Wilson Galatians

Gospel-Rooted Living
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2284-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Reihe: Preaching the Word

Paul's letter to the Galatians stands as a key book in the Bible, especially as it relates to the Old Testament Law and to the Christian's 'freedom in Christ.' Paul's emphasis on Jesus's substitutionary death, justification by faith, and the work of the Spirit makes the letter crucial for a complete understanding of the New Testament's teaching on salvation through faith in Christ. Combining scholarly depth with practical wisdom, pastor Todd Wilson has written a commentary based on years of ministry experience and biblical reflection, resulting in a resource that is exegetically engaged, theologically informed, and pastorally relevant. Paul's passionate exhortation for the Galatians to return and cling to the gospel that saved them remains relevant today, reminding modern readers of the importance of God's grace for all of life. Part of the Preaching the Word series.

Todd Wilson (PhD, Cambridge University) is the cofounder and president of the Center for Pastor Theologians, a ministry dedicated to resourcing pastor theologians. He is the author of several books, including The Pastor Theologian. Todd and his wife, Katie, have seven children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Todd

Leseproben

1

Go Back to Grace

GALATIANS 1:1–5

I WOULD LIKE TO TELL you a story. It’s about a young man who ruined his life. He left home, traveled abroad, and wasted his fortune on shallow pursuits and empty pleasures. Eventually he came to the end of his rope: he was out of money, out of food, out of help, and out of hope. This profligate is better known as the prodigal son in Jesus’ famous parable.

There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.” And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:11–16)

What do we do when we’ve made a mess of things? Where do we go when we’ve blown it badly? To what do we turn when we’ve embittered our child with harsh words, when we’ve betrayed our spouse with sheer stupidity, when we’ve alienated a colleague or a classmate with a series of me-first choices, when we’ve driven a wedge between friends or sown discord among congregants? Where do we go when we’ve been insensitive, thoughtless, or downright obnoxious? How do we respond when we’ve drifted away from the faith, compromised the gospel, or turned our back on God?

Grace to You in Galatia

Typically when we sin we like to hide—either our sin or ourselves or both. This is a natural response, hardwired into our genes. We get this instinct from our first parents, the progenitors of the human race, Adam and Eve. When they sinned, they hid (cf. Genesis 3:8–10). And humanity’s been hiding ever since.1

When Paul’s young converts in Galatia first heard his letter of rebuke read aloud, they too, no doubt, wanted to run and hide.2 As far as Paul was concerned, they’d gone prodigal! They’d turned their faith inside out and upside down; that’s what happens when we turn our back on grace and seek to be justified by the Law!

The Apostle Paul is flabbergasted by this dramatic turn of events, though he’s not quite speechless. “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” (1:6). “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” (3:1). “I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain” (4:11). “You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace” (5:4).

The Galatians find themselves in a serious situation; in fact, it couldn’t be more serious. Paul knows it, and they now know it. Yet notice where this big-hearted apostle leads these wayward young converts. He doesn’t take them out behind the shed for a good whipping or banish them to the doghouse for their retribution. Nor does he vent his frustration with them on Facebook or tweet their crime in one hundred and forty characters or less.

Instead the apostle who gave them birth takes them back to where it all began: grace. He takes them back to grace. In the middle of the letter’s opening paragraph Paul says these easily glided-over but vitally precious words: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:3). Paul’s saying, “You’ve made a mess of things, but all’s not lost! Go back to where you began; go back to grace. And there you’ll find just what you need—everything you need, the only thing you need. There you’ll find grace.”

Yet Paul knows the Galatians will have a tough time going back to grace because they’ve lost confidence in the gospel he preached.

Here’s what happened. After Paul left Galatia,3 his converts came under the influence of certain individuals who discredited his apostleship, called into question the validity of his gospel, and insisted his converts were only half-baked and needed to go all the way and get circumcised, if they were going to shore up their status of children of God.

