Galatians 1:1-5
Amen. You can be seated. And
for the first time in quite a while, we’ll announce that you should
turn to a different book of the Bible. So turn to the book of
Galatians. If you’re using the Pew Bible,
you can find that on page 972. For the last couple of years,
we’ve studied Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Before that, we
studied Luke’s gospel. In the gospel, he sought to show
all that Jesus said and did. Acts of the Apostles, he sought
to show the ongoing work of Jesus. Though he was risen and exalted
from his throne of glory, he built his church through apostles.
And then at the end of the apostolic age, he built his church through
the ongoing work of pastors, elders and deacons. And so We
pick up our study of the life of Paul in Galatians, and the
method to the madness is we’ve gone to his first epistle, his
first letter. Paul wrote 13 of the New Testament
books. I suppose 14, if you believe
that he wrote Hebrews. But it is likely that Galatians
is the first probably written somewhere around 48, 49 BC. So we pick up a new study. Let’s give our attention now
to Galatians chapter one, verses one through five. Paul, an apostle,
not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and
God the Father who raised him from the dead. And to all the
brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia, grace
to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,
who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present
evil age. according to the will of our
God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. Amen. The word of the living
God for us. There’s a joke among pastors
that we have this little hammer. And we can take this hammer and
we can tap the rock that is the scripture and it neatly breaks
into three happy points. You know that a good sermon,
well, this is supposedly is three points in a poem, right? Three
points and then some kind of poem to wrap it all up. Well,
not all the time does the Bible break up into three or four easy
points or two points. You know, if we want to beat
the other churches to Quincy’s or whatever the the need of the
day is. Well, this opening to Paul’s
letter to the Galatians is chock full of gems and pieces of gold
and all kinds of wonderful things. And so I hope you will hang on
to your seats and perhaps maybe like popcorn popping under the
duress of heat and oil and a pan, we’ll get through each of these
points of the opening of Paul’s letter to Galatians. I’ve always
marveled at the openings of all his letters, the salutations,
the greetings, the thanksgivings and the praise. And then then
as you go on through the rest of his letters, you get through
the meat of the letter. There’s usually doctrine and
then there’s Christian living. And then he says his goodbyes
and then he gives a benediction. Well, Galatians is a little bit
different. Galatians is a letter where Paul
is really angry with the churches because they have walked from
the true and pure and right gospel. And so he dives right in. We’ll
see that next week when we get to verse six, he dives right
into the letter. And so we’ll do the same now
as we begin our look at the first five verses of this little epistle. First thing we want to see from
this letter is the divine apostle. Paul says, I am not an apostle
from men. I am not an apostle through man,
but through Jesus Christ. and from God, the father who
raised him from the dead. You see, when Paul established
these churches on his first missionary journey and got them up and running,
got them up and on their feet, he moved on to the next mission
field. But these preachers, these false apostles or fakers, we
might call them, they came saying, we’re from Jerusalem, we’re from
the mother church. And they came in among these
churches of the Galatian region and they began to preach Jesus
plus circumcision. Jesus plus adherence to the Old
Testament law. And Paul catches wind of this. And so as he writes this letter,
the divine apostle says, I did not receive apostleship from
any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation
of Jesus Christ. And he goes on, this is later
in Galatians, to say, I did not consult with anyone, nor did
I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me.
But after his Damascus road experience, he went away into Arabia for
a couple of years, later returning to Damascus where he would preach
the gospel. You remember three times in our
study of Acts, how Paul explains and retells his Damascus road
conversion experience, how on the road to Damascus, He was
going with letters from Jerusalem to persecute Christians, to persecute
followers of the way. And in fact, he would put them
to death if it was necessary. He had just left Jerusalem where
they had stoned Stephen for preaching the gospel. And so he is converted
there on the Damascus Road. He spends three years or so in
Arabia in the desert. Perhaps that’s where Jesus revealed
the gospel to him. He goes off to Jerusalem and
spends two weeks with Peter and James, goes back to Damascus
and then off to his own home country for a really long stretch
of time. So what’s Paul saying here when
he’s establishing his apostleship, when he’s saying, I’m an apostle
of Jesus and God, the father, not from men, not from any human
source? Well, what he’s saying is, if
you read my letter. You should hear it as the word
of the living God. I am sent by God. I am an apostle
of God. I am an emissary of heaven. And I’ve been sent with this
gospel. And so if you reject me, you
reject Jesus. And if you reject Jesus, you
reject the father. And so he, I’m sure, gives them
a picture of what it would be like in their Roman minds if
an emissary came from Caesar and spoke a different message.
