| Christian Life and Doctrine | August 1949 |
O Foolish Galatians!
“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?” —Galatians 3:1
PAUL’S letter to the Galatians brings into sharp focus a condition in the Early Church which was a constant source of trouble to all the apostles, and particularly to Paul, because it was a condition which peculiarly affected the new Gentile converts; and Paul was the “apostle to the Gentiles.” It constantly presented itself under the guise of an “advanced” form of Christianity and was promulgated by teachers who claimed not only to be Christians, but who also claimed to represent the “mother” church at Jerusalem.
The letters of Paul to the various churches were often prompted by some inimical condition within the particular church addressed. Thus, in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, the particular topic was carnality, represented in divisions. (I Cor. 1:10-15) In addition, there was pride, a desire to reign and rule over God’s heritage, and an overriding of the spirit of justice in the church in favor of the judgment of worldly courts.
In this letter to the Galatians, Paul attacks another problem—the imposition upon Gentile converts of Jewish ritualism; and, coupled with it, the undermining of his own apostleship by jealous church members who resented his appointment to the ministry of Christ by other than the sanction of the Jerusalem church.
Both these problems were inter-related, and constituted a serious menace to the spread of the light of truth, even so short a time after the departure of Jesus. That both of these obstacles have persisted within the church to the present time may seem remarkable, yet it is, nevertheless, true. In fact, the spirit of opposition there made manifest within twenty-five years of the Master’s departure has been and still is one of the most virulent illnesses that afflicts the church.
The opposers of Paul on both counts were the “legalists” among the early Christians; those who were jealous of their power as a self-appointed hierarchy which arrogated to itself the authority to approve anyone who should be considered a teacher in the church. This presumption of authority became solidly entrenched in the church as the years advanced, until it became of the force of a dogma—the doctrine of apostolic succession. In fact it was for centuries the source of virtually all power wielded by the early popes of Rome who claimed that they had a direct line of descent in authority from Simon Peter at Jerusalem, who was the one appointed by Jesus himself to lead the church after his death.
It is essential to a knowledge of what Paul is saying to the Galatians to understand, first of all, just who these people were, and also why Paul was so austere in his greeting when compared with the warmth of the superscriptions of his letters to most of the churches. In fact, his first sentence is a challenge, “Paul, an apostle, sent not from men neither by any man, but by Jesus Christ and by God the Father.” Here he strikes instantly to the heart of part of the Galatian problem, for one of the principal parts of the defection of the church was caused by the doubts, sown in the minds of the brethren, of Paul’s apostleship.
Who were these Galatians? Galatia itself was a state well outside of Palestine, occupying a central position in Asia Minor, in that part of Turkey known as Angora. Its people were of Gaul stock and, of course, Gentiles and heathen.
Paul’s first recorded visit to Galatia was during his second missionary journey (Acts 16:6), and he again visited parts of the province during his third journey. During his first visit he must have founded the church which on his second visit some three years or so later he found infected with the doubts concerning himself, and the wrong concepts of Christianity which called forth one of his most able expositions of the relationship of the Christian church to the older Jewish faith. It is this explanation which constitutes the great value of the epistle to Christians of today, and with it this article will largely deal.
The ministry to the Gentiles, which involved Paul in his controversy with Peter over the constitution of the church, had been tentatively tried some years before Paul’s definite missionary work among them. Philip preached to the Samaritans (Acts 8:5), and many of them were healed and received of the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:17); and an Ethiopian also was accepted by faith and baptized.
Thereafter, Peter received his vision of the unclean animals and the command to go to Cornelius who received his knowledge of the hope of life in Christ from Peter’s preaching, and the Holy Spirit again manifested acceptance of these Gentiles and their conversion as demonstrated by baptism.—Acts 10
Paul, however, after his long periods of study and contemplation in the seventeen years from his conversion to his becoming recognized by the older apostles as one of the great ones of the faith, had come to a clear-cut understanding of the inner mysteries of the teachings of Jesus—things which were probably not so clearly perceived by any of the apostles until Paul made them clear.
One of the main themes of the teachings of Peter was the early return of the Master; of John, Jesus’ admonitions to love as the manifestation of the Christ spirit; of all, their testimony to Jesus as the Messiah and the kingdom of hope which he had founded in the hearts of men.
