"No Other Gospel"
Trusting the message of grace and faith
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Text: Galatians 1:1-10
The New Testament is comprised of 27 individual books. They are written by different authors, to different audiences, in varying genres, for various purposes. The gospels, for instance, were written as the first generation of apostles was nearing the end of their lives to preserve their words for future generations. The Book of Revelation sought to encourage believers trapped in the midst of persecution. Numerous letters were written to churches and individuals addressing specific situations. A number of these came from Saul who was born in Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia, and who became the Apostle Paul. One of his letters was to churches he had founded in Galatia.
Galatia was a region that makes up a considerable portion of modern-day Turkey and included the present-day capital region, Ankara. Paul went through southern Galatia several times and also the central region of the province on his later missionary journeys as outlined for us by Luke in The Acts of the Apostles. This fact makes it difficult to place and date the letter to the Galatians specifically because Paul could have been writing to Christians in the southern part of Galatia as early as c. A.D. 48 or, more likely, c. A.D. 50 (Acts 13, 14); or he could have been writing to believers in the central part of Galatia as late as the mid-50s (Acts 16:6; 18:23). Either way, Galatians is a very early letter, written some 18-25 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.
When trying to understand the situation addressed by Paul in Galatians, we are in a scenario not unlike listening to someone speak on the phone - we only get one end of the conversation. But if we listen carefully, we can usually piece together what is being spoken of. Likewise, we can do this with Paul's letters.
Apparently he had recently preached the gospel to a sector of the Galatian peoples (1:6) and they had turned in faith to Christ. Shortly after Paul had left, however, a group of Christians more disposed to Jewish tradition arrived with their own form of the gospel. It was a teaching that the church had to wrestle with continually in its early years; what do you do with Jewish tradition after Christ, what do you do with God's law, the Torah? There were in the church those who accepted Christ by faith, and there were those who sought to synthesize the gospel message with Jewish practice. These more Jewish Christians taught that in order to truly follow God, believers in Christ had to be circumcised and take on God's law, and hold certain feast days etc. (5:2; 6:12; 4:10, 21). When the Jewish Christians came to Galatia, the people must have been confused, wondering, “What do we believe now?” We know that they eventually turned away from Paul's teaching of salvation by faith in God's grace. Perhaps, the Jewish Christians had brought Paul's authority into question. Perhaps, they questioned his apostleship, saying, “What does Paul know? He wasn't even one of Jesus' closest followers. He was later. We have the truth.”
I remember a number of years ago, I had a phone call from a woman who wanted to talk to me. She was quite vague about what she wanted to talk about but I agreed to meet her. We sat in the church library and I listened to her chat about wanting to get a number of ministers together for a think-tank session on world religions. I had some interest in what she was doing so we agreed to meet again. On the second visit, I found out that she was a member of the Unification Church, a follower of Sun Myung Moon, and she told me something of their beliefs which were quite interesting for an enquiring mind. On the third visit, I became aware that she was not only a “mooney” but a “mooney” missionary and she wanted me to join them. She spoke some more of their beliefs and indicated that God would reveal to me who the messiah was, just as he had revealed him to her. I was a little leery of where she was going and as I pushed her, she finally admitted that the Unification Church holds that The Rev. Moon is the second coming of the messiah.
That was the last time we met, but in that encounter I was, to all intents and purposes, facing another gospel, the problem of truth, and the issue of authority. What is truth? Where is it found? Who has authority to help us understand truth? Those are the questions the Galatian people must have been asking themselves when they encountered another gospel and eventually turned from Paul's teaching to another gospel.
Paul was incensed and concerned that the grace of God would be replaced by false teaching and he writes,
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ (1:6, 7).
Over in Chapter 3, “O you foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you (3:1)?” And in Chapter 5, “You were running well; who prevented you from obeying the truth (5:7)?” “Anyone who proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed (1:9)!”
Paul was concerned that the Galatians had moved beyond hope in the grace of God to hope in following Jewish law. To set things right, to help them see where truth really lies, Paul had to re-establish his own authority and apostleship. He offers three thoughts. The first affirms that what he was doing in terms of his mission and teaching was in no way to please human beings but to please God. He says that “If I was trying to please people I would not be a servant of Christ (1:10),” but I am trying to please God.
It is often true that the person who truly follows Christ runs into opposition rather than commendation from others and this was especially true in Paul's pre-Christian society in which he was opposed by Jew and pagan alike. He was imprisoned, abused, stoned and left for dead, all for the sake of the gospel that he preached. Paul was not doing what he was doing for the fun of it; he wasn't doing it to please human beings.
