Readings:
1 Chronicles 19
Sirach 5
Galatians 1

Galatians 1

This Pauline letter was written to Christians in a Roman province called Galatia, that is located in what is now Turkey. He’s writing this letter because some of his old foes, the judaizers, have infiltrated the church in that area and have been making inroads among the believers. They rejected Paul’s teachings that we are saved by grace, working through faith. They preferred a mixture of ritual Jewish observances and the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

Paul writes to the church there to tell them that the ceremonial law is dispensed and fulfilled since the death and resurrection of Christ, and that to return to the old covenant would be to exchange the liberty of Christ for the slavery of the law.

This letter opens with a short greeting and then goes straight into a confrontational tone. He laments that they so quickly adopted a false gospel contrary to the one delivered to them from Jesus through Paul. He lays out a principle that is often quoted by modern Christians when confronted with some pseudo-Christian new religious “revelations” that even if an angel is to appear with a different gospel, let him be accursed. This means that the gospel can’t be contradicted by “new revelations.”

Sure, we can come to understand something better, or have a new theological opinion like what happened all throughout Christian history, especially the great scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages, but they can never contradict what’s already been revealed. We can’t read the gospels and then have a revelation that turns them on their heads, like Joseph smith had or like Ellen G white. Their “revelations” contradict public revelation contained in scripture, and so should be counted as “another gospel” and discarded accordingly.

Paul spends the rest of the chapter explaining his credentials as an apostle. He gives some interesting details too. He says that he received his gospel directly from Jesus Christ in the desert of Arabia where he remained for three years, only after that did he go up to Jerusalem to see Peter and confirm what he’d learned from direct communication with God. Those three years in Arabia learning from Jesus would equal the amount of time that Jesus spent with the original twelve apostles, and remember when they voted to replace Judas with Matthias, one of the prerequisites for being a candidate was that it had to be someone who spent the three years of Jesus’ ministry with him. So here’s Paul, calling himself an apostle and he actually spent three years with Jesus too. Amazing

Tomorrow’s Readings:
1 Chronicles 20
Sirach 6
Galatians 2