It is to be doubted if many of the small companies of Christians which came together in those days, largely composed of slaves and broken men and their devoted families, had any clear concept of the great work which Christ purposed to perform through their weakness and dependence. Yet Paul saw that Jesus’ teaching showed he intended out of such unlikely material to build the nucleus of the kingdom which had been the constant theme of his parables and of his private instruction to his disciples.
Paul’s position in the church was a peculiar one. Of all the apostles he was the best educated, having been a Rabbi of the Jewish Law, and of the sect of the Pharisees. He was also a Roman citizen by birth, not purchase, and could move in the most select Jewish-Roman society if he so desired.
Paul’s education in Jewish history and religion helped him, once his feet were placed on the Christian path by his miraculous conversion on the Damascus road, to recognize the logical sequence of events leading up to the founding of the Christian church as the inheritors of the promises made to Abraham.
By special revelation it was made clear to him that once the transfer of favor had been made from Israel to the church of Christ, the hope of life was no longer a prerogative of Jews only, as they believed, but was open, by a way vastly different from the way of the Law Covenant, to all sorts and conditions of men. (Eph. 3:3-6) The catalyst which should fuse Jew and Gentile, bondman and free citizen, into one unit was Faith in Christ. Having seen this, the entire plan of God for the salvation of the human race opened to him, and in that faith, unswervingly he prosecuted the work of offering life on Christ’s terms to everyone who was prepared to listen and, upon conviction, to act.
It was in this spirit that Paul approached the Gentiles of Galatia and among them made converts in sufficient numbers to found one and perhaps several “ecclesias” or local churches.
However, Paul was the victim of an insidious campaign carried on by certain ones of the Jewish-Christian churches, and his Galatian converts were—as were many others apparently—the victims of this attempt both to undermine his authority as a representative of Christ and also in respect to the freedom of entry into Christian fellowship which was the theme of his preaching to the Gentiles. In this letter to the Galatian church Paul strikes hard at the whole position of the “Judaisers,” and, in doing so, destroys the whole structure of Jewish pride in their fancied superiority to all other peoples, which their centuries-old place as God’s chosen people had built up.
What was it these Judaisers taught which jeopardized the truth of Christ’s message? Simply this: That to be a select Christian, a converted Gentile must accept the superiority of the Jew as a fact. They must be circumcised, thus adopting the physical sign of being of God’s chosen ones, even as were the Jews; and they must adopt a ritual of worship patterned after the ancient Jewish fashion, as evidence of their adoption into Christ. In addition they must recognize the supremacy of the church at Jerusalem in all matters of faith and doctrine.
At a casual glance, and so far away from the events as we are today, none of these things may seem of grave importance. We have become inured to the observance of precise counterparts of these things in our modern Christian worship; for, unfortunately, the error survived the onslaughts of Paul, and endures to this day.
An examination, however, of Paul’s argument shows wherein lay—and still lies—the danger; and Paul’s method of attacking the insidious propaganda of his day contains some sharp lessons for us who fondly believe that what we see paraded before us every day as the Christian church, is, in truth, the church as Christ founded it.
Paul, as we pointed out earlier, throws down the gauge of battle with his traducers in the first phrases of his letter: Paul, an apostle, sent not from men nor by any man, but by divine appointment to the apostleship, given to him on the Damascus road. Several times in his writings he tells the story, affirming that his conversion to the Christian faith was directly as the result of a heavenly vision. In this letter to the Galatians, he makes a specific point of this fact:
“But when he who set me apart even from my birth, and called me by his grace, saw fit to reveal his Son within me in order that I might tell among the Gentiles the Good News concerning him, at once I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were my seniors in the apostleship, but I went away into Arabia, and afterwards came back to Damascus.
“Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem to inquire for Peter and I spent a fortnight with him. I saw none of the other apostles except James, … afterwards I visited Syria and Cilicia, but to the Christian churches in Judea I was personally unknown.”—Gal. 1:15-22, Weymouth
In chapter two he continues the theme, “Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with me also, and I went up by revelation.”—Gal. 2:1,2
Why did Paul make such a point of his independence? Principally, perhaps, to lay a foundation for his forthcoming argument, for he is about to demonstrate that the thing which God does, needs no interpolation of man’s ideas to make it operative; that man’s interference with the direct works of God serves no good end, but may obscure the main issue until finally man’s ideas are presented as superior to God’s.
