Galatians 1:1-9

Israel faced a defining moment at Sinai.

When God delivered the Hebrew people from Egypt to form a special relationship with them at Sinai, what did they do? They turned away quickly from Moses and his teaching to worship a golden calf (Exo 32). When he came down from the mountain, he showed strong emotion and insisted that people make up their mind. Those who followed the Lord were to come his way and those who followed idols were to be executed by sword. This was a defining moment because Israel’s sudden attempt to blend idolatry with worshiping the true God threatened the integrity and purity of God’s redemptive plan for the ages.

Galatians was a defining moment for the church.

Galatians has a similar function, only instead of hearing from Moses we hear from Paul. Instead of reading about the start the Law era we read about the start of the church era. Just as idolatry threatened to undermine the integrity of God’s special relationship with Israel, so legalism threatened to undermine the integrity of God’s special relationship with the church through the gospel – the message of salvation by faith alone in Christ alone.

In this way, the book of Galatians (which is probably Paul’s first NT letter) served as a watershed moment for the church to this day. With this message, Paul “drew a line in the sand” between salvation by faith and salvation by faith plus works.

This message was immensely important because the early church faced strong pressure from the Jewish community to blend the Christian faith with long-held practices of Judaism such as circumcision (which dated back to Abraham) and the Mosaic Law (esp. dietary kosher laws and observing the Sabbath and other Jewish holy days).

As we will see in this letter, the gospel message requires no such things. It requires faith alone in Christ alone. Sadly, our human nature finds this arrangement difficult to accept. We feel this strange urge to earn favor with God to receive salvation. Then, after we’ve received salvation from Christ through faith alone, we easily fall back into the mentality that we must earn God’s favor in our day-to-day lives through religious performance.

Legalism is adding laws and rules to the gospel.

With this letter, Paul addresses both of these problems, which we call legalism. (Legalism is adding rules and laws to the gospel.) He does so urgently and passionately because legalism is a far more serious problem than we suppose. It’s dangerous because it alters the gospel message, which is the center and foundation of the Christian faith.

Since it alters the gospel message, it first threatens to deceive nonbelievers into thinking they’re God’s children if they follow certain religious practices (though never perfectly). People who take this approach will die in their sins. That’s not a minor problem.

This error also threatens to deceive God’s children into thinking they’re living well because they follow certain religious practices as a Christian. Though these will enter eternity with God, they’ll do so having lived far short of their God-given potential, enjoying the Christian life far less and producing much less spiritual fruit for God than was possible.

Do you feel as strongly opposed to legalism as Paul did?

As we consider how Paul introduces this letter, we should ask ourselves this personal, probing question: “Do I feel as strongly opposed to legalism as Paul did?”

Another question to ask ourselves as we study this entire letter together is this: “Do I have evidence of legalism in my own life?” This is the case if:

• You are attempting to receive God’s salvation through religious works that you do
• You are a person who’s believed on Christ for salvation but still feels like you need to earn God’s approval in your day-to-day life through strict and religious behavior.

Legalism is a subtle but serious problem that Paul helps us confront with this letter to the Galatian churches.

Paul emphasizes his God-given authority to write this letter. (Gal 1:1)

Paul introduces himself as an apostle, which is someone who was sent out on a special mission by someone else with a higher authority. In this case, Paul had been sent by Christ to explain the gospel message to the world.

Paul opens most of his letters to churches by identifying himself as an apostle of Jesus Christ, but he gives an expanded version of his “credentials” here. You see, Paul was often accused by his critics of being a “wannabe” or “second-tier” apostle who shouldn’t be taken seriously. After all, he hadn’t spent three-and-a-half years in training with Jesus like Peter and John had done, nor had he grown up with Jesus like James had done.

Paul will confront this criticism more directly later in the letter, but he foreshadows this part of his message here. He assures his readers that his message is no op-ed but comes authorized by the highest possible authority.

• He speaks with double emphases to say that he hadn’t been sent out by other men but by Christ himself.
• He also adds that since he was sent out by Christ, then he was sent out by the highest authority possible, God himself. Whatever he is about to say is a message from God.

Paul shows a close connection between the Father and Christ.

He points out that the Father raised Christ from the dead. This is not only a key factor in the gospel, but it was a key factor in Paul’s mission as an apostle since Christ appeared to him in person to send him as an apostle after his resurrection. Paul’s authority as an apostle rested squarely on Christ’s resurrection (1 Cor 9:1; 15:8; Rom 1:1-6).

