The Message of Galatians

John Stott

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830897889
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

To enclaves of young converts tucked away in the mountains of Asia Minor, Paul wrote what is perhaps the oldest document in the New Testament--the letter to the Galatians. What problems were they facing?Among a variety of religious authorities espousing different teachings, how were they to know who was right? How were men and women to be put right with God? How could Christians in the midst of a pagan culture live lives truly pleasing to God?'Only one way--' answered Paul, 'through Jesus Christ.' His answer holds true for us as well. The details of our struggle have changed since Paul's day, but the principles he sets forth are as timeless as the Lord he exalts.In this book John Stott helps us to understand and apply the message of Galatians in the face of contemporary challenges to our faith.

The Apostle Paul’s Authority and Gospel
(1:1–5)

In the course of the thirty years or so which elapsed between his conversion outside Damascus and his imprisonment in Rome, the apostle Paul travelled widely through the Empire as an ambassador of Jesus Christ. On his three famous missionary journeys he preached the gospel and planted churches in the provinces of Galatia, Asia, Macedonia (Northern Greece) and Achaia (Southern Greece). Moreover, his visits were followed by his letters, by which he helped to supervise the churches he had founded.

One of these letters, which many believe to be the earliest that he wrote (about AD 48 or 49), is the Epistle to the Galatians. It is addressed To the churches of Galatia (verse 2). There is some dispute among scholars as to what is meant by ‘Galatia’, and for the details here I must refer you to the commentaries. I myself take the view that the reference is to the southern part of the province, and in particular to the four cities of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, which Paul evangelized during his first missionary journey. You can read about this in Acts 13 and 14.

In each city there was now a church. It is recognized in the New Testament that what is called ‘the church of God’ (Gal. 1:13), the universal church, is divided into local ‘churches’. Not, of course, into denominations, but into congregations. The New English Bible translates the phrase in verse 2 ‘to the Christian congregations of Galatia’. Further, these churches were grouped together because of geographical and political considerations. Such a group of churches could be described either in the plural (e.g. ‘the churches of Galatia’, ‘the churches … in Judea’, Gal. 1:2 and 22) or by a singular collective noun (e.g. ‘Achaia’, 2 Cor. 9:2). This usage seems to supply some biblical warrant for the concept of a regional church, the federation of local churches in a particular area.

Already in the first paragraph of his letter to the Galatians Paul touches on two themes to which he will constantly return, his apostleship and his gospel. In the ancient world all letters began with the writer’s name, followed by the recipient’s name and a greeting or message. But Paul enlarges in the Galatian Epistle more than was customary in those days, and more than he does in his other Epistles, both on his credentials as a writer and on his message. He has good reasons for doing so.

Since his visit to these Galatian cities the churches which he had founded had been troubled by false teachers. These men had mounted a powerful attack on Paul’s authority and gospel. They contradicted his gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone, insisting that for salvation more than faith in Christ was needed. You had to be circumcised as well, they said, and keep all the law of Moses (see Acts 15:1, 5). Having undermined Paul’s gospel, they proceeded to undermine his authority also. ‘Who is this fellow Paul, anyway?’ they asked scornfully. ‘He certainly wasn’t one of the twelve apostles of Jesus. Nor, so far as we know, has he received any authorization from anybody. He is just a self-appointed impostor.’

Paul sees clearly the dangers of this two-pronged attack, and so he plunges, right at the beginning of the Epistle, into a statement of his apostolic authority and of his gospel of grace. He will elaborate these themes later in the Epistle, but notice how he begins: Paul an apostle (not an impostor) … grace to you. These two terms ‘apostle’ and ‘grace’ were loaded words in that situation, and if we understand their meaning, we have grasped the two main subjects of the Galatian Epistle.