Paul had preached salvation to Gentiles, as the Galatians well knew. He had preached it on the authority of the Holy Spirit, through which God had conferred on him the apostleship. Paul had sought no confirmation of this appointment at the hands of the Jerusalem church. The divine instruction was sufficient, and transcended all that any man might do. It needed no addition.
More than that, it was out of the Jerusalem church that the legalists, the ritual-worshipers, the Judaisers had come to undo the work which Paul had done so well and of which the Galatians had been the beneficiaries. In fact—and this has been a shock to many who have gone along in the idea that among the apostles all was sweetness and light—Paul takes the occasion virtually to accuse Peter with paltering with what he knows to be truth in order to placate and keep quiet the very sort of people who were undermining Paul’s great work.
Paul, in his second visit to Jerusalem, forced the issue with the Judaising party by taking with him an uncircumcised Greek, Titus, nor would Paul permit any discussion of the need for Titus being so treated by those whom he designates “false brethren,” but to whom, he says, “not for an hour did we give way and submit to them, in order,” as he says, “that the Good News might continue with you [Gentiles] in its integrity.”
Paul says he learned nothing new from the leaders of the Jerusalem church, and that they might be considered men of importance meant nothing to him, even as God took no notice of external distinctions. One development did come from that meeting, however, which was that they, the pillars of the Jerusalem church, Peter, James,. and John, were compelled to recognize the integrity of Paul’s ministry, and welcomed both him and Barnabas into the fellowship of the church on the understanding that they, Paul and Barnabas, were to go to the Gentiles while the others ministered to the Jews.
Paul wants it definitely understood, however, that he did not solicit this approval, it was offered to him, and offered also, after a complete understanding that his ministry to Gentiles would not tolerate the business of compelling them to come under the Jewish Law, and bear in their bodies the Jewish mark of circumcision. Yet the Judaising Christians were not discouraged, only driven to carry on their propaganda more clandestinely than they had formerly done.
Then Paul told the story of his controversy with Peter at Antioch. Long before, Peter had received conclusive evidence of the acceptability of Gentiles into Christ. He had had a vision, had visited Cornelius, a Roman of Italy then in Caesarea, had baptized him and had seen his acceptance by manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Peter should have been under no illusion concerning the place of Gentiles in the church, and, in fact, Peter demonstrated on many occasions, when he was away from his own church, his cosmopolitan attitude by eating and fellowshipping freely with Gentiles in the sight of all beholders.
“But” says Paul, “when certain persons came from the Jerusalem church, he withdrew and separated himself for fear of the circumcision party, and other Jews with him also concealed their real opinions so that even Barnabas was carried away by their lack of straight-forwardness.” Paul, ever alert to see an opportunity to use the weapons which circumstances put into his hands, uses this attitude on Peter’s part to strike a direct blow at the whole policy of the Judaisers.
It may be that Peter had never overtly shown any disposition definitely to support the party in its schemes; neither, however, had he taken a strong stand against it. He had temporized, perhaps through lack of clear insight into the insidious danger that lurked in the Judaisers policy. Paul turns on him in front of all, Jewish Christian and Gentile convert alike:
“If you, Peter, though you are a Jew, live as a Gentile does and not as a Jew, how can you make the Gentiles follow Jewish customs? You and I, though we are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, know that it is not through obedience to the Law that a man can be declared free from guilt, but only through faith in Jesus Christ.” Then he goes on to show that Peter had freed himself from the condemnation of the Law by his faith in Christ, but now, by his act, if not by his mental consent, he was replacing the yoke of the Law around his own neck, and tacitly accepting it for his fellow-Christians by not solidly opposing the circumcision party’s propaganda.
Paul’s reference to Gentile “sinners” was an intentional reminder to Peter of a situation which had come up in his earlier life, recorded in Luke 5. It must be remembered that the Jew did not consider himself as classifiable among sinners. Did not his day of atonement each year cleanse him nationally, and did not his personal periodic offerings at the temple cleanse him individually from the condemnation which rested upon all other peoples?
