So this is Galatians for beginners we're in lesson number two of this series.
And we're going to cover Galatians chapter 1:6-9, Lord willing.
The title of this lesson is, The Dangers of False Teaching. So let's do just
a bit of review to kind of cover some things that we've talked about.
In this letter, Paul is writing to churches in the Roman province of
Galicia, concerning the false teaching that is being spread among these churches
at that time. And the idea of the false teaching - we talked about it at
length last time, was that what was being taught was
that in order to become a Christian one first had to become,
well, a Jew. This was being proposed and taught
and promoted by Jewish teachers.
We called them the Judaizers or the circumcision party. Basically they
said if you want to become a Christian before you're baptized, you have to be circumcised. And of
course you can kind of understand these things. These Jewish Christians,
their world had changed all of a sudden. They were used to going to the temple and they had the feasts.
And now with Christianity, well there is no more going to the temple. They're
the temple. So there was a great change and you can almost understand the effort to
kind of hang on to some of their cultural and religious heritage.
But of course, this was violating the principle of the gospel.
As I say, this was being taught by a group - sometimes he talks about them, Paul
talks about them as the Judaizers or the circumcision party.
Now the danger of this teaching, it was
dangerous for several reasons. First of all it added to the
Gospel by requiring additional
responsibilities by the believer, beyond a confession of
faith, repentance, and baptism. They were adding
to the spoken word of Jesus.
And this was not, of course, permitted. Nothing new.
People are always trying to add to the word of Jesus, especially for salvation's sake. You've got to
do this - you've got to buzz your head, you've got to shave your hair off. You've got to
wear a different kind of clothing. You've got to do all kinds of things.
You have to rearrange your marital status, because it's not acceptable for one reason or another.
Just to look at Acts chapter two, watch Peter preach.
There's thousands of people there listening to him and when they say, so what must we do to be saved?
What are we going to do? Men and brethren, what are we going to do? What does he say? Repent and
be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus, for the forgiveness of sins, you will receive the gift the Holy
Spirit. And it says 3000 people that day
were baptized. That very day. Now I ask you this question, don't you
think among those 3000 people that came forward to be baptized, there were some people who had some
bad habits they hadn't completely overcome yet? You think maybe there were some people
in that group there whose marital situation was not quite right?
Do you see what I'm saying? You think some people maybe were over-eating?
We talked in our other course, that one of the big problems is over-eating. You think there were some
people having trouble with food issues?
And yet, what was Peter saying to them? Repent, be baptized.
He wasn't adding other conditions. Now we'll talk about repentance in
a minute, some of the things that it requires. So getting back to my original
point. This additional teaching was dangerous because it added more
stuff to the gospel that Jesus didn't ask of us.
Also, specifically for their teaching about circumcision, by
accepting circumcision, the person was in effect saying that he was abandoning
salvation through his union with Christ based on faith and
now would pursue salvation based on perfect law keeping.
Now there's two systems. There's two ways to be saved. One way is
perfection - don't sin. Don't break the law. Don't break any of the commandments
at any time. And if you do that, you go to heaven.
You'll be judged sinless, you'll be judged - you're perfect.
Then the other way to go to heaven is: you're forgiven for your sins
and God gives to you perfection. He imbues you with
perfection. He gives you - He considers you perfect. Because you've
performed perfectly? No. Because through faith you
have appropriated the perfection of Christ and it's been put upon you.
Those are the two systems. All right.
The danger for these people was that salvation by faith in Christ, that's
possible. We can do that. Despite our imperfections,
despite our weaknesses, being saved through faith in Christ, we can
do that. We have the ability to do that. To believe, to respond
to Christ. But salvation by law keeping, well, that's
impossible. We can't do that. We're unable to
accomplish law keeping sufficiently to achieve perfection.
See that's the point. Jesus, He lived the perfect life.
He's the one that kept all the commandments. He's the one,
he didn't need to be saved, but he is the one that fulfilled
all of the commandments. He never sinned. That was the significance of His perfect life.
He did it. And because He was perfect, He was then
permitted to offer that perfect life in exchange for our imperfect
life.