1. Paul’s Authority (verses 1, 2)

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 brethren who are with me, To the churches of Galatia. Paul claims for himself the very title which the false teachers were evidently denying him. He was an apostle, an apostle of Jesus Christ. The term already had a precise connotation. ‘To the Jew the word was well defined; it meant a special messenger, with a special status, enjoying an authority and commission that came from a body higher than himself.’1

This is the title which Jesus used for His special representatives or delegates. From the wider company of disciples He chose twelve, named them ‘apostles’, and sent them out to preach (Lk. 6:13; Mk. 3:14). Thus they were personally chosen, called and commissioned by Jesus Christ, and authorized to teach in His name. The New Testament evidence is clear that this group was small and unique. The word ‘apostle’ was not a general word which could be applied to every Christian like the words ‘believer’, ‘saint’ or ‘brother’. It was a special term reserved for the Twelve and for one or two others whom the risen Christ had personally appointed. There can, therefore, be no apostolic succession, other than a loyalty to the apostolic doctrine of the New Testament. The apostles had no successors. In the nature of the case no-one could succeed them. They were unique.

To this select company of apostles Paul claimed to belong. We should get used to calling him ‘the apostle Paul’ rather than ‘Saint Paul’, because every Christian is a saint in New Testament vocabulary, while no Christian today is an apostle. Notice how he clearly distinguishes himself from other Christians who were with him at the time of writing. He calls them, in verse 2, all the brethren who are with me. He is happy to associate them with him in the salutation, but he unashamedly puts himself first and gives himself a title which he does not give to them. They are all ‘brethren’; he alone among them is ‘an apostle’.

He leaves us in no doubt about the nature of his apostleship. In other Epistles he is content to describe himself as ‘called to be an apostle’ (Rom. 1:1) or ‘called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus’ (1 Cor. 1:1). Or, without mentioning his call, he styles himself ‘an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will (or ‘command’) of God’ (cf. 2 Cor. 1:1; Eph. 1:1; Col. 1:1; 1 Tim. 1:1; 2 Tim. 1:1). Here, however, at the beginning of the Galatian Epistle, he enlarges on his description of himself. He makes a forceful statement that his apostleship is not human in any sense, but essentially divine. Literally, he says that he is an apostle ‘not from men nor through a man’. That is, he was not appointed by a group of men, such as the Twelve or the church at Jerusalem or the church at Antioch, as, for instance, the Jewish Sanhedrin appointed apostles, official delegates commissioned to travel and teach in their name. Paul himself (as Saul of Tarsus) had been one of these, as is plain from Acts 9:1, 2. But he had not been appointed to Christian apostleship by any group of men. Nor even, granted the divine origin of his apostolic appointment, was it brought to him through any individual human mediator, such as Ananias or Barnabas or anybody else. Paul insists that human beings had nothing whatever to do with it. His apostolic commission was human neither directly nor indirectly; it was wholly divine.

It was, in his words, through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead. Only one preposition is used: ‘through Jesus Christ and God the Father.’ But the contrast with the phrase ‘from men’ and ‘through man’ suggests that Paul’s apostolic appointment came not from men but from God the Father, nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ (the inference being, incidentally, that Jesus Christ is not just a man). We know from elsewhere that this was the case. God the Father chose Paul to be an apostle (his call was ‘by the will of God’) and appointed him to this office through Jesus Christ, whom He raised from the dead. It was the risen Lord who commissioned him on the Damascus road, and Paul several times refers to this sight of the risen Christ as an essential condition of his apostleship (see 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8, 9).

Why did Paul thus assert and defend his apostleship? Was he just a braggart, inflated with personal vanity? No. Was it from pique that men had dared to challenge his authority? No. It was because the gospel that he preached was at stake. If Paul were not an apostle of Jesus Christ, then men could, and no doubt would, reject his gospel. This he could not bear. For what Paul spoke was Christ’s message on Christ’s authority. So he defended his apostolic authority in order to defend his message.