However, on the occasion of Jesus’ miracle of the great draught of fishes, when he was aboard Simon’s fishing boat on the lake of Gennesaret, Peter, terrified at the proximity of the great teacher, besought Jesus to leave the boat saying, “I am a sinful man.”
Paul, knowing this, referred Peter to his unregenerate days when he was a self-confessed sinner, though under the Law Covenant which should have been able to cleanse him from condemnation, and showed him thereby that he, Peter, had come to see the inefficacy of this “cleansing,” and the surety of the cleansing which came by faith in Christ. Now, Paul says in effect, you, as a Jew, were confessedly unclean and found hope only when you came into Christ, yet by your actions you relegate these Gentiles, who also have come into Christ, to the unclean condition from which faith has rescued them as it rescued you, and you give at least grounds to these “false brethren” to continue their un-Christian teaching that the Gentile converts must assume the burden of the Law in order to be acceptable to us converted Jews as brethren.
The Law, says Paul, actually condemned to death, for none of us could keep it, and in Christ we found life; yet not life of ourselves, except the Christ-spirit dwells in us; “it is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20) If it were otherwise, he continues, and the Law could give life, then Christ has died in. vain.
Peter could not gainsay this argument. His whole life was a testimony to redeeming grace, and, not being able to answer the argument should, by that very fact, have taken a strong stand against the Judaisers. Yet they were to continue their destructive work within the church, and never were eradicated, nor have they been even to this day.
However Paul does not let the matter rest there. He immediately sets about demolishing the argument of the circumcision party, root and branch, and does it by a masterly exposition of the axiom that, whereas the whole may contain the part, the part cannot contain the whole. To do this he parades before the Gentile eyes a historic picture of the founding of Israel, and the basis, if any existed, for their fancied superiority. He goes right back to Abraham for his evidence and shows that the agreement to bless all families of the earth originated with God, and was only made with Abraham because Abraham had demonstrated faith. Thus the original covenant, which contains the life of all subsequent covenants, was one of promise based on faith. It had no legal aspect whatever, and law did not enter the scene until four hundred and thirty years later. He shows (Gal. 3) that the blessing of all nations was to come through a “seed,” for such a seed was integral in the promise, “through thee and through thy seed shall all nations be blessed.”
The Jews, separated from all other nations at Sinai when Moses brought down to them, fresh from the hands of God, the Law by which they might enter into a relationship with him different from that enjoyed by all other peoples, came to assume that they, as a nation, were the promised seed. Paul undertakes to disabuse their minds of this fallacy. They were not the seed, for the seed was one, not many, and he identifies the seed as Christ.
“Your mistake,” he says to Israel, “was in assuming that the Law Covenant abrogated or superseded or changed in some way the promise made to Abraham. Don’t be any longer under this misapprehension, because your own reason should show you that if you inherit anything because you have been obedient to a Law, then it no longer comes because of a promise. But, as a matter of fact, God gave it, this blessing you claim you inherit, because of a promise.”
In other words Paul shows that the Law, being only part of a thing, could not and did not change the original thing, the promise, in any way. Furthermore, he goes on to show that the Law was but a temporary measure, and when it should be completely removed, the promise would still continue. And so it was, he says, for it was given to set bounds upon sin, in so far as Israel was concerned, so that they might be brought down to the time when the “seed” should actually appear, and thus be ready, if they were so minded, to join with him already identified as Christ, in doing the work of blessing.
Look, says Paul, before faith was a possibility we were prisoners hedged about by the Law, living under restraints and limitations, under discipline, in preparation for the faith which was to be. In this manner the Law played the part of a tutor, a “pedagogue,” literally, a “boy-leader,” one whose duty it was to lead children to school. (Gal. 3:24) Paul, in penning these lines, was evidently in no mood to save one shred of Jewish vanity, and it was for his ruthless stripping away of all the aids to Jewish pride that he earned the enmity of his former confreres, and the title of “apostate” in place of apostle.
