Galatians 1:6-10
Amen. You can be seated. Please
turn in your copy of God’s word to Galatians chapter one. Our
reading will be verses six through 10 Galatians one, six through
10. If you’re using the pew Bible
that can be found on page 972. Remember our study in Galatians
takes us to Paul’s first letter that he wrote to the churches
where he was missionary. The Galatian churches would be,
uh, from his first missionary journey. And then again, a revisit
on his second missionary journey, Paul was sent by the Damascus
church along with Silas. Uh, they went to the Island of
Cyprus and then across the sea, uh, to the Galatian, the South
Galatian churches. Then on his first missionary
journey on his way by land, uh, over, uh, took Corinth and Athens
and Thessalonica and Philippi and all those places. They stopped
through and encouraged the saints. And somewhere very shortly after
Paul preached the gospel to them, they had these missionaries.
We’ve got to use air quotes, missionaries from Jerusalem who
came and said, you know, Jesus is great, but you need to be
circumcised. Jesus is great, but you need to keep the Old
Testament law. And so today we get into the meat of his letter
where Well, let’s just put it simply. He’s not happy. And so
we pick up in God’s word, Galatians one, beginning at verse six,
uh, the words of the apostle Paul, the words of our great
God, I am astonished that you were so quickly deserting him
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. But even if we, or an angel from
heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one
we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before,
so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel
contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. For am I
now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to
please man? If I were still trying to please
man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Amen. The word of
the living God. We live in a culture of niceness. We live in a culture of niceness
that says, don’t judge. Who are you to judge? Or who
am I to judge? And we see it in all the realms
of life. We even see it in parenting. I’m amazed at watching parents.
They’re walking along the road with little Johnny, little Susie,
and there’s a busy road. Now, Johnny, Don’t you walk out
on that road. I grew up in the era where you
had a Kung Fu grip on both your arms from both your parents,
and you didn’t move. They knew what a Mack truck was.
They knew what a Greyhound bus was. They knew what a driver
in a 5,000 pound of Detroit steel was. And we’re seeing a culture
of niceness with our parenting now. We reason with our children. Now, Johnny, you don’t want to
do that now, do you? Now, Susie, you don’t want to do that. Or
go to the workplace. The sandwich. Not the thing in
your bag that you get out at lunch out of the freezer at work
or the fridge at work, but the sandwich. Your boss, your manager,
needs to call you down on something. So there’s the sandwich, they
call it. Billy, you’re a really great
worker. Billy, you’re doing a terrible job. Billy, you’re a really great
worker. That’s the sandwich. Two positives
with maybe a little something sandwiched in between. We live
in the Dale Carnegie era. How to win friends and influence
people. And isn’t it interesting, just
in these two instances we’ve mentioned, we have the most unparented
children in the world. And we have the laziest workforce
in the world. Where’s the tough love? But sadly,
it’s come into the church. It’s come into the church, the
power of positive thinking, right? No mention of sin. That’s negative.
We don’t want to mention sin. A friend of mine who was an elder
at a local church said that when they serve communion, they were
no longer allowed to say to the people as they came up. the blood
of our Lord Jesus Christ shed for you. No mention of blood. And we’re especially not allowed
in the church these days to make a value judgment of who it seems
is walking in faith and bearing fruit and who is not. Well, it’s rather refreshing,
I think, to come to Galatians 1.6 and see an example in the
life of Paul when it’s appropriate to cut to the chase. It’s appropriate
as people of God to say, you know, I have a firm grip on spiritual
reality here, and what you’re doing is a death spiral. What you’re doing is no gospel,
no salvation at all, but it’s a desertion of the gospel, a
distortion of the gospel, and it’s a walking away from the
true faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Paul skips over
in this passage, in this book, he skips over his usual Thanksgiving
section, you know, for the Thessalonians. He says, I thank God every day
as I remember you in my prayers for the, the word about y’all
is going throughout all the region of Thessalonica. Your faith and
the fruit of your faith is being spoken of all throughout the
region. Or how about even the Corinthians? He writes them four
letters. We have two of them. And remember,
the Corinthians were doing things that ought not even be talked
about, but he somehow can give them a thanksgiving. And I think
there’s a big difference. You’re dealing with the gospel