After introducing himself, Paul also mentions that he was accompanied by other believers.  The phrase “all the brethren who are with me” tells the readers that Paul was not writing alone – that others were aware of his concern for them and even shared his sentiments. Though Paul usually named his co-senders in other letters, he declines to do so here, taking on his shoulders the full weight of the difficult message he will share.

Paul wrote to a group of young churches. (Gal 1:2)

Paul tells us who he was writing to (and for whom he was deeply concerned). He wrote “to the churches in Galatia,” which seems to be the churches he started on his first gospel outreach journey: Pisidian Antioch, Lystra, Derbe, and Iconium (Acts 13-14), which he also revisited at the start of his second missionary journey (Acts 15:36-18:22).

Between these two journeys, Paul spent about one year at his home church in Syrian Antioch. During this interlude, he also traveled to the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:2). This was a gathering of church leaders that clarified the question once and for all of whether or not Christianity should follow OT laws and traditions.

Paul addresses a similar question to the Galatians, which indicates he wrote this letter after his first journey but before the Jerusalem Council. The churches he started during his first missionary journey had been influenced by legalism only a few short months after he traveled away to revisit his home church. This timeline aligns with how Paul said they had turned away “so soon” (or “quickly”) from what he had taught them (Gal 1:6).

Just as Paul said little about his co-senders, here he says little about the churches he is writing to. This unusual brevity and vagueness indicates that he had something more pressing on his mind, which underscores the seriousness of what he was about to say.

Paul focused on the outcome of the gospel. (Gal 1:3-5)

Paul offers his usual greeting as a prayer for grace and peace from God.

Grace is the at the heart of Paul’s message throughout the NT (Tit 2:11; Rom 6:1, etc.). He uses the word 95 times in 13 letters (including 7 times in Galatians).[1]

To nonbelievers, this word described the favor of the gods or the emperor towards people. But for believers, grace means so much more. It describes the favor of the one, true, supreme God towards his special, chosen people. Grace is the source of our salvation and the source of our ability to live the Christian life.

By requesting God’s grace for the churches of Galatia, Paul wants them to enjoy a greater awareness and more complete experience of all God had done for them through Christ.

Paul also requests peace from God for the believers in Galatia. This refers to harmony, tranquility, and unity in your mind and spirit, and in your relationship with God and people.

Grace and peace contrast with the effects of legalism in our lives.

Legalism – the demand of strict religious performance – disregards God’s grace, which he gives us freely, and brings unrest and insecurity to our hearts rather than peace.

Paul reminds us here not only of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, which gives us hope, but of his death on the cross for our sins, which gives us peace. We can never receive peace with God through religious behavior of our own. We can only receive this peace by accepting Christ’s death for our sins in our place.

Paul then describes our salvation from sin as a new reality. He says that Christ’s death delivers (or rescues) us from “this present evil age.” This is something the OT law could never do. It could guide us in a particular direction, but it could never deliver us. It could increase and intensify our guilt, but it could never deliver us.

The Galatians were turning back the clock in redemptive history.

Tom Schreiner says this, “The Galatians were turning the clock back in salvation history by submitting to circumcision and the Mosaic law.”^[2]The problem here is that though circumcision and the Mosaic Law served an important role in moving God’s plan of salvation forward, they were unable to deliver us from the power of sin in our lives and bring about God’s kingdom. They could only prepare the way.

Now that Christ had come, died for our sins, and risen again, circumcision became irrelevant and the Mosaic Law had been fulfilled. So, by embracing the law, the Galatian churches were attempting to “go back in time” to things which were could not provide deliverance from sin. They were attempting to live as when the promises of God’s deliverance and kingdom were announced, foreshadowed, and promised, but Christ’s death and resurrection had moved things forward so that now God’s future deliverance and kingdom had begun to take shape.

All of these things have unfolded throughout history “according to the will of God” who deserves all of our praise and worship for eternity to come.

Paul withheld any expressions of thanksgiving.

What’s fascinating about Paul’s introduction to this letter here is not just what he says but what he doesn’t say. By this point in all of his other letters to churches, he expresses some form of thanksgiving to God for the people to whom he is writing. Even when he wrote to the immature church at Corinth (of which there was little to be thankful), he expressed thanks for what God was doing in their lives. Yet to the churches in Galatia, Paul offers no thanksgiving at all.

This detail, once again, magnifies the severity of his concern and reason for writing. Even secular letter writing in that period would traditionally offer something nice to say about the recipients before getting to the main body of the letter, yet Paul skips such pleasantries altogether.

The effect of this approach resembles the difference between your supervisor sending you an email that begins with some kind things to say and your supervisor sending you an email that begins abruptly with, “I need to talk with you.” Or it resembles the effect of your mother walking into your room, skipping her normal pleasantries, and saying, “Son, I need to talk to you.” “Uh oh,” you mutter to yourself, “I’m in trouble! What did I do now?”

