus’ work of salvation is perfect, then adding anything to it obscures its saving power.

This background helps us understand the opening verses of Galatians. It’s why Paul begins this letter with the phrase “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” He doesn’t use this phrase out of habit to open all of his letters, but because the Gospel is about God’s grace from start to finish. It tells us that Jesus has done everything to free us from God’s judgment because we are powerless to free ourselves. We don’t need God’s reward for our best efforts. We need God’s mercy (not punishing us as we deserve) and we need God’s grace (blessing us even though we don’t deserve it). We can never earn these things from God ourselves. We can only receive them as gifts because we believe in the perfect life that Jesus has already lived for us.

Paul wrote to the Galatians in their native Greek, and he uses three Greek words to show them just how serious these pinpricks of self-reliance are. The first word is metatithemi, a word which was normally used for soldiers who switched sides before a battle (1:6). Paul tells the Galatians that switching to self-reliance instead of continuing in God’s grace makes them turncoats who have sided with the people who attacked him. The second word is heteros (1:6). The Greeks had two words for another : the word allos meant another of the same type (Jesus uses this word to describe the Holy Spirit as another helper like himself in John 14:16), and the word heteros meant another of a different type (this is the root of the English word heterosexual). By describing the new message that was being preached in the Galatian churches as a heteros gospel, Paul emphasizes that Christian self-help is very different from the real Christian Gospel. Since the Gospel is perfect, adding to it is just as fatal as subtracting from it. These tiny pinpricks of self-reliance couldn’t be more serious.

The third word that Paul uses is anathema (1:8 and 1:9). This is the word used throughout the Greek Old Testament to translate the Hebrew word herem, or handed over to the Lord for destruction. It was the strongest curse which a first-century Jew could place on anyone, so Paul utters it twice in order to convey to his readers the seriousness of their situation.⁷ By smuggling human works into the finished work of Jesus these false teachers had committed the same sin as Achan in the time of Joshua.⁸ They must be cut off from God’s People or the Galatians would be cut off with them.⁹

That’s why Paul’s letter to the Galatians is the Magna Carta of the New Testament, the proclamation of God’s freedom as a gift to sinful people who believe in Jesus Christ.¹⁰ Paul tells us that this message of freedom cannot be earned. It is all about what Jesus has done for us and not about what we can do for him in return. Reliance on religious rituals or on our own good works isn’t a different emphasis. It is an entirely different gospel.

Good Ideas and God’s Idea (1:10–2:14)

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin.

(Galatians 1:11)

Paul’s message was deeply unpopular in Galatia. We tend to miss this because he was so successful in planting churches there. We tend to forget that the Jews forcibly expelled him from two cities because they hated his message that only Jesus’ death on the cross could free them from God’s judgment. We tend to forget that he fled from another city having almost been lynched for trying to persuade the pagans there that they needed to turn from the hero gods of Mount Olympus to the crucified God of Mount Zion.¹ Unless we grasp the full scandal of Paul’s message in Galatia, we will fail to understand why the churches he planted there modified it very shortly after he sailed back to Syria.

We will also fail to understand why the first two chapters of this letter read like Paul’s autobiography. He feels he needs to persuade the Galatians that the Gospel he preached in their cities wasn’t just his own good idea but God’s idea. It’s why he begins the letter by stating that he is an apostle “sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, ” and it’s why he spends much of these first two chapters listing his credentials as a Gospel preacher.

First, he tells the Galatians in 1:10–24 that they need to take his Gospel seriously because he received it directly from God. They must not believe the propaganda of his critics, which he refers to in 1:10, that he is merely the lackey of influential Greek Christians in Syria.² He is more Jewish than any of the false teachers in Galatia, and he was once more tangled up than they are in Jewish traditions. But God freed him through the message of his grace. Jesus appeared to him personally on the road to Damascus and commissioned him to be a preacher of the very Gospel that he sought to destroy.³ The good ideas preached by the false teachers might sound convincing, but they were no match for God’s idea which he had entrusted to Paul. If the Galatians modified his message, they were rejecting the very words of Jesus.

Second, Paul tells the Galatians in 2:1–10 that they need to take his Gospel seriously because it has been endorsed by all of the apostles. Fourteen years after his conversion, in 47 AD, he responded to the words of the prophet Agabus in Acts 11:27–30 by going down to Jerusalem with a financial gift for the Christians in Judea. He took advantage of this opportunity to set out before the apostles the Gospel that he was preaching about “the freedom we have in Christ Jesus.” These apostles – men like James, Peter and John⁴ – fully endorsed Paul’s Gospel message and “recognised the grace given to me.” Paul ups the ante for the Galatian churches when he tells them that, if they modify his message, they are rejecting the collective teaching of Jesus’ apostles.

Third, he tells the Galatians in 2:11–14 that they need to take his Gospel seriously because it has been vindicated when challenged in the past. He tells them that he had a public confrontation with Peter, the leading apostle,⁵ over the very same issue that was troubling the churches in Galatia – whether Gentiles needed to convert to Christ alone or convert to all the trappings of Judaism as well.⁶ Historians refer to the false teachers in Galatia as “Judaizers” because they tried to force Greek converts to embrace these Jewish trappings, but Paul simply calls them “the circumcision group” in 2:13 because this was their most obvious demand. If the apostles had not forced Titus the Greek to be circumcised (2:3), and if Peter had backed down when Paul opposed him (2:11–14), then Paul warns the Galatians they are flying in the face of the past two decades of theological discussion if they believe the subtle lies of the Judaizers.

We live in an age that is full of good ideas, so these two chapters are far more than a lesson in Church history. They teach us how to respond to good ideas that promise us greater freedom if we adapt the Gospel to fit our culture. Paul warns us in 2:4 that such compromise always traps us into greater slavery instead.

These two chapters teach us to walk humbly whenever we discuss the Gospel. If even Peter and Barnabas could be led astray by false teaching, we must not be so proud as to imagine that we are immune to this danger ourselves.⁷ It is far easier to point out flaws in the thinking of others than it is to admit that we may have succumbed to false teaching ourselves. If even Paul thought it was important to receive “the right hand of fellowship” from the other apostles, we ought to be accountable to other trusted Christians and willing to allow them to correct us.⁸

These two chapters also teach us to honour the conclusions of previous generations of believers. When Rob Bell was interviewed about his controversial statements about the nature of hell and about same-sex marriage, he was asked, “Isn’t the humility of orthodoxy to say, ‘I’ll stay where the church is unless I’m sure that the church has always been wrong about this?’” His response was that “This is why so many people don’t want to be part of the church.” When he was challenged further – “You’re saying the world’s moved on, God’s going to get left behind… because it looks boring and retrograde and backward and intolerant” – he simply replied, “That’s well said.”⁹ Whatever you think about his conclusions, you should sense from these two chapters that his reasoning is very dangerous. Paul warns the Galatians that, whenever we compr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Praise
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Straight to heart Series
• Introduction: God on the Inside
• PART ONE – GALATIANS: FREE ON THE INSIDE
• PART TWO – EPHESIANS: NEW ON THE INSIDE
• PART THREE – COLOSSIANS: STRONG ON THE INSIDE
• PART FOUR – PHILIPPIANS: JOYFUL ON THE INSIDE
• Footnote