THE GOSPEL TRUTH
Galatians 1 and 2
“But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!”
Paul could not have used stronger words: “If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!” Make no mistake, Paul is saying that it is not about WHO but about WHAT. We can be tempted to say that it was easy in those days because you could depend on the Apostles but today we do not have the Apostles with us to authenticate the message but that would be wrong. Anybody can be preaching a false Gospel and you can only determine the truth from Scripture. Even Peter could get it wrong sometimes. The truth is the Gospel that came from Jesus Christ.
He describes to us the core truth of that Gospel: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
When you look at it, and you contrast it with the teaching that the “circumcision group”, or Judaizers, espoused, you can then see the difference clearly: in the true Gospel, Jesus is clearly at the centre while in the Gospel of the Judaizers, the Law is at the centre; in the true Gospel, it is the accomplishment of Christ that makes all the difference, while in the Gospel of the Judaizers, the accomplishment of man by fulfilling the law is what counts.
Those of us who are not Jews may ask, “what has all this to do with me?” The relevance is in Paul’s earlier assertion, that it is vital that we live by the Gospel Truth as taught in the Word of God.
For the Galatians, they were swayed by the Judaizers, likely because they had impressive Jewish credentials. For us though, all manner of Christian teaching inundates us and we are hard put to know where we should put our trust. Are we saved once for all and we can never lose our salvation, or only those who persevere to the end shall be saved? Are we persuaded by Calvinism that raises the sovereign choice of God above all else, or do we think that man’s choice, and therefore, man’s responsibility, is at the core of the Gospel? Can we claim the good life as the intent of God for our Christian experience? Can we expect to be victorious over sin and evil in this life? Is it true that our initial baptism into the church as a result of our confession of repentance and faith must be followed by a second baptism, the baptism of the Holy Spirit or we will remain carnal Christians, whatever that means?
The modern church is full of teaching that claims to be the answer for what often is our own insipid Christian experience. We need to go through this programme, or this experience, or this type of worship, or this way of praying, or to be in this church, shepherded by this pastor. The focus shifts away from Christ, and makes our actions the significant factor.
Paul tells us that the Gospel is predicated on the experience of death and resurrection. When we put our faith in Jesus Christ, we surrender ourselves to our death, so that we might live again with Christ living in our stead. Our Christian experience, our growth and maturity, is founded on us accepting that indeed we have died, indeed we are no longer under the power of sin, indeed we are not condemned, indeed God loves us and recognises us as his children, and in our stead, in our place, Christ lives in us and we learn to let our body obey him and his will.
The real wrong that we do is when we try to rebuild what was destroyed, that is, when we let the self assert itself again in the body. Instead we should let our faith in the Son of God, who loved us and sacrificed himself for us, lead us to trust him more to shape our life and being. It is not that this “death and resurrection” will happen all at once—God does not transform us by force; he transforms us by grace—and we must understand that John the Baptizer’s observation, “he must increase, but I must decrease” is the way of the Gospel.
“The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”