This special, divine authority of the apostle Paul is enough in itself to discredit and dispose of certain modern views of the New Testament. Let me mention two.

a. The radical view

The view of modern radical theologians can be simply stated like this: The apostles were merely first-century witnesses to Jesus Christ. We on the other hand are twentieth-century witnesses, and our witness, is just as good as theirs, if not better. So they read passages in the Epistles of Paul which they do not like, and they say: ‘Well, that is Paul’s view. My view is different.’ They speak as if they were apostles of Jesus Christ and as if they had equal authority with the apostle Paul to teach and to decide what is true and right. Let me give you an example from a contemporary radical: ‘St. Paul and St. John’, he writes, ‘were men of like passions to ourselves. However great their inspiration,… being human, their inspiration was not even or uniform.… For with their inspiration went that degree of psycho-pathology which is the common lot of all men. They too had their inner axes to grind of which they were unaware. What therefore they tell us must have a self-authenticating quality, like music. If it doesn’t, we must be prepared to refuse it. We must have the courage to disagree.’2 We are told to disagree, you observe, on purely subjective grounds. We are to prefer our own taste to the authority of Christ’s apostles.

Again, Professor C. H. Dodd, who has made a great contribution to the biblical theology movement, nevertheless writes in the Introduction to his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: ‘Sometimes I think Paul is wrong, and I have ventured to say so.’3 But we have no liberty to think or venture thus. The apostles of Jesus Christ were unique—unique in their experience of the Jesus of history, unique in their sight of the risen Lord, unique in their commission by Christ’s authority and unique in their inspiration by Christ’s Spirit. We may not exalt our opinions over theirs or claim that our authority is as great as theirs. For their opinions and authority are Christ’s. If we would bow to His authority, we must therefore bow to theirs. As He Himself said, ‘he who receives you receives me’ (Mt. 10:40; Jn. 13:20).

b. The Roman Catholic view

The Roman Catholics teach that, since the Bible authors were churchmen, the church wrote the Bible. Therefore the church is over the Bible and has authority not only to interpret it, but also to supplement it. But it is misleading to say that the church wrote the Bible. The apostles, the authors of the New Testament, were apostles of Christ, not of the church, and they wrote their letters as apostles of Christ, not of the church. Paul did not begin this Epistle ‘Paul an apostle of the church, commissioned by the church to write to you Galatians’. On the contrary, he is careful to maintain that his commission and his message were from God; they were not from any man or group of men, such as the church. See also verses 11 and 12.

So the biblical view is that the apostles derived their authority from God through Christ. Apostolic authority is divine authority. It is neither human, nor ecclesiastical. And because it is divine, we must submit to it.

We turn now from Paul’s credentials as a writer to his purpose in writing, from his authority to his gospel.

2. Paul’s Gospel (verses 3, 4)

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.… Paul sends the Galatians a message of grace and peace, as in all his Epistles. But these are no formal and meaningless terms. Although ‘grace’ and ‘peace’ are common monosyllables, they are pregnant with theological substance. In fact, they summarize Paul’s gospel of salvation. The nature of salvation is peace, or reconciliation—peace with God, peace with men, peace within. The source of salvation is grace, God’s free favour, irrespective of any human merit or works, His loving-kindness to the undeserving. And this grace and peace flow from the Father and the Son together.

Paul immediately goes on to the great historical event in which God’s grace was exhibited and from which His peace is derived, namely the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Verse 4: who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father. Although Paul has declared that God the Father raised Christ from the dead (verse 1), he writes now that it was by giving Himself to die on the cross that He saves us. Let us consider the rich teaching which is given here about the death of Christ.

a. Christ died for our sins

The character of His death is indicated in the expression who gave himself for our sins. The New English Bible translates ‘who sacrificed himself for our sins’. The death of Jesus Christ was primarily neither a display of love, nor an example of heroism, but a sacrifice for sin. Indeed, the use in some of the best manuscripts of the preposition peri in the phrase ‘for our sins’ may be an echo of the Old Testament expression for the sin-offering.4 The New Testament teaches that Christ’s death was a sin-offering, the unique sacrifice by which our sins may be forgiven and put away. This great truth is not explained here, but later in the Epistle (3:13) we are told that Christ actually became ‘a curse for us’. He bore in His righteous person the curse or judgment which our sins deserved.