One man says this opening is a “splash of cold water in the face of the audience to get their attention and wake them up to what their situation really was and to the fact that they needed to take action to correct the situation.”[3] Another says, “Paul does not bypass the thanksgiving in order to insult the Galatians but to signal that this is not an ordinary letter.”[4]

He expressed astonishment at their sudden change. (Gal 1:6)

Here is where Paul gets to his reason for writing. He was shocked! He was beside himself over something happening in the churches at Galatia only months after he went away!

He describes this stunning development from two sides, what the believers in the churches were doing and what some other people were doing to them.

They were entertaining a different gospel. (Gal 1:6-7)

The believers in the churches were bailing out, beginning to abandon, deserting, and turning away from God, even though he had reached out to them with the grace that comes through Christ. They were turning away from a plain and simple trust in the death and resurrection of Christ as the one and only source of God’s grace for salvation and Christian living. They turning to “another gospel which is not another.”

The churches seemed to think they were improving what Paul had taught them, adding the observance of Jewish traditions and the OT law to the gospel of Christ. And that’s the challenge that legalism presents. As one pastor rightly observes, “The trap of Christian legalism is that it never feels like legalism in our own eyes. It feels like godliness.”

The trap of Christian legalism is that it never feels like legalism in our own eyes. It feels like godliness.

Curtis Jones

Yet according to Paul, they were abandoning the gospel altogether not enhancing or improving it. The gospel is perfect because it’s all about Christ.

• If you add anything to it (or him), you ruin it instead because you can’t improve Christ.
• You can’t improve the gospel by subtraction either because anything less than Christ is woefully insufficient and critically flawed.

That's the underlying danger of legalism. It subtracts from the gospel of Christ by adding our incompetent religious performance.

Paul calls legalistic teachers troublemakers. (Gal 1:7)

Though Paul is concerned that the churches in Galatia had turned so quickly to a different and wrong understanding of the gospel, he is even more concerned about the people who were influencing them to change. He doesn’t name them specifically but refers to them generically as “there are some,” and he maintains this distance throughout the letter so as not to give them the honor of undeserved attention. Instead, he describes their effect on the churches and their underlying motivations.

Regarding their effect on the churches, he says they are “troubling you.” This effect represents a condition opposite of the peaceful inner disposition that the grace of God offers through Christ. It means “to cause acute emotional distress or turbulence—‘to cause great mental distress.’”[5] It implies inner pain, anxiety, agitation, and confusion.

The gospel enables us to breathe a sigh of relief knowing our sins are forgiven and we’ve been accepted by God. Legalism disrupts or prevents this peace with unrelenting questions like, “Am I good enough?” or, “Have I done enough?”

A legalistic heart feels hopeless with every failure, disillusioned with any good, and overwhelmed by what needs to be improved. The gospel calms the troubled waters in our heart, but legalistic teaching stirs them up. Legalism loves a guilty conscience but the gospel resolves it through Christ’s death for our sins and his resurrection.

Regarding the underlying motives of these false teachers, he says they “want to distort the gospel of Christ.” Distort may also be translated as to “alter, change, or pervert” something from its original condition. That’s what legalistic teaching does to the gospel.

Though these teachers weren’t necessarily trying to get rid of the gospel, they were trying to twist or shape it into something different. They wanted to add the Hebrew tradition of circumcision and the OT sabbath (holiday) and dietary (kosher) laws as necessary for salvation and godly living. Paul insisted, however, that these additions were perverting the gospel not enhancing it.

Paul condemns anyone who changes the gospel. (Gal 1:8-9)

It’s at this point that Paul puts the exclamation point on his strong opening statement. If he were playing volleyball, he would be serving the ball with an emphatic spike – twice. Two times in a row he says, “Let him be accursed” (or “cursed,” or “condemned”).

With this pronouncement, Paul is invoking God since God is the only one who can condemn people to eternal punishment, which is what accursed mean, “to be devoted to destruction.” This is strong language for sure and tells us something of what God feels about not just messages that alter the gospel but people who alter the gospel.

Let’s think about this from a medical and scientific vantage point. Just last week, a pharmacist was arrested in Wisconsin for ruining hundreds of doses of COVID vaccine by removing it from refrigeration two nights in a row. Authorities confirmed that all the vaccinations which were taken from those vials were ineffective. Thankfully, no one died.