I'm reminded of a time when a former president of The Methodist Church in Ireland came to visit Canada. The Rev. Derek Ritchie and his wife Joan were staying with my mother. One evening, Derek and I took my children out to play on the swings at a park nearby and as we walked, we talked about ministry, its rewards and challenges. In the midst of the discussion, he said, “David, you don't become a minister because you want to, do you? It is only because you have to, because God compels you.” I had to agree because I had known individuals who had left a thriving law practice or a highly paid business career to enter the ministry. They did it because they were compelled by something higher and greater. I knew a few individuals who had given up even more leaving a secure environment to go to dangerous mission fields because they were compelled by God. I agreed with him because I could recall stories of how ministers, a couple of generations ago, had been pelted with eggs and various vegetables for preaching the gospel in the open air. Ministry is not something one does to please human beings. The Rev. Ritchie said that one goes into ministry only if compelled by God. The Apostle Paul indicated that what he was doing was not for personal gain or to achieve the praise of men, it was because God compelled him, because he was serving God, because he was trying to please God. “I don't have ulterior motives other than truth,” he said.
The second thing that Paul says in support of his position is that the gospel he preaches is not of human origin but was received through a revelation of Jesus Christ (1:12). His opponents had perhaps criticized his lack of apostolic credentials (cf. Acts 1:21ff). He had not walked with Jesus, and so Paul has to re-build his credibility. He begins by rehearsing the events of his life, how he had grown up in the Jewish faith, and how he had advanced beyond many of his peers in education. He had become a Pharisee. As a young man he had been privileged to study at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem and had become very zealous for the traditions of his fathers to the point of persecuting a troublesome sect who claimed to have found the messiah - the first Christians (cf. Acts 22:3ff.; Phil.3:1ff.). That all changed when God met him in a flash of light while he was journeying to persecute Christians on the road to Damascus (cf. Acts 9). In that moment and in his grace, God revealed his Son to Paul. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me,” Jesus said (Acts 9) and Saul's life never was the same. After a few days with believers in Damascus, Paul says he went away. “I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me,” says Paul, “but I went away at once to Arabia and afterwards returned to Damascus (1:17).” We have to see that for three years, Paul, this student of the Jewish law, went off to think about what had happened to him on the Damascus road. For three years, he sought to integrate this remarkable event, this remarkable revelation of Jesus into what he already knew about God and faith. For three years, he went off to talk to God before he would venture to talk to men and women about what God had done in Christ. He says, “God set me apart. God called me though his grace (1:15). God revealed himself and his gospel to me (1:11f.).” Paul may not have walked with Jesus but he had received a no less direct revelation of Christ from God independent of those who followed Jesus while he was on earth.
Thirdly, though this was an independent revelation, Paul says in his defence that what he had received from God was continuous with, and in full agreement with that which was taught by the original disciples. He speaks of spending 15 days with Peter and James in Jerusalem after his three-year stint in Arabia and then of a later time in Jerusalem in which he laid before the leaders of the church what he had been preaching, lest he was running in vain (2:2). The leaders voiced their approval, gave him the right hand of fellowship, and recognized that Paul should go out to the Gentiles just as they ministered to the Jewish population (2:9; cf. Acts 15).
So Paul wrote to the Galatians not as one with ulterior motive, not as one who was trying to please human beings, but as one whose only interest was the service of God; as one whose gospel was given to him directly by God, and as one who had confirmed all things with Peter, James, and John and those who had been closest to Jesus. Paul is concerned for the Galatians, and in this letter one can sense how deeply conscious the apostle was of the divine truth of the gospel, of the truth of what he taught, and of his apostolic authority. When one thinks of his life and the things he endured for the cause of the gospel, there is a tremendous credibility in what Paul was about and taught.
We have been going through the series Living Faith on Tuesday evenings here at the church. A part of the session is a DVD presentation by New Testament scholar, prolific writer, former professor of New Testament Studies at McGill and Oxford Universities, and now Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright. It is interesting the way this great scholar has commented on several occasions of how, even after a great deal of enquiry, the gospel comes back and rings true time and time again. Wright holds that we can trust the gospel and that we can trust the gospel message that Paul, long ago, brought to the towns of Galatia. It is a message about how one relates to God, it is a message about the work of Christ, it is a message of grace and a message of the faith that leads to eternal life.
We, today, have similar issues to those faced long ago by the Galatians. In the midst of a myriad of claims of truth, in the midst of other religious traditions vying for our attention, in the midst of a relativism that posits many truths and goes largely unquestioned, we are called to discover truth.
Today, Paul still comes to us, with all that he knows and has experienced of God and says, “Hold on to that you have received, there is no other gospel.”
From a personal perspective, after many years of study, many questions, and many struggles, I find myself still agreeing with Paul, and with Tom Wright who said, this gospel of hope for eternity “just rings true time and time again.” And so with Joshua, who lived some 1,200 years before Paul, I would say, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord (Josh.24),” and I would invite you and your household to do the same. There is something about the gospel that rings true, this gospel of grace. There is no other gospel!