The epistle to the Galatians sets before us the great source of the
afflictions and conflicts of the apostle in the regions where he had
preached the glad tidings; that which was at the same time the principal
means employed by the enemy to corrupt the gospel. God, it is true, in His
love, has suited the gospel to the wants of man. The enemy brings down that
which still bears its name to the level of the haughty will of man and the
corruption of the natural heart, turning Christianity into a religion that
suits that heart, in place of one that is the expression of the heart of
God-an all-holy God-and the revelation of that which He has done in His
love to bring us into communion with His holiness. We see, at the same
time, the connection between the judaising doctrine-which is the denial of
full redemption, and looking for good in flesh and man's will, power in man
to work out righteousness in himself for God-in those who hindered the
apostle's work, and the attacks that were constantly aimed against his
ministry; because that ministry appealed directly to the power of the Holy
Ghost and to the immediate authority of a glorified Christ, and set man as
ruined, and Judaism which dealt with man, wholly aside. In withstanding the
efforts of the judaisers, the apostle necessarily establishes the
elementary principles of justification by grace. Traces both of this combat
with the spirit of Judaism, by which Satan endeavoured to destroy true
Christianity, and of the maintenance by the apostle of this liberty, and of
the authority of his ministry, are found in a multitude of passages in
Corinthians, in Philippians, in Colossians, in Timothy, and historically in
the Acts. In Galatians the two subjects are treated in a direct and formal
way. But the gospel is consequently reduced to its most simple elements,
grace to its most simple expression. But, with regard to the error, the
question is but the more decisively settled; the irreconcilable difference
between the two principles, Judaism and the gospel, is the more strongly
marked.
God allowed this invasion of His assembly in the earliest days of its
existence, in order that we might have the answer of divine inspiration to
these very principles, when they should be developed in an established
system which would claim submission from the children of God as being the
church that He had established and the only ministry that He acknowledged.
The immediate source of true ministry, according to the gospel that Paul
preached to the Gentiles, the impossibility of uniting the law and that
gospel-of binding up together subjection to its ordinances and distinction
of days-with the holy and heavenly liberty into which we are brought by a
risen Christ, the impossibility, I repeat, of uniting the religion of the
flesh with that of the Spirit, are plainly set forth in this epistle.
The apostle begins, at the very outset, with the independence, as to all
other men, of the ministry which he exercised, pointing out its true
source, from which he received it without the intervention of any
intermediate instrument whatsoever: adding, in order to shew that the
Galatians were forsaking the common faith of the saints, "all the brethren
which are with me." Also, in opening the subject of his epistle, the
apostle declares at once, that the doctrine introduced by the judaisers
among the Galatians was a different gospel (but which was not really
another), not the gospel of Christ.
He begins then by declaring that he is not an apostle either of men or by
man. He does not come on the part of men as though sent by them, and it is
not by means of any man that he had received his commission, but by Jesus
Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead. It was by Jesus
Christ, on the way to Damascus; and by the Father, it appears to me, when
the Holy Ghost said, "Separate to me Barnabas and Paul." But he speaks
thus, in order to carry up the origin of his ministry to the primary source
of all real good, and of all legitimate authority. [see note #1]
He wishes, as usual, to the assembly, grace and peace from God in His
character of Father, and from Jesus in His character of Lord. But he adds
here to the name of Jesus, that which belongs to that character of the
gospel which the Galatians had lost sight of, namely, that Christ had given
Himself for our sins that He might deliver us from this present evil age.
The natural man, in his sins, belongs to this age. The Galatians desired to
return to it under the pretext of a righteousness according to the law.
Christ had given Himself for our sins in order to take us out of it: for
the world is judged. Looked at as in the flesh, we are of it. Now the
righteousness of the law has to do with men in the flesh. It is man as in
the flesh who is to fulfil it, and the flesh has its sphere in this world;
the righteousness which man would accomplish in the flesh is directed
according to the elements of this world. Legal righteousness, man in the
flesh, and the world, go together. Whereas Christ has viewed us as sinners,
having no righteousness, and has given Himself for our sins, and to deliver
us from this condemned world, in which men seek to establish righteousness
by putting themselves on the ground of the flesh which can never accomplish
it. This deliverance is also according to the will of our God and Father.
He will have a heavenly people, redeemed according to that love which has
given us a place on high with Himself, and a life in which the Holy Ghost
works, to make us enjoy it and cause us to walk in the liberty and in the
holiness which He gives us in this new creation, of which Jesus Himself,
risen and glorified, is the head and the glory.
The apostle opens his subject without preamble: he was full of it, and the
state of the Galatians who were giving up the gospel in its foundations
forced it out from an oppressed, and I may say, an indignant heart. How was
it possible that the Galatians had so quickly forsaken him, who had called
them according to the power of the grace of Christ, for a different gospel?
It was by this call of God that they had part in the glorious liberty, and
in the salvation that has its realisation in heaven. It was by the
redemption that Christ had accomplished and the grace that belongs to us in
Him, that they enjoyed heavenly and christian happiness. And now they were
turning to an entirely different testimony; a testimony which was not
another gospel, another true glad tidings. It did but trouble their minds
by perverting the true gospel. "But," says the apostle, reiterating his
words on the subject, "if an angel from heaven, or he [Paul himself],
preached anything besides the gospel that he had already preached to them,
let him be accursed." Observe here, that he will allow nothing in addition
to that which he had preached.
They did not formally deny Christ; they wished to add circumcision. But the
gospel which the apostle had preached was the complete and whole gospel.
Nothing could be added to it without altering it, without saying that it
was not the perfect gospel, without really adding something that was of
another nature, that is to say, corrupting it. For the entirely heavenly
revelation of God was what Paul had taught them. In his teaching he had
completed the circle of the doctrine of God. To add anything to it was to
deny its perfection; and to alter its character, to corrupt it. The apostle
is not speaking of a doctrine openly opposed to it, but of that which is
outside the gospel which he had preached. Thus, he says, there cannot be
another gospel; it is a different gospel, but there are no glad tidings
except that which he had preached. It is but a corruption of the true, a
corruption by which they troubled souls. Thus, in love to souls, he could
anathematise those who turned them away from the perfect truth that he had
preached. It was the gospel of God Himself. Everything else was of Satan.
If Paul himself brought another, let him be anathema. The pure and entire
gospel was already proclaimed, and it asserted its claims in the name of
God against all that pretended to associate itself with it. Did Paul seek
to satisfy the minds of men in his gospel, or to please men? In no wise; he
would not thus be the servant of Christ.
