The Book of Galatians #3
Galatians 1:10-15
There are three primary issues that Paul is dealing with in the letter to the Galatians. Two are of a doctrinal nature and one is personal. He deals with salvation by grace and freedom from the law on the theology side and his credentials as an apostle on the personal side.
In the opening five verses of the book, he gives his salutation. And in verses 6 through 9 he introduces what he’s going to talk about in the rest of the letter. And beginning with verse 10, he begins his defense of his apostleship.
Now remember, the false teachers in the area are questioning the doctrine of salvation by grace, and instead are substituting a mixture of law and grace. And there attack on these teachings is dependent upon questioning Paul’s authority and right to speak on God’s behalf.
Now, as we said in our last study, two weeks ago, the attack came on three fronts. First of all, the false teachers attacked Paul's authority. They, in fact, stated that Paul was a subordinate to them, and that whatever Paul taught was now superseded by what they taught. And they went so far, probably, as to claim their heritage from the Jerusalem church, sort of giving them authority. They really denied Paul's right to speak for God.
So Paul writes the Book of Galatians to answer these attacks. In chapters 1 and 2, he defends his authority.
In chapters 3 and 4, he establishes grace salvation. In chapters 5 and 6, he shows that Christians are free from the law.
The first criticism was the fact that Paul was not the authority and that he had no right to speak for God, and that these Galatians should never just believe what Paul said.
And that is a valid concern because if he has no authority, then he has no voice. If they do not believe that he speaks for God, then he might as well shut up and forget it, because it doesn't matter.
And so he launches right off, in chapters 1 and 2, with a lengthy defense of his right to speak for God as an authority. In fact, that is heard as early as verse 1 where he says, "Paul, an apostle not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead." In other words, he establishes the authority of his apostleship in the very first sentence.
So let's follow his defense. Apparently these false teachers are questioning Paul’s authority. After all he is a former Jew who is now ignoring Jewish tradtions so he can be popular with the Gentiles. All you have to do is believe in Jesus Christ by grace through faith." And they all believed, and that was it, and he did it just to be popular with the Gentiles. That's what they accused him of.
By the way, notice how we responds to that in chapter 5, verse 11
He says, "If I'm just looking for popularity, how come I keep getting persecuted?" Of the apostle Paul was just trying to be popular, he did a lousy job of it.
So notice how he responds.
verses 6-10
Is calling people accursed sound like I'm trying to please people?" Does that sound like a people pleaser Do you think I'd spend my life serving Jesus Christ at this level, suffering what I suffer, if all I want to do is please people?
At the end of the Book of Galatians, he says, "I bear in my body the marks of Jesus Christ." "Do you think I'm going through all of this and suffering all the pain and the anguish because I want to please people?
That's a pretty solid argument.
Then notice verse 11
Now Paul said, "Let me go a step further. Not only am I not a people pleaser, but I didn't make up my message.
It's a very strong term. In the vernacular, it would be, "Let me make this perfectly clear." "Get this and get it good. The gospel which is preached by me is not according to man. I didn't devise it. I didn't invent it. Neither did any other man."
You know what kind of a gospel we'd have if men invented it? Just check around. What is every other religion than Christianity based on?
Works. If man invents a system, it is always works. So if man was responsible for the gospel, it would be injected with a large dose of works.
Paul makes his point clear. "The gospel I preach is not human."
Verse 12
By the way, that is a direct shot at the Judaizers. The Judaizers learned things two ways. First of all, they received it from man. It was passed down from generation to generation. That’s called tradition.
All Jews were the products of tradition. That goes clear back to Deuteronomy. "Take these things. Teach them to your children."
And Paul is taking a direct shot. "I did not receive it like you receive your information, through tradition."
And then the second thing he says is, "And I wasn't taught it, either." You know the second way the Jews learned? They learned under rabbinic teaching. And you know how they learned? They learned by repetition. The teacher would speak, the student would repeat. The teacher would repeat and they would repeat, and over and over, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And that again goes back to Deuteronomy, where you're to say these things when you stand up, sit down, lie down, walk around.
So he rejects entirely their usual format for information, and he comes up with this at the end of verse 12. "But by the revelation of Jesus Christ." "Christ Himself gave it to me, revealed it supernaturally."
Does that mean Paul didn’t know anything before his conversion? I think he knew a lot about the gospel before he was saved. Why? What did he spend his time doing before he was saved? Persecuting Christians. So he must've known enough about it to hate it.
So he knew the facts. He knew about Jesus Christ. And he actually persecuted Christ. Although not physically, not bodily persecuting Christ, it was Christ that he was after. He must've known about the claims of Christ. But he had no supernatural acquaintance with Christ. But once he came to know Jesus Christ on the Damascus Road, then he was capable of learning the supernatural truth that God had ready for him to know.
So now, he says, "I didn't get this from men. You'd better listen to me. I'm giving you exactly what Jesus Christ told me."
Now, it's one thing to state that. It's something else to prove it. I mean, it's a tremendous statement to say that "I speak for God. Everything was revealed to me. I got it from no humans at all."
But can you prove it?
That’s what verses 13-24 are all about and there we find one of the most air-tight and water-proof arguments for Paul’s apostleship that can be found anywhere.
In these verses he use areas of his personal life to prove his claim of apostleship.
It is nothing more than his personal testimony. He talks about his life before his salvation, his salvation experience itself, and his life after salvation.
Does that sound familiar? We still use the same outline today to talk to people about the authenticity of our faith.
He just does a biography from 13 to 24 and says, "Before I was saved, when I was saved and after I was saved, all those events prove I never got my message from a man. But God gave it straight to me." And I'm telling you, it's astounding evidence.