So the Galatians were abandoning the system by which it was
possible for them to be saved and they were going over to a system where
it was impossible for them to be saved. That's what the danger
was. Paul says in another epistle, Romans 3:28,
just in case you're not sure of this, "For we maintain that a
man is justified by faith apart from works
of the law." We're not saved by works of the law. Do we do
works of the law? Sure. Sure we do. We try to tell the truth. We try
not to steal. We attempt these things.
But it isn't our attempt to do these things that saves us.
So in the first verses Paul establishes his authority as an apostle
and he reminds them of the core of the gospel.
And the core of the gospel is that the debt for sin was fully paid
by Jesus. He makes restitution for all of our
sins, on the cross. I know I've repeated that, but it is
so important to understand this idea.
Restitution is what we owe God for having broken His laws.
If you speed and it's 40 miles an hour and you're doing 50 miles an hour, well,
maybe your ticket is 60 bucks plus 20. If you're doing 60 in
a 40 zone, well, maybe it's 50 bucks plus 50 more dollars. If you're doing
80 in a 40 zone, then it's 200 bucks and, I don't know, they take your license
or something.
There is a consequence for having broken
the driving law. And what happens when you get caught and
judged? You've got to make restitution. And how do you do that? Well, you pay.
You pay your fine. And once you've paid your fine you've made restitution.
That's what restitution is. So Jesus makes
restitution for every single sin that we have
ever made in all of our lives, and every single person on earth
He has made restitution for us.
And trying to be saved by a system of law is trying,
somehow, to begin paying some of that restitution off.
Can't do it.
We don't have anything to give.
Now, repentance.
Now that's another thing. Let's not confuse restitution with
repentance.
Repentance is a change, a turn around. The Greek word simply means to turn around.
Like you're - do you ever do that? You're driving - not a lot of one-way streets in Oklahoma, but in Montreal there
are plenty of one-way streets. You can only go in one direction. And it happens to a lot of people who drive in
that city, they're not thinking, they turn down the street, and all of a sudden they notice the arrow is pointing this
way. Meaning, I'm going down the wrong way on a one-way street.
I need to turn around. And a lot of times you go into a driveway, you back up, you know what I'm saying.
Well, if you were saying that in the Greek, I'm going down the wrong way,
I need to repent. That's what the word
repentance means.
It's a change of attitude. It's a recognition, oh I'm going the wrong way.
I'm going to turn around. It's a recognition
that we've been wrong. It's a change of attitude
that I have toward God. It's a change of attitude that I have towards
sinfulness. Before, I didn't care about sin. It didn't matter to me. And as long as I
didn't get caught, as long as I didn't get punished. Doesn't matter. But now repentance requires
that I do care about sinfulness. I want to do what is right.
Think of it this way, repentance is not going back
and making right every wrong in your past. That's not repentance, that's
restitution. Jesus has already done that for you on the cross.
Repentance is forward looking. When I repent I'm looking to the
future.
From here on in, I repent.
What I did badly, incorrectly, whether I did it willfully or not in the
past, in the future,
I'm going to do or I'm going to try to do what is right.
That's repentance. That's why I say on the day of Pentecost those 3000 people who repented,
they couldn't go back and change all the dumb stuff that they have done in the past.
But they did decide from that moment on that they were going to follow Jesus and that
they were going to change, and that they were going to do what they could to do what is right
before God. And this plan, this is a plan from God.
And He deserves glory for devising this plan. So
salvation is offered by grace. What does that mean? Well, it
means, because God is gracious and merciful, He's offered to us
salvation based on a principle of faith rather than salvation on a
principle of law. That's mercy. Thank you, God.
Thank you. You could have said hey you want to get to heaven? Great. Just don't sin.
And even if He said, you want to get to heaven? I'll tell you what, I'll make a deal with you, just don't sin
from here on in. I got your past covered,
but from now on, don't sin if you want to go to heaven. Well, how many of us would make
it, if that was the deal? We wouldn't.
