The Apostle Paul has been accused of not being the real thing. Paul is being accused of not being authentic, he is accused of being a slick salesman rather than a true disciple. Is Paul reliable? Is Paul authentic? Are his writings to be taken seriously? Can we trust Paul and his understanding of the Gospel?
Well, here in the last part of chapter one of the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul gives us, in essence, his resume. Here, Paul shows us that he is a reliable source of the Gospel, and Paul also shows us that God will use things in our history that we do not see as connected to the Gospel, God will use these things for his glory.
If you have ever had to hire someone, you know that sometimes, what people put on an employment application or what people put on a resume can be pretty funny. What you place on an application or resume really matters, doesn’t it? Here are some, honestly, real things people wrote down on a resume or an employment application.
Employment applications.
Question: How large was the company you last worked for?
Answer: 3 stories.
Question: Why are you interested in the position?
Answer: To keep my parole officer from putting back me in jail.
Question; List your accomplishments.
Answer: Completed 11 years of high school.
Question: Do you have any hobbies?
Answer: Getting drunk every night down by the water, playing my guitar and smoking pot”
Question: Please list an emergency contact number.
Answer: 911.
From resumes.
Skills: Strong Work Ethic, Attention to Detail, Team Player, Self Motivated, Attention to Detail.
My duties included cleaning the restrooms and seating the customers.
I am bi-lingual in three languages.
And finally - Please call me after 5:30 because I am self-employed and my employer does not know I am looking for another job.
I guess that is the split personality job seeker.
The details of who you are matter. As a Christian who you are, and how you came to be who you are matters very much. You are not here by chance or happenstance and who you are is not some sort of a coincidence. God had His hand on you before you even knew anything about God. In the same way, the details of who Paul is matters. Paul isn’t some guy who showed up one day and charmed the masses. Paul’s history has a direct bearing on who he is and the accuracy of the message that he conveys.
Looking at our beginning verses 10 and 11, we see Paul answering charges that he preaches to please men and that he made up his version of the Gospel to easily gain converts. Notice that the charges against Paul are not stated here in chapter one, but we know what the charges are by how Paul writes.
The men who have come to Galatia believe they have the answer to a dilemma that has come upon the early church: What to do with the non-Jews who were entering the church. See, at the very beginning of the creation of the church in Acts chapter 2, all those who were gathered together on that great day of Pentecost were Jewish. And the 3000 that were added that Pentecost day, were also, Jewish. In fact at the very beginning of the church, everyone was Jewish. Everyone. It makes sense. After all Jesus was Jewish and the vast majority of His ministry was spent interacting with Jewish people. Remember, the only Bible they had at this point was, the Old Testament, which of course is Jewish.
It had been for a time, that those who became Christians were only Jewish, and they used the Jewish Scriptures, and worshiped the God who Jews had always worshiped. Christianity was seen, and in fact is, the Completion of Judaism. Those in the early church did not see Christianity as another religion, but as a fulfillment of what they had been waiting for generations – the arrival of the promised Messiah. At first, the Romans saw Christianity as a sect of Judaism. They saw it as no different than Judaism. You see, from the point of view of those in the very early church, they were still Jewish, they just took the additional step of believing that Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah.
So the men who arrive in Galatia believe this: We and all of those before us, including Paul, were Jewish before we became Christians; We were Jewish in our diet, we were Jewish in our dress; we were Jewish in our language; We were Jewish through and through. So, they would say, since Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism, it makes sense that a Christian should follow Jewish customs, in essence, be Jewish.
What they see Paul teaching is that Christianity is not connected to Judaism. What they see is that Paul is preaching ‘Jesus lite’ and making it easy on non-Jews to become Christians, because if he didn’t preach ‘Jesus lite’, he would have no converts.
No, Paul answers, these men are wrong. Christianity isn’t just new things piled on top of old. Yes, Christianity is a fulfillment of Judaism, but that doesn’t mean you have to be Jewish to be a Christian.
Funny thing is we have the opposite thing going on today. In Galatians we see a group of men who say to be a Christian you must be essentially be Jewish – in other words, you couldn’t be a Christian without being Jewish, but today we have people giving us the line that it is offensive evangelize Jewish people, it is offensive to tell Jewish people about Jesus because Jewish people don’t need to become Christians, they say Christianity is the last thing a Jew needs. Amazing, isn’t it? What ridiculous stuff ignorance makes people believe.