Paul was a renegade Pharisee, a turncoat Rabbi, according to his former compatriots, but, unfortunately, he was also the master of most of his assailants in knowledge and experience in the Law. Even to his, Christian friends he was often a bitter draft, because Paul brought to Christianity an unchanged austerity from his rabbinical days. As a believer in and a teacher of the requirements of the Law he had been one who hewed to the line. The letter of the Law was to be kept? Then keep it! No “try” to keep it with Paul, but a stern uncompromising unyielding demand, if you believe it, live it!
This is what had made him a fanatical persecutor of the church before his conversion. Christianized Jews were blasphemers against the Law, destroy them! Now he himself had turned about face, had seen the “liberty wherewith Christ made free” and that same uncompromising spirit that had driven him to persecute, now drove him to defend.
Paul was a purist. Upon his own flesh he used the whip and the spur, he drove himself in the harness of Christ, because to follow Christ was, to him, to refuse to admit that the flesh could not be made to go where the spirit led. Thus, when the Law, which he now knew to be less in power than the spirit, was made superior to the spirit, he stripped the arguments of his opposers to the bare bones and showed the inferior position of the Law, and the people of the Law, to Christ and the people of Christ.
The Law, says Paul, was for children not yet fully educated. It was a slave leading those who leaned on it to the Master; and in that simple, yet truthful illustration he placed Christ so far above the Law, and made the position of these despised, ignorant Christians so superior to the highly placed doctors of the Law, that their rage must have been frightful to behold. Yet he had not stretched the truth one iota beyond what was the absolute fact of the matter.
God’s original promise to Abraham was the fountain-head of both the Law of Israel and the faith of Christ. No Christian became one by following the channel of the Law to a conclusion, because the Law only served the purpose of demonstrating the existence of guilt, of sin, and could never end in giving life to any guilty man. It was a constant accuser, a “curse” as he has described it in the thirteenth verse, from which Christ had redeemed his people by accepting upon his own person the full weight of that curse, and had suffered death as a result.
In his letter to the Church at Rome, Paul develops the same theme, and in chapters seven and eight of that letter he reviews life as a Jew under the Law before his eyes were opened by the power of Christ. He tells us that his whole mind and soul were bound up in the Law, which was the only way to life, as he then believed, that there was in the world. Yet reason, based on his own experience, told him that this could not be true because Law was the one thing in the world that convicted of sin, ergo, if there was no Law there could be no violation of it, hence, there could be no sin.
Paul reasoned further. The Law only binds during the life of a person, and he uses the illustration of a marriage between two people. (Rom. 7:4) The Law was of the earth; he, Paul, was formerly married to the world and condemned by the Law, but Christ had ended the Law and now Paul was free to remarry.
In our former state, married to the world, our flesh was full of passion, and that passion the Law condemned, but the Law was dead by Christ’s victory and has no further power over us. We no longer obey the commands of a dead husband, but now live according to the demands of a new husband—Christ. No longer do we cater to the requirements of the flesh, but now we live after the spirit. Then Paul asks a question. (Rom. 7:7,13) Does this mean that the Law itself was sinful? No, he answers, for without the Law we could never know what those things are which God counts sinful, and we must know those things in order to rid them out of our hearts.
We see this well illustrated in the case of Adam in the Garden, to depart for a moment from Paul’s argument. Had God said to Adam, “Of all the trees of the Garden you may freely eat,” and stopped there, sin could never have entered by the door through which it came; but God did not stop there. He placed a prohibition on one tree, and the moment that prohibition was placed, Law came into being. “You may not,” God had said, and followed that stricture with a statement of penalty for breaking the prohibition. The existence of that law was the thing that would demonstrate the sin of disobedience. And so with all law. It convicts of sin where sin exists. It cannot give life to fallen human beings.
Then Paul changes his viewpoint as recorded in chapter eight of his letter to the Romans, and shows that once we come out from under this dark menace of the Law, into the freedom which Christ offers us, legal condemnation ceases. What the Law could not do because it affected fallen human lives and was interpreted through imperfect human minds, God has done in another way.