So His grace is seen in the fact that He's offered us this marvelous
salvation and all the many gifts that come with it. And He's offered it to us
based on faith. That's why salvation is by grace,
because of His wonderful grace He offers us salvation. In a way that
we can attain it, achieve it. And we accept it how?
We accept it by faith, by the principle of faith, not by the principle of law
keeping. So once having done this, Paul goes on to immediately
chastise them for moving away from this basic teaching.
He is not happy with them because they've taught them properly and now they're going back to
a works-based type of salvation.
And circumcision, that was the heart of it. It was like that was the
point of no return, if they had that done to themselves.
So here's the accusation part. He says, "I am amazed that you are so quickly
deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ,
for a different gospel." So he marvels at the
speed with which they are turning away from God. Not that they are turning
away from God, but at the speed at which they are turning. I mean, you people have
just been saved. I've just saved you. Well, I've just
preached you the gospel. You've just avoided the flames of hell and already
you're abandoning that. The gospel
comes from God. And to turn away from it, is to turn away from God.
He's amazed that this thing is happening so quickly after their conversion. They're at the
early stage of their faith, a critical time, and they're already having
problems. They're in the process of turning. Maybe not completely yet,
but they're on their way. So God calls
all men - when I say "man" I use that in the generic terms: men, women, of course, humanity.
God calls all men to be saved. The gospel is the tool that
he uses. When we say, I've been called by the gospel,
what we mean is that the gospel contains the message
about this salvation offered by faith. And the response of
faith, repentance, and - well belief, of course, and repentance,
and confession, and baptism. That's how I'm saved, I hear that message and I
respond to that message. The grace of Christ can better be
translated as, God called you graciously through
Christ. A little easier way to translate what he's saying there. It is through the
gracious work of Jesus and the proclamation of it, that men are called
by God. That's what we do. Why do we support missionaries?
Well, we support missionaries in Haiti. And what are they doing down there? They're calling men to be
saved by faith. And we support a missionary in
Africa. Why? Well, he is calling men to be saved by faith. Why do Hal
and I have a website? I mean, after you get through all the technical jargon
and the internet and all that kind of stuff.
What are we doing? We're calling men and women to be saved by faith.
We're calling them on their phones and on their tablets, but it's the same thing.
So in verse seven he says, "which is really not another," he says,
you've been called - you're listening to another gospel. And then he makes a kind of editorial
statement, "which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing
you and want to distort the gospel of Christ." So in
reference to the quote gospel brought to them by the Judaizing, Paul makes the following
statement. He says, the Judaizers were bringing their
teaching as the true or the superior gospel claiming that Paul was not
teaching them accurately. In response
Paul says, there's no such thing as an other gospel. There's only one
gospel. There's no other. There are not two gospels or five. There's just one.
What was happening was that the original Gospel was being changed into something else.
Something which did not resemble or achieve what the original Gospel
achieved. So Paul charges these people
with their true motives. And what are the true motives?
The teachers, the Judaizers. What are their true motives? Well,
first of all, they are disturbing and unbalancing them in their faith. They
want to shake them up. And secondly, they're distorting and changing the
gospel to suit their own prejudices. They wanted to be
saved by law keeping. And they wanted others to follow suit.
Misery loves company, error loves company. Don't you remember you were in high school,
you had the midterm tests. What do you get? Well, I got 30 on one hundred,
28 on a hundred. Yay!
Misery or error
loves company. So these people preached
about Christ, and they claim to be from God, but they were false because what they
preached was different than what Jesus had preached. Even today this holds
true. If what you teach about salvation is false, then you are a false
teacher.
Don't get fooled by -
I used to watch on TV, I haven't seen that much now, but there was a time maybe a year or two ago
that the Mormons had these fantastic commercials, you remember, on TV.
They were so slick, they were so cool. They showed beautiful,
energetic, intelligent, young people - successful. And the guy
would be skydiving. And he'd be driving his car, and he'd be biking,
and he'd be doing this and that. And at the end, the tag line says, and he's a
Mormon. Because they were trying to dispel the idea that Mormons were
fanatics, or kooks, or something like that. So the marketing effort was to
portray them as, not just normal people, but successful
people, and smart people, and something - you should pay attention. And a lot of
people bought into that. How can they be wrong? They're so good looking, so successful.