But see, Paul was as perfect a Jew as there ever was – and it didn’t matter. In verse 14, when Paul says that he was “advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews my own age”, He means that he was adhering to the law and customs of Judaism more perfectly than anyone his age, and as a result he was noticed and given positions of power for zealousness. What Paul is saying here is no exaggeration, history tells us that Paul was very much a extreme Jew of the day.
The word he uses for advancing means to blaze ahead like an expedition hacking its way through the jungle. He was so zealous in his adherence to Judaism, that he felt that this new group of Jews who popped up calling themselves first “The Way” and then “Christians” needed to be purged out of Judaism. Paul had been given papers to remove and even kill anyone who was found to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
Paul was highly educated in the ways of Judaism. He was educated under one of the best teachers of the day Gamaliel. This alone set him above other Rabbis. Paul was a Pharisee, which means that he was an expert in both the written law (the Scriptures) and the oral law (the ancestral Jewish traditions perfected in the Pharisaic schools). For Paul the bases of life was both the Scriptures and this tradition of oral law that gave very detailed prescriptions on how to act in every aspect of life – what to eat, when to eat it, what to wear, where not to go, who not to talk with, there were details on how to live down to specific minutia. Paul, before he came to Christ followed these hundreds of laws perfectly, better than most anyone else. Paul was quite the scholar in his day.
A young man reported to work in a large supermarket chain. The store manager greeted him with a warm handshake and gave him a broom and said, “Your first job is to sweep the produce department”.
The young man protested, “But I’m a college graduate” “
The manager took the broom back, “ I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were a college graduate, here, let me show you how one of these work”
Gal. 1:15 But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace,
We talked about this a little last week. We found that in the context of salvation, what grace means is that God gives his favor, He has done everything we need, and there is nothing more we can do more than accept what He has done for us. To receive salvation, we repent of our sins, and accept Jesus into our heart – it is by faith we are saved. See Paul was the image of perfection, if there ever was a good man, a man who did everything right, if there ever was a man who followed the rules perfectly, to the tee, Paul was that man. But even though he was the image of perfection, Paul needed something else, not something more, but something else.
Paul was on the road to Damascus, with papers to arrest those who where said to follow Jesus Christ. We see in Acts chapter 9, that Paul had an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. This was no internal vision, this was not just a man with a change of heart, this was the person of Jesus Christ appearing to Paul. Paul fell from his horse, was blinded – and Paul, he believed.
This is the essence of what Grace means. Here is a man who is on his way to kill Christians, and the very one who he is persecuting, Jesus, comes to Paul, not to destroy Paul, but to save him. It didn’t matter how good Paul was, or how perfect Paul was; It didn’t matter how bad Paul was, or how much destruction he had put into people’s lives, neither mattered – what mattered was Grace.
Before his conversion Paul was trying to please men, and he was very good at pleasing men, but after his encounter with Jesus, Paul gave up on pleasing men, because he saw how empty pleasing men was. He saw that pleasing men did not matter, because the Grace of God had fallen upon him. Remember, we saw last week that with grace always come peace. They go hand in hand. To have peace in your life, you must experience the grace of God. When you receive the grace of God, the peace of God follows right behind it. My guess is, that Paul was so zealous in being a Jew, so zealous in pleasing men, because he was looking for peace in his life. When he received Grace, he received peace, and he didn’t have the need to please men anymore.
Looking back at verse 15, let us touch on the first part of that verse. Paul says there that God set him apart from birth. In the Greek, the words used mean, from before the beginning of time.
Paul’s conversion wasn’t random. God had his eye on Paul. It was irrelevant how good Paul was. It was irrelevant how bad Paul was. God had Paul picked out from the beginning of time. Now this is more than foreknowledge, more than God being able to see into the future. This is God actively choosing.
This does not only apply to Paul. This also applies to all who are Christians. Not only does God know who will become his followers – but God has picked them out ahead of time. Today, many would say, that’s not fair! Well, that’s very true. It is not fair that God pick Abraham over all the others alive at the time. It is not fair that God chose, Joseph, Moses, Esther, Elijah, and so many more... It is not fair that Jesus picked the twelve disciples over many others who probably were better men, and it is not fair that God picked Paul – in spite of who he is. Do you know it has been reported, by very reliable sources that the murder Ted Bundy had become a Christian days before his execution – God had picked Ted Bundy out as his child from the beginning of time – how unfair is that? God never, never claims to be fair. In fact God claims just the opposite, for if He was fair, none of us here would stand a chance.
