No Other Gospel Series

NOT A REAL CHRISTIAN

Have you ever had someone tell you that you’re not really a Christian or not saved? Maybe because, they said, you don’t belong to the right church or you celebrate the wrong holidays or whatever.

When I was returning from the mission field, I had the good fortune of sitting next to another missionary on the plane. I had the misfortune of it being a Christian who didn’t accept I was actually saved. The bone of contention was that I didn’t speak in tongues.

Now, I’ve spent some time in Pentecostal churches and classic Pentecostal doctrine teaches that tongues are the evidence that you’ve been baptised in the Spirit. That doesn’t mean you’re not saved or even that you don’t have the Holy Spirit because they’re separate things. Normally you’ll get saved and be born again in the Holy Spirit, and then be baptised in the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues later. Spirit-baptism supercharges your Christian life.

That’s not what this man was saying. He was saying that you had be baptised in the Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues in order to be born again. According to his doctrine I wasn’t even a Christian.

BACKGROUND

The church in Galatia faced a similar situation.

Galatia was a Roman province in modern day Turkey and you can read about Paul’s first in Acts 13.14-14.23. It was a spectacular trip with signs and wonders. He and Barnabas were worshipped as gods and then stoned almost to death in the same city. They faced fierce opposition from the Jews, and many people coming to faith.

Not surprisingly, then, it seems that Paul had a special place for the Galatians in his heart and his passion really overflows in this letter.

Reading between the lines, it seems that a group of probably Jewish Christians had arrived from Jerusalem, possibly claiming to come with the Jerusalem Apostles’ authority but certainly undermining Paul’s apostolic authority (we’ll unpack this over the next couple of weeks). They were teaching that all those Gentile Galatian converts weren’t really Christians until they were circumcised.

Now, that might seem outrageous to us (and it is) but to be fair, Christianity was still a Jewish sect, and these Jewish Jesus-followers were still trying to figure out what to do with the Gentiles. Jesus was a Jew, as were his Apostles, and they were all Torah observant so it followed that to be a genuine Jesus-follower, Gentiles should be Torah observant as well. And that included circumcission.

A DIFFERENT GOSPEL

Paul took this opposition to him and his message very personally and his indignation immediately evident. In v. 6 he says, " I am amazed that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel."

Let that sink in. Paul says that, in listening to these interlopers (regardless of how genuine and well-meaning they were), the Galatians aren’t just rejecting him, and not even just rejecting the gospel, although that was true. But they were turning away from God himself. What these so-called ‘Judaisers’ were offering was not just an alternative interpretation of the gospel, or an alternative Christian tradition, it was another gospel altogether. The Galatians were committing spiritual treason! Paul said that even if an angel preached such a so-called gospel, a curse on them!

Paul will identify this ‘other gospel’ later, but in these opening verses he signals two important themes in Galatians.

PAUL DEFENDING HIS APOSTOLICITY

The first is a defence of his apostolic authority. Apparently, his opponents accused him of not being a genuine Apostle – which was an easy charge to lay since he hadn’t even met Jesus (they thought). The real apostles were in Jerusalem and Paul’s base was in Antioch in Syria.

Nevertheless, Paul claims that his apostolic commission wasn’t from any human but from God himself, and this will be his argument for the rest of this chapter.

PAUL DEFENDING THE AUTHENTIC GOSPEL

The second theme is a defence of the authentic gospel.

What is this Gospel?

Paul states it in brief in v.4: "[Christ] gave himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age."

That’s fairly straight forward, although very brief. Paul, of course, sees Jesus giving himself on the cross so we can be freed from the power and penalty of sin and be made right with God.

The crux of the issue is how do we get in on that salvation? Essentially the Judaisers were saying, ‘By becoming part of the Covenant through circumcision,’ but Paul will argue, ‘by faith.’ Paul says that there is only one gospel and that we are saved by trusting in Jesus. If we say that we have to do something else to receive the Gospel, then it’s not really the Gospel.