The thing I hear all the time, look at the family
values. Look at the family values. They
don't smoke, don't drink coffee, they don't drink. Look at the values.
And I would answer, look at their
preaching.
You don't get to heaven on your looks. It's a good thing, isn't it. We won't go there.
We don't get to heaven on our looks. We don't get to heaven
on our successor. It's not a marketing campaign.
We get to heaven based on the gospel. And if you haven't got the gospel, it doesn't matter how good
looking and successful you are.
Check out what they're teaching. Well, they're teaching that Jesus is not really the son of
God. That's it for me. I don't care what else you have.
If you don't have that, I'm not interested in everything else that you've got.
So Paul quickly goes to a warning directed at these Judaizers and
anyone else who would distort - meaning, change or add or subtract,
from the gospel, in verse eight. He says, "but even if we, or an angel from heaven,
should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you,
he is to be accursed!" So everybody who preaches a
different gospel originally preached by Paul and the Apostles - that's what the "we"
stands for - those people stand condemned by God.
The Greek word there, anathema, they're anathema. They're accursed.
So this included, imagine, this includes apostles. He said even if
one of the twelve apostles are preaching to you a different gospel,
they're going to be cursed.
Even he himself.
Even an angel,
he says. If an angel comes, because remember, Jews,
they had a very strong thought about angels, a very strong
relationship and history in their relationship with angels.
Because in their history, angels had appeared to them in the Old Testament. And the angel who appeared to
Mary, and an angel who appeared to the prophets, and so on and so forth.
The presence of angelic beings was very important to the Jews. And he's
saying here, even if an angel appears to you and brings you a different message,
that person and the angel should be accursed.
Well, how many false prophets, even in today's age, claim that
their doctrine comes from a vision that they've had, an angel that they've seen.
And yet Paul says, even if an angel appears to you. And even if it's not like
hallucination, like it's a real angel, if they bring you a
different gospel, they are to be accursed.
And angels, they're the powerful beings next to God, in the
presence of God. So condemned, not because
Paul orders the church to pronounce this curse on those who distort the gospel, but rather
condemn because Jesus has already condemned those who do
this. Didn't He condemn the Pharisees - Matthew 23:13?
Too long a passage to read. Woe to you Pharisees, woe to you Pharisees - you know
know what they did. Keeping people outside the kingdom because they were distorting God's
word. Then in verse nine he says - and we said tonight we
just do six, seven, eight, nine. Just that little passage in verse nine, he says, "As we
have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what
you received, he is to be accursed." So he repeats the injunction,
including any person - it includes Pharisees who are not spirits and have
no apostolic authority, who distort the Gospel. So Paul
repeats that this is not a new warning. He has said it before. Now the
Judaizers were deserving of the curse
for several reasons: they knew the Gospel, and they believed it.
If you go to Acts Chapter 15, they're called the Jerusalem Council, there were they were
discussing should Gentiles be circumcised and should they
be allowed in the church.
The Pharisees, they were Jewish Pharisees who had become Christians, they were part of that
council, part of that discussion. So they believed. It wasn't that they didn't believe.
And they were now knowingly changing their teaching despite the
warnings and the letters sent by the apostles. Remember, the apostles sent the letter to all the
surrounding churches saying to them, you Gentiles who have become Christians, you
don't have to be circumcised.
Stay away from sexual immorality, stay away from strangled
blood. And that mainly was for the
the very delicate sensibility of Jewish Christians who still were
adhering to food laws.
In the first century, the Jews who became Christians, they still didn't eat pork. They
still adhered to the food laws. It was too much of a change for them. That's what
was causing the friction in the church. Gentiles were coming in, they were like,
alright, we're saved, we're going to heaven. Let's go
barbecue. Because they had no qualms about
eating pork or anything else. That wasn't part of their heritage.
But within that same church you had Jewish people who were very fastidious about what they
ate and how it was prepared and feasts and so on and so forth. They didn't just
throw all that away. They continued practicing their Judaism.