However, understand that all the experiences that Paul had in his life prior to his conversion were not wasted, even the fact that he killed Christians made his testimony even more powerful. All his education and Pharisaic experience, he was able to use this to forward the plan of the Gospel. Paul was not the only Pharisee that became a Christian. Many Pharisees became believers, and many of them became leaders in the church.
Let me stop here a moment. Many of you here have had years of experience in various areas of expertise. In your mind, there is no possible way that they can be connected to the Gospel. Don’t be so sure. God has given you life experiences, and talents, and education to place you in a position, be it high or low, to further the Gospel.
Jack went to an Ivy League School and was a star on the basketball team and graduated with a degree in topography – that is, the study of mapping. What do basketball and topography have to do with the Gospel? Nothing. Except that years later Jack found himself in Turkey as the pastor of a small congregation. His church, by state law was illegal, so he took a job as a semi-pro assistant basketball coach. Since he has a job as a basketball coach, no one suspected he was an illegal pastor. Later, a mission organization in Turkey was establishing churches in rugged unmapped regions of Turkey and Iraq – guess who was available to help? Now, what are the odds of that? See, God had picked out Jack from before time…….He thought basketball had no connection to the Gospel, he thought topography had no connection to the Gospel?
What is it that you do that has no connection to the Gospel? Where do you go every day, or every so often that has no connection to the Gospel, with people who have no connection to the Gospel? Could this be what God will use in your life to advance the Gospel? Chances are that God will use what you think is useless. That history you have, things that may even be selfish or self centered, even things that were done that hurt the Gospel, that hurt Christians – even this God will use. God will not waste anything in your life.
We see in verse 16, that God reveled the Gospel to Paul. Understand that Paul has vast and profound Biblical knowledge of the Old Testament. So when Paul is confronted by the Lord Jesus, and Paul believes that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the Holy Spirit comes upon him. With the power of the Holy Spirit, Paul is now able to connect all the dots in the Old Testament and build a powerful Christian theology.
Paul does not need to consult any man, and Paul did not consult any man. He went into Arabia, which means he went into the Nabatean kingdom which is a desert kingdom. Today it would be found in the country of Jordan, the city of Petra was its capitol. Paul went into isolation, even when he returns to Damascus, he is away from any real authority in the church.
Paul then stresses that he only goes to Jerusalem, the heart of Christianity, to get acquainted with Peter. He stresses that he did not go to learn from Peter, or to get Peter’s approval. He mentions spending time with James, Jesus’ brother, who was for all purposes the top leader in the church. Paul stresses all of this, because he wants to be clear that what he will teach in the next few chapters in not something he made up, or something that he learned from other men – Paul claims that what he will teach is revealed from God.
Paul is telling the Galatians, and he is telling us that this is not some religious philosophy, nor is it just more commentary, or thoughts on Christianity. Paul says I am the authority, because of my background, because God chose me specifically for this purpose, because of my conversion to Christianity, and because God revealed his Gospel to me – independent of any other man.
In our day, the reason so many people in the church believe in moral relativism is because they believe the teachings of the Bible are man made, and not revelation from God. The believe they can read whatever they want to into the Scriptures and so justify their sin. Recently, in our denomination, a well known pastor gave a sermon on the miracle of Jesus multiplying the fishes and the bread. His interpretation was that those who brought their lunch that day (in addition to the little boy), shared their lunches with the others – It was a beautiful thing. Ladies and gentlemen, you can find nowhere in the story of Jesus multiplying the fishes and the bread, any illusion to, any indication of, nor any reference to anyone sharing lunch, or even that anyone beside the little boy had brought any food. How did this man come up with this interpretation? He reads what he wants into it. May God have mercy on this man, he treats Scripture like it came from humans. But Paul assures us that it does not, Scripture is revealed from God.
God had his hand on Paul, not only from before time began, but even when Paul was doing things that were hurting the Church. God used the history of Paul specifically to advance the Gospel, even the things that seemed to have no connection to Paul. Paul in his obedience was able to allow God to use even the worst things he did to bring glory to God.
You and I. God does not waste our history either. If we are obedient to the Holy Spirit, God will use you to his will, to bring the Gospel in ways that you never thought possible.