Let's look first of all at
1. His Life before Salvation
verses 13 to 14
Now, here Paul describes his state in Judaism. And he was a Jew of the first order, Pharisee, tribe of Benjamin, Hebrew of the Hebrews, circumcised the eighth day, the whole that he goes over. But he describes his state in Judaism, and he's saying this. Now, watch. This is the thing you want to see here. He is saying essentially that there was absolutely no preparation in his former life for this message of grace. That's important.
There was no preparation for this message. There was no way that I would ever understand grace. Grace was a foreign concept in my mind." As a Jew, he was so hung up on the Law, he couldn’t see anything else.
He had been a fanatic for the law. The law had been his life. His one object was to know the law, study the law, defend the law, propagate the law. All of a sudden, bang, he, in a moment of time, begins to preach grace, and law is gone. Now, something happened. I mean, when you go from law to grace, you go 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Something happened.
Notice how he addresses that in these verses.
Verse 13
He’s talking about his passion for Judaism. He is saying, “I was more Jewish and more Judaistic than anybody else. I was more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my father’s than my contemporaries. I was a super-legalist. I even set about beyond bounds to persecute the church of God and destroy it."
And he says, "You know that." It’s common knowledge. And he gives two aspects of his former life. First, I persecuted the church." And then he uses the phrase "beyond measure." Read what he did in Acts and you just can't believe it. It makes you wonder, why was he soo passionate about destroying the church? Why doesn't he go home and relax?
And yet he was hell-bent on destroying the church. He was furious with Christians. "Breathing out threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord." He was a radical terrorist. He was so zealous for the traditions. He was so committed to persecuting the church of God beyond measure, violently desiring to destroy it.
Then in verse 14 he says, "I profited," or I grew, "in the Jewish religion," Judaism, "above many my equals in mine own nation." He was so filled with Pharisaical zeal that he became the Pharisees' Pharisee. I mean, he was the epitome of what a legalist would be.
The word "profited" is an interesting word in verse 14. It's the word literally that means chopping ahead. It could be translated advanced, in a more refined sense. But in a kind of a literal sense, it means to chop ahead. In other words, Paul says, "I hacked my way through the Christians."
So here was his life before conversion. There was nothing in his life that would relate to grace.
You want a pre-conversion characteristic of Paul? Here is it is: bigot, fanatic, legalist, ritualist, persecutor, hater of Jesus.
And his point is when you find a man going that fast and that furiously in that direction, and then you tell me that same man is going in the opposite direction, you're going some explaining to do.
He didn’t get an education.. No one stopped him and talked some sense into him. He didn’t just turn over a new leaf and reform his life. The only person who could ever reach that man is Jesus Christ Himself.
Do you know why Paul was saved like he was saved on the Damascus Road? Because there was no other way it could have happened. Only God could reach him, and He did, and He slammed him in the dirt, and He said, "Stop right there, Paul.
I'm Jesus talking to you. And I’m not putting up with you anymore. Shape up." And he did. "What will you have me to do?" And so would you have.
So his point in verses 13 and 14 is to show you that his pre-conversion experience proves that he never got his message from men. Only God could bring this about.
Secondly, we have
2. His Salvation
Verses 15-16
He was going along the way he was going and all of a sudden it pleased God to transform him, and that was the beginning. Now, I want you to notice something. His call was both supernatural and sovereign.
In the case of Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul, there wasn't anything for him to do but stop, because the Lord blinded him and slammed him on the ground.
"When it pleased God." Paul’s salvation was of God’s plan. God determined to save Paul and call him to be an apostle.
Listen to 1 Corinthians 1:1. "Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, through the will of God."
God wanted it.
Get the picture? Here is Paul running around like a fanatic, bent on a course of persecution and destruction, but God changed it. You say, "Why?" Because He wanted to. God wanted this man. And God changed it. His fanaticism was no match for the will of God.
Some might say, "Well, God was up there in heaven, and He saw his potential." Said, "Boy, that old Paul. He's really got a lot of fire. If I can just latch onto him, we'll get something done." No, no. Listen to what Paul said, "When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb."
He’s not talking about physical birth. He's not saying, "God, who made me be born." saying, watch this, now, "When it pleased God, who separated me unto the apostolate, did it "from my mother's womb."
Did you realize Paul was chosen to be an apostle before he was born? The physical birth of Paul isn't the issue in this passage. What's the issue here is his call to be an apostle. What he's saying is, "Hey, people. You want to know something? I didn't get my message from men. God called me to be an apostle when I was still in the womb." That's pretty strong language.
Just like Jeremiah of old, or Isaiah or John the Baptist. God had His hand on these men before they were born! That sounds like God's running the show. That's sovereignty.
And the Jews understood that language. After all, God had chosen them. They knew that's how God usually chose His prophets.
The Jewish mind has no problem with that. When Paul said, "God separated me even from my mother's womb," they knew exactly what he was talking about. They knew that he was claiming apostleship, that he was claiming the call of God equal to the prophet of God who was chosen by God before such a time as he was ever born.
So if God had marked Paul off, set him aside, before he was born, then he was no human apostle. That's a strong, strong proof.
Well, that’s enough for tonight. We’ll look at his life after salvation next week, but let me just close with this:
The heart of our commitment to the Word of God is the confidence we have in its writers. If I can’t trust the men God used to write this book, I can’t trust the book. It excites me to know that this Book that I hold in my hand every day, that I study and read and pray over and meditate on, is not a human book, but it's God's Book. He wrote it. Through all different men and all different times, it is God's truth.
And if it will be able to make any difference in my life, I’ve got to be able to go to this Book and say, "I believe it, and this is why I believe it."
We have nothing to say to this world unless they're convinced that our Book is true. And they're not going to be too convinced unless you're convinced. And I trust that our study of the apostolic credentials of Paul will help you to be convinced.
Let's pray.