If an envoy came from the capital city of Rome and did not accomplish
their errand, I’m sure they would be put to death. And we remember
that Jesus said, they’ve rejected the prophets before me. They
rejected the son, Jesus Christ, and so they will reject you also. But we have a picture here of
Paul’s clear, divine apostleship. The second thing we find in this
opening is a divine letter. Paul is writing to the Galatian
churches. Now notice plural. This is what
we call a circular letter. It was sent to churches all through
the region. It would have been delivered
by hand, perhaps read in their weekly assemblies and then taken
the next week or the next night or the next opportunity to the
next church. This letter made it around to
the Galatian churches. This is a divine letter, an epistle
written to correct false and damning doctrine. Because Paul
is writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, it is God’s
word, and it is for them, and now it is for us because we have
it in our copies of God’s word. We believe by the Holy Spirit,
Galatians, to be the word of the living God. So this divine
apostle writing this divine letter is upset. And it cuts to the
chase. There’s no Thanksgiving. There’s
no, I hear good things about you Galatian people. You’re telling
the whole world about Jesus. There’s none of that. He’s just
going to launch into it. When we get there next week,
verse six, what’s wrong with you people kind of speech. I’m
astonished at you. Well, this divine letter, uh,
is one of, Paul’s great anxiety for the souls of these people,
the souls of these churches. He’s upset. He’s going to say
later in the letter, have I then become your enemy by telling
you the truth? Boy, what a statement. He’s going
to say, I am in anguish of childbirth for you until Christ is formed
in you. He is perplexed. He wishes he
could be present instead of by letter. He wishes he could change
his tone. And even at the end of the letter,
this is a man who doesn’t write his own letters as a secretary.
He says, see with what large letters I have written to you
with my own hand. Sometimes, brothers and sisters,
we encounter issues in the church. And to use Martin Luther, the
Protestant reformers famous words, sometimes the things over which
we argue are the articles upon which the church either stands
or falls. And so for Martin Luther, it
was the article of justification by faith alone. Here, it’s the
content of the gospel. The gospel is faith in Jesus
and nothing else, but they made it faith in Jesus plus whatever
the Jewish customs and practices they added were. Sometimes we
need to duke it out over theology, don’t we? Some things are of
first importance. And if you if you don’t hold
on to the definition of the gospel or the definition of justification
by faith alone, you have no church at all. Now, sadly, in our day
and age, we fight over carpet color. Oh, we need to get red
for the blood of Jesus. No, we need to get green for
sap and life. Or we need to get mauve because
the ladies met in the parlor and that’s what they decided.
And, you know, we fight and divide churches over things that are
way down the line don’t matter. But brothers and sisters, when
it comes to things of first importance, like the gospel, like justification
by faith alone, we ought to go to the mats. We ought to fight
to the death for these things because you either preserve the
church or the church ceases to exist. And when the divine apostle
writes this divine letter, He says to them, there are also
brothers with me as I pen this note to you. We suspect that
Paul wrote this from Antioch. That was his sending church.