But this here, was the sore point.
And of course, they were encouraging others to follow their example in this heresy.
So Paul rebukes them for being unfaithful to the Gospel in such little
time. And then he establishes that there is only one true gospel and that
was the gospel originally preached by himself and the other Apostles and
he condemns anybody who changes it. All right.
So that's the only section we're going to do. I want to just draw a couple of lessons from that for tonight and
then we'll quit. And maybe if we finish a little early, if you have any other questions, we can discuss them.
So a couple of lessons. Number one, well it begs
to be said, there's only one gospel. There's just one.
In Matthew 28, Jesus said to his apostles,
"Teaching them," meaning the new disciples, those who become Christians, "teaching
them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the
end of the age." Jesus gave the apostles the ministry of
proclaiming the gospel and teaching people.
Not just teaching people the facts and the information, but teaching them to
obey the facts and the information
And I'll make an aside here, for those who may be involved in teaching
smaller children. Sometimes we overemphasize the
idea of teaching them the names of the Bible and who Moses was, and
Noah and the ark, and Jonah and the fish and that's fine. They
have to upload all of this information, it's very important.
But we're not - we don't put a lot of emphasis on the idea that the
purpose of uploading all that information is so that they will obey
this information. Because that's what Jesus - teaching them to observe
all that I commanded you.
It's both. It's - I know what's in the Bible and I recognize that I
have the responsibility to obey, to respond to what's in the Bible.
Loving your enemy, that's just not like a suggestion.
You know what I'm saying.
To be sexually pure, that's not just a lifestyle choice.
These are commands that we as
Christians must observe.
In Mark 16:15-16. Jesus says to them, "Go into
all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be
saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned." Again,
preaching the gospel, but preaching that people should obey the gospel.
When Peter was preaching in Acts chapter two - repent, be baptized - a little later
on, Luke says that he continued exhorting them
to be saved. In other words, he told them what they needed to do, he encouraged them to obey, and then he
continued to encourage them to respond to the gospel.
And that's what we do. Someone says, why the invitation every week? Why do we do that all
the time? We get it already. Because as the Bible
demonstrates to us, we must continue to exhort the congregation to
obey, to respond to God's word. We have a couple of chances
each week and we take that - whoever's in the pulpit takes that opportunity.
In First Corinthians chapter 15 it says, Paul
says, "Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in
which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the
word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I
delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins
according to the Scriptures," there's the restitution, "And that He
was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to
Cephas," that's Peter, "and then to the twelve." Why did I read
that? I read that simply to demonstrate that the content of the
gospel has never changed. It's the life,
the death, the burial, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's what the
story of the Gospel is. It tells that story. It's always the same story.
And then followed up with an encouragement to obey the things that Jesus has asked us to do.
Th e content always remains the same. We've
said this in other classes. Wow, what if all of a sudden
the Muslims take over America.
There's this - is it Hightower? There's a show, I know, it pretends that
that the Germans won the second world war. That they won.
I haven't seen the show, I've seen some previews and I've read some stuff about it. And they've won.
And America has the swastika flag, and the Germans are
in charge or the Second World War Germans - the Gestapo - they're in charge of
Washington. It's a TV series that says, what would
happen?
And sometimes people say, what would we do if the Muslims
took over, if that would have happened? Well I don't know about you, but I'd be doing the same
thing.
I'd be looking for other Christians that I know and I'd be trying to get together with them to study
God's word, to encourage them to be faithful until He returns, to take the communion. And it
might not be easy, but somehow - either underground or secretly, somehow,
do guerrilla evangelism. Now is great.
We could get online. If we had a lot of money we could buy TV - we could do anything we want. Get
up on the tallest mountain and shout out the gospel.
If we were restrained because we were under some foreign power or a dictator our job wouldn't
change. Maybe we'd all be crowded into a secret place now. We wouldn't have a sign out front.
But our life, our job, our role or expectations, our hope, our message would be
exactly the same thing. It just would be a little more difficult. But I dare say the church
would probably be growing at a much faster rate, because when things are going
good, and we're enjoying it, and everything's gravy, we tend
to take the church for granted. That's why in China the church
is growing so fast. Why? Because it's all underground. It's all secret.