here. You’re dealing with salvation or no salvation. You’re dealing
with heaven and hell. You’re dealing with eternal truths
here. And so Paul says, we need to
be crystal clear about the gospel. He wants to win converts for
Jesus Christ and build a church in the most holy faith. And so
he’s dealing with the gospel here. Something we mentioned
last week that Martin Luther said, uh, is the article on which
the church either stands or falls. Now I mentioned we live in a
culture of niceness. We see it in parenting. We see
it in the workplace. Yes, we see it in the church
and we see it in other spheres where we live lives. And you
might say, with regard to the church. Well, if we were nicer,
we wouldn’t have all these splits. If we were nicer, we wouldn’t
have all these denominations. If we were nicer, we wouldn’t
have all these differences. And I want to point out to you
as we enter into this passage, there are allowable differences
within the Christian community. Albert Moeller has done really
well to give us what he calls theological triage. He says there’s
things of first order, like the gospel. You don’t negotiate the
gospel. If you do, you have no religion
or Christianity at all. But then there might be things
that are second order, whether we baptize infants or we dedicate
them or whether it’s believers baptism or parents presenting
their children and maybe some other examples. Those might be
second level. They’re really important, but the church does
not fall apart because of these differences. But then there’s
like third order things. Do we have deacons? Do we have
elders? You know, who do we ordain? Who do we not ordain? And then
there’s down the line issues. And it’s the down the line issues
that we fight about. You know, do we do we pick red
carpet for the blood of Jesus? Do we pick, you know, maroon
or green carpet? Because that’s what Aunt Ma loved
and she gave the most money to the church. And that’s the stuff
we fight over. Well, you didn’t pick the air
conditioning company that I would have used to put in the new unit.
So we’re going to go down the street and start a new church.
Those are real things people fight over. It’s not appropriate
to get upset like Paul is here over second and third and fourth
level issues. But it is appropriate to become
upset over a distortion of the gospel, a diversion from the
true faith. or another gospel as he speaks
of it. And so in verse six, he begins
the body of his letter by saying to the Galatians, I am astonished. I am beside myself. I am cussing
mad, we might say in the South. I’m spitting mad. I have no words
to communicate to you how upset and angry I am. Now, in a typical, letters of
the Roman era where Paul would have been educated as a student
in Tarsus, you would not write a letter this way. You would
not begin a letter by yelling at people. You know, it’d be,
Hey, I’m Paul. I met you before, preached in
your churches, stayed in your homes. Remember, Jesus called
me on the Damascus Road. I’m a Christian. I’m a saint.
I’m an apostle. I’ve been an eyewitness to the risen and exalted
Jesus. And I’m so thankful for you people,
your wonderful Galatian church people. You know, you tithe,
you go to Sunday school, you got perfect attendance. You know,
you’ve got a youth group and on and on. That’s kind of how
letters go. Here he just says, well, maybe
some of you have seen the infamous R.C. Sproul video where at a
Ligonier conference sometime before his death, a question
was asked. A question was asked something
like this. When Adam and Eve sinned, why
was God so harsh with them? And he begins his answer by saying,
the God of the universe gave them a command and the people
of the dirt saw it in themselves to disobey this Lord of heaven
and earth’s command. And they disobeyed him cosmic
treason against almighty God. And, and, and God killed some
animals and clothed them with the skins. And he says, and you
think God was harsh on him and he just outburst what’s wrong
with you people. That’s a similar response here.
Isn’t it? What, what are you thinking?
What are you not thinking? And isn’t it, a mercy of God
sometimes to be rescued or to be thumped on the head by the
word of the living God and say, what are you thinking? What do
you believe in? What are you doing? You’re going down the wrong path.
You’re on a death spiral. Oh, we live in a culture of niceness.
Somewhere in my file on the book of Galatians, I found I printed
email from probably like the early 2000s. Remember when we
used to forward each other stuff? We had Dial Up and AOL and Juno
and we’d spend two hours at night forwarding cute stuff to each
other. Now that’s what y’all do on Facebook. But I printed this one off and
it was letters to the editor. Dear editor, where does Paul
get off? Dear editor, who does Paul think
he is? Dear editor, why couldn’t he
be nice? You could see that sort of reaction,
couldn’t you, from people? Well, the gospel is at stake. This is a five alarm fire. This
is this is cutting the wrong wire and detonating. The bomb. This is this is a massive issue
in the life of the Galatian churches. Notice churches plural. This
is a region of churches and these missionaries have gone through.
