“No Catch…No Rules”
Galatians 1:1-5
The Good News of the freedom that is available through Jesus Christ seems almost too good to be true. The fact that there are no rules is perhaps the most exciting and yet at the same time the most puzzling fact about being a Christian. There are so many who hold the view that being a Christian is about keeping a lot of rules for which God will reward us, and if we do not keep every one of them we can expect to be punished. So immediately when someone becomes a Christians they ask, “Okay, what are the rules?” As you will see throughout this study Paul’s main theme in this letter is the incomparable freedom we have in Jesus Christ. In every chapter Paul examines a different aspect of this unbelievable freedom. The message of Galatians is quite simple: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm and do not let yourself be put back into slavery again. No catch…No rules. Over and over again Paul returns to this central idea: God wants you free. The Galatian letter explains how life without overbearing rules is possible.
I. God’s desire for our freedom is evident in the opening words of the letter.
A. Paul uses a very authoritative tone beginning here and throughout the rest of the letter.
1. By adding the word "apostle," Paul at once highlights his claim to be commissioned by Jesus to preach the gospel with authority and to plant Christianity.
2. Paul is an apostle in the fullest sense of the word, commissioned apart from any human intervention.
3. An apostle is a messenger sent to deliver a message from the sender, with no authority on his own but delegated power from the one he represents.
4. Notice that Paul’s statement here about being chosen by Jesus Christ and God the Father does two things.
a. It sets Paul apart as a special apostle, chosen by Jesus Christ himself through the encounter on the Damascus road.
b. It subtly but distinctly “sets Christ in a category apart from ordinary man”. It was not any man that chose Paul—it was Jesus Christ!
5. Paul never wavers in the fact that he was sent to the Gentiles as surely as Peter was sent to the Jews.
B. Paul is challenging the Judaizers in the Galatian churches who are calling his authority into question.
1. The Judaizers rejected Paul’s commission and teachings. They would not accept his credentials as being valid.
2. The Galatians needed to develop a more discerning approach to those who claimed to speak for God.
3. Paul wants to emphasize that in contrast to the local distortion of the gospel in Galatia, “all the brothers” elsewhere stand together with Paul in the true gospel.
4. The churches in Galatia likely included several cities (Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe) Paul visited on his missionary journeys.
5. The word “church” is used as it is here in Galatians to refer to local congregations of baptized believers who regularly meet for worship and witness.
6. Galatians issues a strong warning! None of God’s faithful will ever utterly or finally fall away, and the gates of hell certainly will never prevail against the church of Jesus Christ. There is no such thing as “eternal security” especially for a local congregation that has lost its first love.
II. The Christ that makes this freedom possible.
A. Paul packs a lot of information about Jesus into these opening verses.
1. He is Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary, raised in the home of Joseph the carpenter, circumcised on the eight day, presented in the temple in His twelfth year, baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River, a true member of the nation of Israel and the tribe of Judah, fully human, fully man, fully one of us.
2. He is the Christ, (Messiah in Hebrew), the chosen one of God like kings, priests and prophets of old, the Promised Savior of the world.
3. He is the Son of God the Father who raised Him from the dead on the third day.
4. The resurrection is crucial to the good news of freedom.
B. Paul is eager to establish the core of the gospel truth in his opening verses.
1. Jesus gave himself to save us from our sins and God the Father confirmed the validity of that sacrifice by raising him from the dead.
2. It is by this act of grace, not by any works of law, that the Galatians are saved.
3. Paul wants to establish from the beginning what the important theme of Christianity is. Salvation is not based on man’s ability to keep God’s rules, but on Christ’s ransom, paid with his blood.
4. It is hard to imagine a statement better calculated to oppose any intrusion of the will or supposed merits of man in the matter of attaining salvation.
5. The Galatians will be reminded throughout this letter; the atoning sacrifice of Christ is not compatible with man-made salvation. Either Jesus saves us, or we save ourselves.
C. Salvation begins in the eternal counsels of God. It is a matter of His will and not of the will of man.
1. It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.
2. It is God’s will that we be saved! We do not need to do some heroic act to convince an unwilling God that he should change his mind about us.
3. We do not even need to initiate some contact with him to apply for salvation. He has loved us; He has wanted us to be saved; He has sent His Son to pay the penalty for our sins.
4. The Father has stretched out His arms to us, and it is but for us to surrender to that love.
5. The bottom line is that Jesus sacrificed Himself to set us free from this present evil age.
III. The message of grace that rings out in these opening verses.
A. Galatians begins and ends with “grace.” Verses 3–5, which form the closing part of the long, one-sentence (in Greek) salutation.
1. Paul in this passage presents very clearly the idea of God’s incomparable grace.
2. There are two main ideas to the word “grace” (charis).
a. Sheer beauty—the idea of charm and loveliness.
b. Sheer undeserved generosity—the loving favor that God gives to people who have not earned it.
3. Grace is God’s “unconditioned good will towards mankind which is decisively expressed in the saving work of Christ.”
4. Paul can probably never use the term grace without remembering the past life that God had rescued him from.
B. Paul continues with this message of grace by using the term peace.
1. Paul leaves no doubt that peace is the natural result of grace.
2. Peace is the “state of wholeness”enjoyed by those who have effectively experienced divine grace.
3. This word began as a greeting (shalom in Hebrew) that wished the recipient peace, but in time it came to encompass much more: the way Paul uses it wishes nothing less than one’s total well-being for time and all eternity.
4. They have not struggled to earn God’s approval, nor must they find some way to earn the right to keep it. Because grace has been freely given, peace can be securely enjoyed.
5. Paul’s constant gratitude for forgiven sins and the accompanying harmony with God, causes this greeting become a sign pointing to a new peaceful relationship with from whom we were formerly estranged.
C. Such a great God merits our highest praise, so Paul concluded his long salutation with a doxology, “To whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
1. The inclusion of this exclamation of praise is no mere formality.
2. To contemplate who God is and what he has done in Jesus Christ is to fall on our knees in worship, thanksgiving, and praise.
3. We study the Bible and the great doctrines of the Christian faith not out of vain curiosity, nor merely to increase our intellectual insight and historical knowledge but rather that we might come more fully to love and enjoy the gracious God who delights in our praise.
4. This closing doxology sets the gospel, centering in the preeminence of the Lord Jesus Christ and his work, above any human criticism or praise.
5. Gratitude should permeate our lives like Paul’s, we no longer have to fight with or flee from God because of what Christ has done.
In James Michener’s “Hawaii”, Nyuk Tsin Kee stands before the officer in her examination for United States citizenship. She has relentlessly driven herself to prepare for this exam. More than anything else, she wants to become a citizen of America. But now she is strangely silent. When the examiner asks who is the father of our country, Mrs. Kee does not answer. Michener explains that the old woman is overwhelmed by the importance of the moment. She has so wanted to belong, first to her father, later to her Punti husband (who made fun of her big feet), then to her children (who feared that she might have leprosy), then to America (which has turned its back on Orientals). Now that she is about to attain what she has so fervently hoped, she has lost her tongue.
Finally, when the examiner asks her the third time, she begins to speak. Then she can’t be stopped. She names the capitals of the states, she explains the three branches of government, she describes the Bill of Rights, and still she talks. But when she triumphantly leaves the immigration building as a citizen, she tells her family that when you are a citizen, even the earth beneath your feet feels different. That’s shalom peace. You belong. You are a citizen of the nation of God. You have been brought back to God not through what you have done but through the efforts of His Son.