Martin Luther comments that ‘these words are very thunderclaps from heaven against all kinds of righteousness’,5 that is, all forms of self-righteousness. Once we have seen that Christ ‘gave himself for our sins’, we realize that we are sinners unable to save ourselves, and we give up trusting in ourselves that we are righteous.

b. Christ died to rescue us from this present age

If the nature of Christ’s death on the cross was ‘for our sins’, its object was ‘to rescue us out of this present age of wickedness’ (verse 4, NEB). Bishop J. B. Lightfoot writes that the verb (‘deliver’, ‘rescue’) ‘strikes the keynote of the epistle’. ‘The Gospel is a rescue,’ he adds, ‘an emancipation from a state of bondage.’6

Christianity is, in fact, a rescue religion. The Greek verb in this verse is a strong one (exaireō, in the middle voice). It is used in the Acts of the rescue of the Israelites from their Egyptian slavery (7:34), of the rescue of Peter both from prison and from the hand of Herod the King (12:11), and of the rescue of Paul from an infuriated mob about to lynch him (23:27). This verse in Galatians is the only place where it is used metaphorically of salvation. Christ died to rescue us.

From what does He rescue us by His death? Not out of ‘this present evil world’, as the Authorized Version puts it. For God’s purpose is not to take us out of the world, but that we should stay in it and be both ‘the light of the world’ and ‘the salt of the earth’. But Christ died to rescue us ‘out of this present age of wickedness’ (NEB), or, as perhaps it should be rendered, ‘out of this present age of the wicked one’, since he (the devil) is its lord. Let me explain this. The Bible divides history into two ages: ‘this age’ and ‘the age to come’. It tells us, moreover, that ‘the age to come’ has come already, because Christ inaugurated it, although the present age has not yet finally passed away. So the two ages are running their course in parallel. They overlap one another. Christian conversion means being rescued from the old age and being transferred into the new age, ‘the age to come’. And the Christian life is living in this age the life of the age to come.

The purpose of Christ’s death, therefore, was not only to bring us forgiveness, but that, having been forgiven, we should live a new life, the life of the age to come. Christ gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age.

c. Christ died according to God’s will

Having considered the nature and object of Christ’s death, we come to its source or origin. It happened according to the will of our God and Father. Both our rescue out of this present evil age and the means by which it has been effected are according to the will of God. They are certainly not according to our will, as if we had achieved our own rescue. Nor are they just according to Christ’s will, as if the Father were reluctant to act. In the cross the will of the Father and the will of the Son were in perfect harmony. We must never imply either that the Son volunteered to do something against the Father’s will, or that the Father required the Son to do something against His own will. Paul writes both that the Son ‘sacrificed himself’ (verse 4a) and that His self-sacrifice was ‘according to the will of our God and Father’ (verse 4b).

In summary, this verse teaches that the nature of Christ’s death is a sacrifice for sin, its object our rescue out of this present evil age, and its origin the gracious will of the Father and the Son.

Conclusion

What the apostle has in fact done in these introductory verses of the Epistle is to trace three stages of divine action for man’s salvation. Stage 1 is the death of Christ for our sins to rescue us out of this present evil age. Stage 2 is the appointment of Paul as an apostle to bear witness to the Christ who thus died and rose again. Stage 3 is the gift to us who believe of the grace and peace which Christ won and Paul witnessed to.

At each of these three stages the Father and the Son have acted or continue to act together. The sin-bearing death of Jesus was both an act of self-sacrifice and according to the will of God the Father. The apostolic authority of Paul was ‘through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead’. And the grace and peace which we enjoy as a result are also ‘from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ’. How beautiful this is! Here is our God, the living God, the Father and the Son, at work in grace for our salvation. First, He achieved it in history at the cross. Next, He has announced it in Scripture through His chosen apostles. Thirdly, He bestows it in experience upon believers today. Each stage is indispensable. There could be no Christian experience today without the unique work of Christ on the cross, uniquely witnessed to by the apostles. Christianity is both a historical and an experimental religion. Indeed, one of its ...