And Paul says to the Galatians, you are so quickly you’re in
the act of you are turning from Jesus. You’re turning from God
who called you by his grace. You can tell from the letter
Paul believes. that they heard the gospel. Paul believes that
they received Jesus by faith alone. Paul believes that they
have true fruit bearing faith. But he is astonished that when
these missionaries come in after his departure, that they have
so quickly deserted Jesus. They have so quickly turned away
from him who called them in the grace of Christ. He’s later in
the letter to the Galatians going to say Christ was portrayed as
crucified among you. You know, there’s this idea in
the Christian faith. Every sin is equally heinous
or equally wrong in the sight of God. But some sins are more
heinous in God’s sight than others. Our larger catechism explains
this really well. It says, you know, a sin of a
parent against a child is more heinous, a sin against a king
over those he rules is more heinous, a sin of a superior against an
inferior, more more heinous. Or one of the things that explains
is It’s more heinous in God’s sight when we know full well
the right thing. We have heard it, we have received
it, we have tasted, we have touched, we have received and gladly even
performed the duty attached to the goodness of God revealed
to us. And then at some point later, we say, nah, not for me
today. Can you imagine the anger, the
astonishment? And Paul, you heard the gospel.
You believed in Jesus. You walked in him. You bore fruit.
You were a witness to the watching world. Christ was portrayed as
crucified among you. But now you have been duped.
By these distorters of the gospel of Jesus Christ, these agitators,
these troublemakers, these. Well, they’re Judaizers, it’s
pretty clear from New Testament scholarship, these Judaizers
were from Jerusalem. They showed up after Paul and
Silas left the Galatian churches to move on to their next missionary
endeavors. And these Judaizers come in and
say, hey, we’re from Jerusalem. Oh, we know brother James. We’re
from Jerusalem. Yeah, Peter, Peter’s my buddy.
And they seem to have credentials and they insist in these churches
in Galatia that these new Gentile converts, well, they really convert
to Judaism first. They got to get circumcised.
You’ve got to keep the law of God. And once you do this, you’ll
be you’ll be bonafide. We can put our stamp on you. And you think about. this insistence
of these Judaizers, these missionaries, as we might call them, to the
Galatian churches. We see the same distortions of
the gospel throughout church history. I know that you have
probably met people before or maybe even personally believed,
yes, I’ve got faith in Jesus, but I’ve got to do these good
works. Perhaps you’ve been a Roman Catholic and you better do good
works to merit Enough merit, I guess, can you say that? Merit
enough merit to get into heaven. Or if not, you better do some
penance, or you better put some money on the plate and spring
your soul from purgatory sooner rather than later. Works. Or we have this prosperity gospel.
God wants you to be rich. Do you know I read a statistic
this week, and I don’t know, you know, statistics are statistics.
take them with a grain of salt, but they do mean a little something.
74% of Americans who say they believe in God, 74% think that
God means to prosper them. That’s scary. That shows you
how much the prosperity gospel of American Christianity that
has ramped up over the years. has infiltrated our thinking
and even our faith, our beliefs. What if God for your sanctification
wanted you to be broke? What if God for your growth and
grace wanted you to get up every day and beg him for daily bread
like the Israelites did in the wilderness? And all he ever gave
you was just enough, just enough, just enough, but it got you all
the way home. Prosperity gospel wouldn’t allow
for such a thing. You’re not believing God. You’re
not obeying God. You’re not laying into God like
you should. Then there’s this gospel of destiny. Flip on your TV sometime, flip
through the TV preachers. It’s your destiny. God wants
the best version of you. You know, you watch a sports
game, you know, college football started yesterday and they interviewed
the quarterback afterward. And he says something like this.
I want to be the best version of myself. That’s what some people
are preaching from pulpits. You be the best version of you. You tune out the negativity,
you get rid of negative people in your life, and you find that
destiny God has for you. Again, what about Job? Job suffered
more than any other saint, perhaps in the Christian faith other
than Jesus. And what about the personal destiny
for him? Well, Job, he just hadn’t got
enough faith. Sounds like his miserable comforters, doesn’t
it? Or how about the social gospel of our day? Jesus is just a good
example. He’s not a savior, but he’s a
really good example of how to feed the poor. He’s a really
good example of how to build habitat for humanity houses.
He’s a really good example of how to have a soup kitchen. He’s
a really good example of how to do, and you just start listing
all the social gospel issues of the day, I’m not saying there’s
no room for Christians to do good things for people in need.
Jesus would teach that, but it becomes the gospel. How many
good works have you done? How many poor have you fed? How
many babies have you adopted? How many children have you sponsored
from across the world? That’s the social gospel. Then
there’s legalism. Legalism says you can find God’s
pleasure or God finds pleasure in you when you check all the
boxes, when you do all the right things. And then there’s just
the opposite of legalism. It’s antinomianism, which basically
says, Hey, Christian, you’re saved. There’s not a thing you
could do to ever displease God. And if you send your brains out,
you just go to him and seek forgiveness. That’s a dangerous gospel, isn’t
it? And then there’s what I might
would say is broad evangelicalism. Everything is about the gospel.