These “Judaizers,” as they’re commonly called,4 were apparently quite effective in persuading the Galatians of the necessity of circumcision, if not the need to embrace the Jewish law as a whole.5 Of course, they “could have drawn on a powerful battery of arguments to commend the law to the Galatian Christians.”6 In addition, they could have pointed to a number of advantages to circumcision in particular: sharing in the blessing of Abraham (3:6–18), securing their identity as the “sons of God” (3:23–4:7), even finding assistance in the battle against “the desires of the flesh” (5:16).7

As a result, Paul’s once enthusiastic converts were now ambivalent at best. They’d developed misgivings about whether Paul had told them the whole story and whether his gospel could get them to where they needed to go spiritually. Thus they were suffering from a bad case of buyer’s remorse (cf. 4:15, 16), the upshot of which was to turn away from the one who called them in the grace of Christ and turn to a different gospel, the one the Judaizers preached (1:6, 7). So serious, in fact, was their crisis of faith, they were ready to submit to the knife and get circumcised, no small step for them to take given the widespread antipathy toward circumcision among pagans and the inherent undesirability and risks of the procedure for adult males living in the ancient Mediterranean world.8

Paul’s Message Is Legitimate

Some of us find ourselves in a similar situation to the Galatians. We embraced the gospel with great enthusiasm at first, but we’ve found that living the Christian life isn’t what we expected. As a result, we too wrestle with a bit of buyer’s remorse, wondering whether something more is needed to get us to where we want to go in life.

This is just where the Galatians were, which is why Paul’s very first word to them is to insist that the message of grace still stands. But, notice, he speaks not about the message but the messenger: “Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (v. 1).

Does he say this because he’s insecure about his own credentials? No, but in order to reassert the legitimacy of his gospel! For if Paul himself isn’t legitimate, that is, if he’s not truly an apostle sent from God, then his gospel isn’t legitimate either. It’s that simple. This is why Paul insists on his God-given commission here, something he’ll go on to do at greater length in this and the next chapter (cf. 1:11—2:10).

This is also why he appeals to the fact that he stands together with a band of fellow gospel workers as he writes to the Galatians—“and all the brothers who are with me” (v. 2).9 Paul is no lone ranger, a renegade working in isolation from the rest of the early church. The gospel he preaches and the gospel the Galatians first believed is the same gospel preached by Paul’s cohorts and many others.

We see, then, Paul insisting that he’s a real agent of grace. Indeed, this is the point of his apostleship: to extend grace to others on God’s behalf! This is also the point of Galatians: Galatians exists for grace! That’s why Paul writes this letter: he wants to see grace unleashed on a desperate situation.

More importantly, God wants to unleash grace. That’s why the church needs not only Galatians but all of Paul’s letters, each one of which begins and ends with grace. Indeed, this is why we have the Scriptures as a whole, both Old and New Testaments, because God desires to unleash his grace in our lives through his inspired Word, the Bible!

From Genesis to Revelation the Word of God is a treasure trove of grace. Golden coins of comfort, costly pearls of assurance, precious jewels of promise are all found in the pages of Scripture. In fact, everything that was written in the Bible was written for us, that “through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4).

Therefore, every time we make a mess of things, we must go back to grace by going back to the Word of God. When we blow it, we must not neglect Scripture. Instead of closing our Bible let’s open it, read it, look to it, dwell in it! Again, when we sin our tendency is to neglect or even hide, because the Word of God is indeed “living and active . . . discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). But nowhere else will we find the very thing we need when we make a mess of things. There alone, in God’s Word, will we find a message of grace—the gospel. Part of what it means to go back to grace, then, is to go back to the Bible, where the message of grace can be found.

Jesus’ Sacrifice Is Sufficient

For Paul it’s not enough to reestablish the legitimacy of his gospel. Sure, it may be true, but is it adequate? He therefore needs to demonstrate the sufficiency of the gospel as well. Paul knows he must convince the Galatians that the grace of God, turned loose on the world through the death...