He was sent on his first missionary journey up into the regions of
Galatia. He went with Silas there. He met Timothy and picked up
Timothy, a faithful servant with him to the very end. And perhaps
the brothers at Antioch are with him in this letter. Paul’s probably
said, you think this is too much? Am I too harsh? Am I being too
nice? Ask for advice, for wisdom. They
prayed over this letter. How do I handle this? Is it just
right? One encouragement I think we
ought to take from our study in Galatians is how dear to us
our copies of God’s word are, and how dear to us it ought to
be that we live on down the line of Christian history where we
have creeds and confessions and catechisms that help us formulate
in our mind the truths of the scripture. For example, we get
the wonderful definition from our shorter catechism, what is
justification by faith? It’s an act of God’s free grace
whereby he pardons all our sins. And he accepts us as righteous
in his sight by faith and because the righteousness of Jesus is
imputed to us. Those are simple definitions
that help us get the gospel right. And so we ought to know our scriptures
and we ought to know our creeds and our catechisms. Well, the
divine apostle is writing a divine letter and you probably wouldn’t
believe it based on all we’ve said so far. He’s writing it
to a divine people. That’s our third point from this
passage, a divine people is to the churches of Galatia. And
they’ve lost their minds. They’ve lost their minds biblically
and theologically. Yes, he calls them the churches,
the called out ones called out of the world to Jesus Christ. They are the Lord’s people. They
are the saints of God. They are what the theologians,
though, would say. They are both just and sinners
at the same time. They are justified in Jesus,
but still struggling with sin and their struggle with sin in
particular is to be duped and deceived by these false teachers. Don’t have to say it too loudly,
do we? The church is made up of imperfect people. You know,
people all the time say, I don’t go to church. It’s full of hypocrites.
And we always say we got room for one more. Right. The church
is not made up of perfect people. It is made up of people, yes,
who are justified in Jesus Christ, all their past, all their present,
all their future sins pardoned and forgiven in Jesus. But we
still struggle with sin and it rubs, doesn’t it? It creates
friction, not just in our own spiritual lives, but in the covenant
community. And so it is necessary from time
to time for the word of God to come in to our minds, our hearts
and say, you’ve strayed from the gospel. You are my people,
but you’ve strayed from the gospel. And so Paul, on his first missionary
journey, visits these people. He preaches to them the gospel
given to him by Jesus Christ. But these false teachers have
come in. And where Paul formed the church, they’ve come in and
by their false preaching have deformed the church. But by God’s
grace, this letter to the Galatians to us is meant to reform the
church, to put back what is correct. Remember, Paul says to Timothy,
all scripture is breathed out by God and is useful for doctrine. It’s useful for reproof. It’s
useful for correction and for teaching and training in righteousness. So the man of God, the people
of God are fully equipped to do the work of God. Sometimes
the word needs to come clean up the mess. And don’t we know
that from our Christian lives? We get away from the word, we
get out into the world, and we need God to put the pieces back
together. Well, there’s a fourth thing
in this passage that I think is one of the most wonderful
features. It’s the divine greeting, grace to you, and peace. At the beginning of every worship
service, we have what we call the apostolic greeting. God says
to you, his people, grace to you and peace from God, our father
and the Lord Jesus Christ through the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. And it’s a good greeting from
God, isn’t it? Because God could say to you,
curse and judgment because you’re sinners. But because of Christ, he can
say to us, grace to you and peace. Grace, he could have left you
in your sins and trespasses. He could have said to Adam and
Eve and all of us, come on down the line. Fine, be that way.
Fine, you want to go around eating the forbidden fruit, do it. See
what kind of mess it makes of your lives. But remember, God
came looking for Adam and Eve in the garden. And the first
gospel words of the scripture are God calling out to Adam and
Eve, where are you? God comes looking, speaking grace
and peace. Peace meaning we are no longer
at odds with God. We have peace of conscience because
our sins are forgiven. Our sin is no longer a ball and
chain that we drag around, though it’s left nailed to the cross
of Jesus Christ. Ephesians chapter two says, it
is by grace that you have been saved. Romans five says, since
we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ. God could have passed us over.
He could have left us as we were dead in our sins and trespasses.