If a pharmacist who alters a critical vaccine makes the vaccine ineffective, places lives at risk, and deserve to be imprisoned, then how much more does a person deserve to be condemned by God for altering the precious message of Christ’s salvation, changing it into something that’s ineffective and destructive instead? Is not eternal life more crucial than physical life, and peace with God more crucial than physical health?

Paul applies this curse as strongly and broadly as possible.

He includes an “angel from heaven,” “we” (himself and other apostles or well-known teachers), and “anyone.”

Why would Paul refer to an “angel from heaven?” Well, consider that it was an angel fallen from heaven that altered God’s words at the beginning of time, leading all humanity into sin and death. And if an angel appeared to you, you’d be tempted to take such a fantastic experience seriously, wouldn’t you?

Why would Paul refer to himself and other apostles? Because this demonstrates that Paul is not lifting himself up as superior to the legalistic teachers in Galatia. He wasn’t competing with them for the loyalty of the Galatian churches. He was submitting himself to the gospel of Jesus Christ just as he expected everyone else to do as well.

It was not his personality or role as an apostle that gave authority to the gospel of Christ, it was God who gave his authority to this message. It was Paul’s role as an apostle which demanded that he teach nothing which would alter that message. He was not at liberty to teaching anything different and requested that he also be condemned if he did.

Do you feel as strongly opposed to legalism as Paul did?

Or do we have evidence of legalism in our own lives? Are you trying to get God’s salvation through religious works? Or if you’ve believed on Christ for salvation, do you still feel like you need to earn God’s approval in your daily life through strict religious behavior?

Legalism changes the gospel regarding salvation.

Today, we face similar challenges to the gospel, as when:

• Catholic or Greek Orthodox teachers require observing the Seven Sacraments to secure Christ’s salvation.
• The Charismatic church requires an ecstatic experience of speaking in tongues and being “baptized in the Spirit” as evidence of Christ’s salvation. (Sometimes they call this the “full” gospel” as though believing on Christ alone is not enough.)
• Seventh Day Adventist teachers require the observance of a weekly sabbath (on Saturday) and OT dietary laws, etc. as necessary expressions of faith in Christ.

Examples like these and more are direct parallels to the problem of Galatia, but there is another form of this problem of which we should also be aware.

Legalism changes the gospel regarding our spiritual growth.

This happens when we add the requirement of observing OT laws as a means of gaining favor with God in our spiritual growth and sanctification. Later in this letter, Paul will describe this version of legalism as trying to “be made perfect by the flesh” (Gal 3:3).

This wrong approach to the Christian life insists, for instance, that to please God as a Christian, we need to religiously observe a full day of rest every week or else we’re disobeying God. This approach also tends to pick out various commands from the law of Moses and apply them to our lives as laws which we must obey, such as clothing laws, food laws, and money laws. This approach then “grades” our spirituality by whether or not we’re doing these things and how well we’re doing these things.

By extension, this wrong approach also includes the requirement of manmade religious and cultural laws as well as a means of spirituality. It will insist on a set (or understood) list of clothing styles, hairstyles, media choices, musical styles, and so on as benchmarks of Christian holiness and maturity, much like the NT Pharisees taught first-century Jews.

Certain behaviors are wrong in the sight of God. These sins require God’s salvation and forgiveness through Christ and should be avoided by faith in Christ. Paul calls these behaviors the “lust … and works of the flesh” (Gal 5:16, 19). He claims that such sinful behavior is “obvious” and does not require a law to be understood.

The gospel is not a free license to do the works of the flesh, but it recognizes our need for Christ to deliver us from these sins and does not burden our consciences with additional, superficial requirements, either before or after conversion. Is that what we believe and is that how we live?

Just as Christ had strong feelings and words of rebuke for those teachers who pressed superficial requirements on their followers, Paul had strong feelings and words of rebuke for similar teachers who mixed legalistic teachings into the gospel of Jesus Christ in the church. We need to be sensitive to these strong, biblical sentiments – both from Christ our Savior and Paul, the apostle whom he sent.

With God’s help, we should expel legalistic beliefs and tendencies from our hearts, replacing them with the grace and peace that comes from trusting in Christ’s death for our sins and his victorious resurrection.

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[1] Gal 1:3, 6, 15; 2:9, 21; 5:4; 6:18

[2] Thomas R. Schreiner, Galatians, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 75.

[3] Ben Witherington, Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 80, cited by Jeffrey Weima, Paul the Ancient Letter Writer: An Introduction to Epistolary Analysis, Kindle ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016), 81.

[4] Frank Matera, Galatians, Sacra Pagina Series, vol. 9, Daniel Harrington, ed. (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 48-49, cited by Weima, Paul the Ancient Letter Writer, 81.

[5] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 314.