You can be thrown in jail for just having an open Bible study. There's something
about adversity that whets the taste for evangelism
and living out our lives as Christians. I hope that that's not what God
is intending for us, to spark our faith. But if He
did, the gospel doesn't change, our life doesn't
change. It becomes, perhaps, more difficult.
Second lesson, excuse me, so in the Galatian letter we see that the first attack
against the Church was an attack, not against the people, it wasn't at the
time of the writing of this - there wasn't Roman persecution of Christians
throughout the Empire. The first attack against the church was inward and it was
against the gospel message itself. Lesson number two - So
lesson number one, right, lesson number one, the gospel is always the same. And I forgot
one scripture here, where Jude says, "Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our
common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly,"
fight for - for what? "The faith," the teaching, "which was
once for all handed down to the saints." Notice he says in the first
century, "which was once for all handed down to the saints." The faith,
the gospel, the message, it was given to the saints in the first century one
time. There is no new gospel. There is no new information,
despite what you might read on TMZ or online.
That they may have found some fifth, sixth gospel. Or they may have found a
letter by, or the bones of some guy. Don't let that rattle you.
The gospel is always the same. What was delivered to the saints in the first
century, we got it. We have it. Our job is to
preserve it in our era and to hand it down to our
children, intact. That's the task. Number two,
lesson number two, judge the messenger by the message.
Many messengers claim to be from God's - superior intelligence, vision, secret
knowledge. But the true test of credibility is the accuracy of the message.
Reputation, college degrees, speaking style do
not make up for a false message. When I'm talking to someone,
sometimes people on line, or I meet someone and they're talking, they want to talk to
me about Christianity and we get into it.
The first real question that I ask them, who do you think Jesus is?
Because that's going to tell me where I'm going to go.
I once did a man on the street interview on TV in Montreal for one of our shows,
and I was downtown on like Main Street, St. Catherine, and I would just go by -
a typical man on the street - and I'd ask people, so who is Jesus
for you? Oh man,
not one person gave the same answer. One person said, He's the son of God. Okay, good.
Another guy said, well, you know, He's like Muhammad, He's just another guy.
And everybody gave a different answer.
One guy -
the last guy that we showed on the video, he was like - he hemmed and hawed for
like 60 seconds and then he looked at me and he said, you've got another question?
And I said to myself, brother, there is no other question.
There is no other question. Who is Jesus? I encourage you to
keep that as your ace in the hole, when you're talking to somebody about religion, and they're trying to
give you - just ask them, tell me who do you think Jesus is? You're going to find out
very quickly who they are. Judge the messenger
by the message. And beware of the majority of messenger's trap. The
gospel is written so all men can understand it and it will be true even if the
whole world is in error.
So if you're outgunned five thousand to one somewhere, and you're the only one that
believes that Jesus is the Son of God and five thousand other people are against you and don't
believe that, don't worry about that. It's not a question of who's in the
majority. Jesus absolutely told us that we'll always,
always, always, to the end of time,
we'll be in the minority. It's the narrow way, not the
broad way.
And then thirdly, false gospels do not save.
In First Timothy 4:16, Paul says, "Pay close attention to yourself and to your
teaching; persevere in these things, for as you do this you will ensure salvation
both for yourself and for those who hear you." Paul says that in continuing to
preach the truth, Timothy would ensure salvation for himself and the church.
The opposite is also true, to fall away from the true message, is to lose that
salvation. The urgency with which Paul writes to the Galatians is
necessary because in turning away from grace, they were turning away from their
salvation. So those who preach a false gospel will be damned, yes. And those who
follow it. That's the unfortunate thing, they'll be also lost. One through
rebellion and distortion, the other through ignorance and
foolishness. So just remember, please, please remember there is
only just one gospel. Next time we get together we're going to
look at Paul's life, chronologically, and really key in on
his early life. And look at some very little known things, or things
we kind of just pass over about Paul. We're going to take a look at that next
week as we continue our study in Galatians. Thank you for your attention.