Hey, let’s, let’s build a gymnasium and let’s run a basketball league
because if we run that basketball league, people are going to hear
the gospel. Now they’re going to hear their parents hollering
at them and yelling at their coaches afterwards because little
Johnny didn’t get enough playing time or his team didn’t win. And we’ve confused the gospel,
uh, very much even in good evangelical churches these days. And Paul
might would come to us in our world and say, yes, I’m astonished
at the Roman Catholics. Yes, I’m astonished at the social
gospel folks. But I’m also astonished at you
people who are holding to the gospel of Jesus. You’ve added
to and taken from and given all these little hoops to jump through. Now, if a person becomes a Christian
and grows in the grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus,
praying and worshiping and reading the Bible, sitting under preaching
and all that, and they work at a soup kitchen, that’s great.
But Jesus is still the only thing that has saved them. And Jesus
is still the only thing that will get him to heaven, the only
person I should say. And you could run through all
these false gospels that we have built up and added on to the
church of Jesus. God has called us by his grace. We think of the story of creation
and Adam and Eve in the garden and Satan slithering into the
garden and tempting Adam and Eve. God’s just holding back
on you. Eat the fruit, eat the tree. And we think of our original
sin that came to us from Adam. And our actual sins that proceed
from that original sin and how glorious it is in the gospel.
When God has Satan and Adam and Eve lined up there and says to
Satan, you’re going to crawl on your belly. And one day from
the line of this woman, Eve, someone is going to come. That’s
Jesus. And he’s going to crush your
head. And then from Adam, he says, it’s going to be hard to
bear fruit from the ground. And Eve, it’s going to be hard
to bear children. But these curses are given to them because of
their sin. But then he says, as they stand there clothed in
animal skins, something had lost its life. Something had lost
its life to cover their sin and their shame and their nakedness.
He says to them in the distance, in the future, there will be
a Messiah. And so when we read and we see
the coming of Jesus, the second Adam, first Adam failed in paradise. Second Adam passed the divine
test in the desert. 40 days, 40 nights without food,
without drink. Satan comes to him and says,
I’m going to give you the easy way out, Jesus. You don’t need
to go to the cross to win a kingdom for yourself. You don’t need
to go to the cross to earn a people for your own possession. You
just bow down to me right now. and I’ll give it to you, easy
button. Oh, how tempting that must have
been. And the other temptations are recorded in the scripture.
And every time Jesus says the word of living God, he rebukes
Satan with scriptures. And so Jesus, we’re told in his
earthly ministry came to fulfill all righteousness. You know,
we think very often of our salvation in this way. Jesus died for my
sins. I am forgiven of my sins. And
when I die, when my time comes, I’m gonna go directly to heaven. Like getting around the corner
of the Monopoly board, pass, go and play, $200, right? That’s
kind of how we think of salvation, which is a really sad way. Of
course, Jesus has died in our place. Of course, our sins are
forgiven if we receive him by faith alone. Yes, he was obedient
unto death. Yes, he fulfilled all righteousness. Yes, he is the spotless lamb
slain before the foundation of the world. He is the serpent
crusher. And yes, as Hebrews tells us
so clearly, he has ended all the ceremonial law, all the sacrifices,
not all the blood of bulls and goats and beast could save us. A couple of weeks ago in the
adult Sunday school class, y’all went through a study, an overview
of a man named Anselm, Anselm of Canterbury. In one of his
most famous books in Latin, Cardeus Homos, or in English, Why the
God-Man? Why was it necessary for Jesus,
the God-Man? And it brings up this idea we
have in theology. Was it necessary for God to send
his son to die in the world? Couldn’t God have done it another
way? You know how our minds go. Um,
you know, like a two year old, a three year old asking questions.
Why, why, why, why our minds go that way, but we should never
go beyond what is written. We should receive the scriptures
and enjoy what God has told us. But he, and so why the God man
and the question, the two questions of the atonement are this, is
it necessary for God to save centers? And the answer is no.
God, in his wrath and his judgment
and in his justice could have left us dead in our sins and
trespasses. He did not need to redeem mankind. Mankind was told, you eat and
you will die. You don’t eat and you will live.