His Son, a perfect man, was made a willing sacrifice for sin, and because he, a perfect human, was able to keep this Law—which could be kept only by a perfect human. Throughout the whole of his earthly life, Jesus never once violated one jot or tittle of that Law, thus never came under condemnation to it. He ended it in so far as believers are concerned.
The new law of Christ condemned also but after a different fashion. It condemned sin in human nature, and not sinners. Thus, when one has come into Christ, he is regulated by the new spiritual mind of Christ. The flesh is no longer that which dictates our lives, nor dominates our thinking. However, if one so freed from condemnation persists in reverting to fleshly desires and sets hope upon earthly things, he simply returns voluntarily to legal condemnation. How much better it is to hold fast to the peace of mind and the full assurance of life which faith in Christ can give, than to return again to the old unsatisfactory and, in truth, hopeless condition from which we have been freed!
Those who have this peace of faith are no longer at war with God. They recognize the righteousness of God’s law, agree with it, and accept the only way of escape—through Christ. “Great peace have they which love thy law, and there shall be no stumbling block before them.”—Psalm 119:165
“You,” says Paul, “no longer fear slavery to the sin within you because you have been adopted as God’s sons. In this you rejoice, and the spirit of God bears witness with this spirit within you, that you are indeed sons of God.” This reasoning of Paul’s was the core of his argument to the Galatians, who, having accepted the freedom of Christ through faith in him, thus had become heirs of the promise made to Abraham by direct line of succession through the “seed” of Abraham. “Why, then,” he reasonably asks, “do you feel constrained now to enter into legal bondage such as the Jew himself has been rescued from, if only he will accept the proffered freedom? It is foolishness, for if you are Christ’s you are Abraham’s seed and legitimate heirs of God’s promise.”—Gal. 3:29
We leave the argument at that point. It is plain enough for any man to follow the exact reasoning of Paul as it affected these puzzled Gentile converts, but what of ourselves? Have we fully persuaded ourselves that we could never be as foolish in such a circumstance as the Galatians? Let us examine the matter a little more closely. Is there no one among us who believes that if he will but follow the instructions of a human leader, living or dead, without personal examination of the things taught and comparison with God’s Word to see that they are exactly as taught therein, he shall inherit eternal life?
Is there no one among us who believes that to observe some certain ritual of worship is to do all that is required of a Christian? in other words, that salvation is of “works” of “doing” things, rather than of faith?
Is there no one who claims to be a Christian, yet also firmly believes that he must obey the Ten Commandments? Yet the Ten Commandments were given not to Christians, but to Jews, and were the sum of the Law given to Israel. These also were ended by Christ, to all who believe.
“But,” you inquire, “do you mean to say that the Ten Commandments are not good things to obey? Would you take them away from the church? Why, you are advocating virtual anarchy!”
Glance casually around the world in which you live, and find some small evidence that anywhere at anytime in history, the Ten Commandments have ever been kept by any nation of which you have knowledge. You have a condition closely bordering on anarchy, which never could have been the case had the professed Christian church honored and obeyed the instruction of its Head who, while keeping the Ten Commandments inviolate as intended and magnified them and made them honorable (Isa. 42:21), said, “A new commandment I give to you, to love one another as I have loved you. It is by this that everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”—John 13:34,35
If that one simple law or command of Jesus were to become the guiding motive of all conduct, is any further law required? Can one truly love, and not honor God above all other things? Can one really love and not treat his neighbor as himself? Can one unfeignedly love and not keep the Golden Rule?
The day is coming when, under the rulership of the Prince of Peace, every law book in every lawyer’s office, every national code of laws in every nation of the earth will be torn up and cast aside, to be replaced with that one simple rule, “love one another.” In it is the solution of all the earth’s difficulties and perplexities; for love, pure, unadulterated love, is the solvent of every human, every national, every racial relationship.
O foolish Galatians! O foolish Christians! Can you afford to look for any other way to life and happiness than the way opened to you by Jesus of Nazareth? The time is short, as yet the door is open, the dark night has not yet fully set in, the opportunity to receive the peace of faith in Christ may still be taken advantage of.
But the night comes on apace, a dark night of terror and horror in which every man’s faith, or lack of it, will be tested to the full, before the dawn of hope for the whole world of mankind breaks, and the Sun arises with healing in his wings.