He could have not come looking for us in the person and work
of Jesus. He could have left Paul a persecutor. He could have left Paul the chief
of sinners seeking to stamp out the way the Christian set. But God came to Paul. He came
to the Galatians and he’s come to us to rescue us, to deliver
us, to save undeserving sinners. And he does so through the next
thing we find in our passage, the divine substitute. Jesus is the lamb slain before
the foundation of the world. He is the Lord Jesus Christ who
gave himself for our sins. My life, he says, for yours. And it was, as Hebrews tells
us, for the joy that was set before him. You all, the Galatians,
that he endured the cross, that he despised the shame. Scripture
says greater love has No man than one who would lay down his
life for others. Jesus says, I lay down my life
willingly. How could the Galatians say we
don’t need Jesus? We need circumcision. We don’t
need Jesus and his finished work. We need some ancient Old Testament
rituals. We don’t need Jesus. We need
hard work. Friends, there is salvation in
no other name. There is salvation in no other
person than Jesus Christ. The next thing our passage shows
us is divine deliverance. And this is, I think, rather
remarkable. I already said that the grace
to you in peace was pretty good stuff. But this divine deliverance
is rather wonderful, too. And I don’t think we think about
the scope of our salvation as often as we should. It says in
our passage, he has rescued us from this present evil age. I don’t believe I need to convince
you that we live in the present evil age. When Paul speaks of
this present evil age, when he speaks of the world, he’s talking
about it in two ways. Yes, the dirt of the earth, cursed
by sin and all the people in it. Yes, this world we live in
is cursed by sin and people are broken by it and they do wicked,
bad things. Just read after Adam and Eve fell, how quickly Cain
killed Abel and how quickly life got pretty nasty until only God
could find one family of faith and that was Noah. And he destroyed
the earth with a flood and saved one family because of their faith.
And then quickly after the flood, how evil spread again. They’re
building the Tower of Babel. And then God calls Abram out
of Ur of the Chaldeans. God always has a remnant. God
always delivers his people out of this present evil age. And
so, yes, God is talking about the dirt, the cosmos, this world,
but he’s also speaking of the this age, this stretch of time
that will one day end. But before it ends, it will be
full of politics and evil and wickedness and hardship and strife
and struggle. And Paul will speak on and on
to the Galatians, the Ephesians and all other people he writes
to. God has delivered you from your former manner of life. He’s rescued you from Egypt,
from the taskmasters. He’s rescued you from the relentless
slavery to sin. But before Christ, that’s who
you were. That’s how you walked. You were unredeemed. You were
dominated by evil taskmasters. And now in Christ, you were saved. Ephesians chapter two says, you
were dead in your trespasses and your sins in which you once
walked. You followed the course of this
world. You followed the prince of the power of the air, the
spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among
whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying
out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature,
children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But thankfully, the
Bible doesn’t stop there. The next phrase, but God. but
God who is rich in mercy sent his son to deliver us out of
the age, this present evil age, and to usher us into the age
that is to come, to give us a new way of life, walking with Jesus
by the Spirit. We are under Jesus’ royal dominion
now. We are under King Jesus. Satan
has been kicked out of the cockpit of our lives. And now Jesus is
at the helm and we can live his divine purpose. If anyone is
in Christ, Paul wrote to the Colossians, he is a new creation. The old is gone, the new has
come. This is divine deliverance. Colossians 2.20 says, with Christ,
we died to the elemental spirits of this world. Friends, God’s
deliverance of you through Jesus is more than just a bus ticket
to heaven. It’s more than just a train ride
to glory. It’s more than just when the
chariot swings low, you get on board and say, take me on to
heaven. God has delivered you from this world in which we live.