So he laid it out there, didn’t he? So it’s not necessary or
required for God to send his son to atone for sin, but it
is necessary for this reason, before the foundation of the
world, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit determined
in their own holy, wise and perfect and loving wills to set their
affection on a people and send the Son to obey and live and
die in their place so that God could have rich and eternal fellowship
with the men and women and boys and girls that he loved with
an everlasting love from before the beginning of the world. Did
God have to send an atoning sacrifice? No, but he did. And we should wonder and we should
marvel at that. And we should be like Paul, who
is astonished at other gospels. I know we get into water cooler
discussions and You know, tomorrow maybe you’ll get in one, where’d
you go to church? Where’d you go? What’s your church believe?
And maybe you’ll talk about baptism and carpet coloring. Don’t argue
about that stuff. If people have blue carpet or
purple carpet and dunk babies or, no, not dunk adults and splash
babies, don’t get into arguments about that stuff. But if you hear them saying something
about works righteousness, oh, your hair ought to stand up on
your necks. There is no other gospel. There
is no other good news except what God has portrayed before
us in Jesus Christ. And we said earlier during our
confession of sin, we need to understand that wonderful word
justification. God sees us just as if we’ve
never sinned. We usually get that part, don’t
we? Jesus died on the cross for my sins. I asked him for forgiveness.
He’s washed all my sins away. I was once stained red as crimson,
now I’m white as snow. We get that part, don’t we? And
we should. But we also need to get the other
part. It’s not just as if I’ve never
sinned, it’s also just as if I’ve always obeyed. Jesus has fulfilled all righteousness.
You could never obey his law perfectly, but that demand of
God has never left. How does one get to heaven? by
obeying his law perfectly. Can you do it? No, but one has
done it for you. And so when God declares you
righteous, he gives to you the righteousness, the perfection,
the obedience of Jesus. Yes, he’s washed away your sins,
but he has given you his righteousness. We love the little saying about
justification. It’s just as if I’ve never sinned.
It’s just as if I’ve always obeyed. It’s a, it’s a two-sided coin,
isn’t it? But there’s another little saying that I think would
be helpful. And you, you take the word faith, F-A-I-T-H, forsaking
all, I take him. Faith. Forsaking all, I take
him. That means we forsake our own
works. Nothing in my hands I bring. simply to the cross, I cling. Helpless come and naked come
to thee for dress. God takes our filthy rags. And he gives us his righteous
robe. Christ was obedient to fulfill
the law. Christ was obedient to go to
the death of the cross. And in his life of fulfilling
righteousness and in his death of all deaths, you get both important
pieces of Christ, his righteousness and his atoning sacrifice for
your sins. Some of you I know have received
the 100th anniversary edition of Jay Gresham Machen’s Christianity
and Liberalism. And you’ve studied a little bit
of him, maybe in the Sunday school hour, where he was famous for
saying there’s Christianity, true faith and the true gospel
of Jesus. Right doctrine means Christianity.
And he says everything else is just liberalism. Doesn’t matter
what they’ve attached to the gospel. You add anything to Jesus,
it’s not Christianity at all. He’s got the heart, doesn’t he,
of Paul. He’s got the agitation of spirit of Paul. But Machen was famous for saying
something else. And these words came from his
lips through a telegram on his deathbed. When in early January
of 1936, he had gone to North Dakota to preach the gospel.
He fell sick and was in the hospital and he was sending telegrams.
You know, he didn’t have a text gadget like we do almost 100
years later. And he was sending telegrams
and he sent one to his close friend, Professor John Murray
at Westminster Seminary. And he simply sent him this message. So thankful for the active obedience
of Christ. No hope without it. I’m sure
you think of the blood of Jesus all the time and you think about
how it washes away your sins. What can wash away my sins? Nothing
but the blood of Jesus. It’s one thing to have a clean
slate, isn’t it? But what happens when we get a clean slate? We
start failing all over again. And what Machen was saying on
his deathbed. is when I enter the presence
of God, it will not be by the works of my hands, but it will
be because of the active obedience of Jesus. Yes, his passive sacrifice,
but his positive, active obedience on my behalf. Could you say at
your deathbed, or perhaps etch it on your tombstone, so thankful
for the active obedience of Christ, no hope without it. Do pray with me. Lord, we do
marvel at the blood of Jesus and how blood washes away sins,
but we do stand in awe of the active obedience of Jesus and
how it has been credited to us. An inexhaustible account of righteousness. There is therefore now no condemnation
for those who are in Christ Jesus, but justification. And we give
you thanks. What a happy, a happy thing to
put our faith in. We thank you for Jesus and ask
that these truths will be written on our hearts and in our minds
and put into practice in our lives. In Jesus name we do pray. Amen. We want to sing of the
righteousness of God number 232. So turn there and we will stand
to sing.