It’s as if your feet are on the earth, but your head is in the
heavens. Your feet, yes, are on the earth. We have work to
do while we are here, but our mind, our bodies, and our spirits
are living out of the resources and the graces of heaven. Paul
says to the Ephesians that when we came to faith in Jesus, we
were raised up with him and seated in the heavenly places. Our feet
are on the ground here, yes, but we are living out of the
resources and the joy of heaven because of Jesus’ divine deliverance. Well, there’s a divine message
in our passage as well, and it’s the true and the only gospel. And Paul’s desire is that the
Galatians would hear it and believe it and receive it and rest in
it and not go back to the law, not to go back to the other things
that people may add on to Jesus. Why desert the gospel? Why go
to a different gospel, something contrary than to what Jesus has
given us? Why go to man’s gospel, a distorted
gospel? Paul says of his own life later
in Galatians, after some time I was out preaching the gospel
and I went to Jerusalem and I said, here’s what I’m preaching. Here’s
the gospel I received from Jesus because I didn’t want to run
in vain. How many people do we know? think they’ve come to faith in
Jesus, but there’ve been so many add-ons and they’re burdened
by the extras. You got to be here every time
the church doors open, you’ve got to do this and dress that
way and do this and do that and do that. Just give Jesus, right? Receive him and rest in him alone
for your salvation. Christ is no advantage to you.
If you add something to the gospel, if you add something to what
must be done in order to believe, we receive Jesus and we rest
in him alone. That’s why every single Sunday
when we have our confession of sin. And I get ready to give
the assurance of pardon. It’s my little wake up from your
prayer phrase. Brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus Christ, who
by faith have received Jesus and who are resting in him alone
for your salvation, hear now the words of the assurance of
the gospel. That is a declaration, isn’t
it? That is not a filler of time or a saying to get you to wake
up from your own personal prayers. It is a declaration directly
aimed at your heart. If you’ve received Jesus, You’re
resting in him alone for your salvation. You have every assurance
that you belong to Jesus and he has forgiven you of all your
sins. But when Jesus calls us to this
divine gospel, We need to live in step with the gospel. Our
conduct must match the gospel. That’s why Paul in chapter six
of Galatians is gonna say, live by the spirit, not the flesh.
The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, and so on. But the
fruit of the flesh are these things. If we want peace, we
need to receive Jesus and rest in him alone for our salvation.
Well, there’s a divine plan on display in these verses. Our
passage says that our salvation, our deliverance from this present
evil age through Jesus Christ was according, catch that, according
to the will of God our father. Salvation was initiated in the
mind and in the heart of God in eternity past. God determined
to save a people out of sin and misery and death and darkness
for his glory, for their good, but to the praise of his eternal
name and the father sent the son on the divine mission. We
think of Paul as an apostle and we do so rightly, but isn’t Jesus
the chief apostle? He is the first apostle. He is our apostle and high priest.
The book of Hebrews tells us. And then since he’s ascended
up to heaven, he’s left on earth, his spirit, his apostles and
his preachers. Well, the last divine thing,
you can take a breath. The last divine thing that we
find in this passage is the divine glory. The glory of God and the
redemption of sinners. Why did God save you? Well, the
answer is always, if you don’t know the answer, the good answer
is always Jesus or for his own glory, right? If you get asked
a question, the preacher puts you on the spot, just say Jesus
or for his own glory. You usually can’t go wrong. Why
did God save sinners? For his own glory. And what does
saved people do? Saved people sing. Saved people
sing the Gloria Patri. Saved people sing the doxology.
Saved people glorify God and enjoy him forever. And yes, it’s
imperfect in this life. We’re sick sometimes and can’t
make it to church. Maybe we say we can’t carry a
tune in a bucket and we don’t like to sing so much. We are
striving to be the church in the midst of this present evil
age. And we are sinners, we’re weak.
But friends, one day we will enter the worship of God that
is perfect in heaven. And while endless ages run, we
sing it sometimes in amazing grace. When we’ve been there
10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days.
to sing God’s praise than when we first begun. There is no glory in a false
gospel. There is no glory in telling
lies to people to cajole them into Jesus. We must believe the
gospel. We must preach the gospel. And
we must remember salvation is by the will of God through the
sacrifice of the son for the deliverance of the saints to
the praise of his glory forever and ever. Amen. Pray with me. Lord, we thank you for the glorious
gospel and pray that we would never stray from it. By your
help and for the good of your great name, hear us and help
us as we make our prayer in Jesus, the gospel son’s name. Amen.