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    Paul's Letter to the Galatians
    Paul's Letter to the Galatians
    Paul's Letter to the Galatians
    Ebook153 pages2 hours

    Paul's Letter to the Galatians

    By Edwin Walhout

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    About this ebook

    Early in his missionary career Paul takes on the Judaizers who want all Christians to keep observing the Jewish ceremonies such as circumcision, kosher food, sabbath keeping, temple worship. Not so much that Paul finds these ceremonies wrong, as that it is unnecessary for Gentile believers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEdwin Walhout
    Release dateMay 27, 2015
    ISBN9781310392733
    Paul's Letter to the Galatians
    Author

    Edwin Walhout

    I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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      Book preview

      Paul's Letter to the Galatians - Edwin Walhout

      Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

      A Pastoral Commentary

      by Edwin Walhout

      Published by Edwin Walhout

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2015 Edwin Walhout

      Cover design by Amy Cole

      See www.edwinwalhout.com for additional titles by this author.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      CONTENTS

      1 The Opening Salutation

      2 The Problem: A Different Gospel

      3 Paul’s Apostolic Credentials

      4 The Jerusalem Conference

      5 Becoming Righteous Persons

      6 Rebuke

      7 Abraham

      8 The Law

      9 Children of God

      10 Paul’s Example

      11 An Allegory

      12 Freedom

      13 Christian Ethics

      14 Concluding Comments

      CHAPTER ONE

      The Opening Salutation

      Galatians 1:1-5

      *Paul an apostle,

      not from men nor through men

      but through Jesus Christ

      and God the father who raised him from the dead,

      and the brothers who are with me,

      Galatians 1:1-2

      * Translated from the Greek by the author.

      1. Letters in those days were sent as rolled-up scrolls, sealed on the outside so they would not unravel during transit. Further, it was customary to identify oneself at the very beginning rather than as we do now at the end of the letter. So that’s why the first word of this letter is Paul. Readers would not have to unroll the entire scroll to find out who wrote it.

      2. The second word is apostle. We may wonder why Paul identifies himself this way, rather than, say, Paul of Tarsus. We customarily think of the apostles as the disciples of Jesus whom he sent with the command to disciple the nations. So how did this man, originally Saul of Tarsus, once a feared persecutor of Christians, acquire the title of Apostle? Paul was not one of the original Twelve. In fact it is doubtful if he ever even met Jesus in the flesh. It’s common enough for us today to use the term, the Apostle Paul, but probably not for people back then. So did he just take the title for no valid reason?

      We need to remember the meaning of the term apostle as contrasted with the term disciple. Apostle means a person who is sent out. Disciple means a person who is attached to a teacher as a learner. The original twelve disciples were in the learning stage at first, and then when Jesus sent them out on their own with the message of the kingdom they became apostles. And that is what the Great Commission means also. When Jesus instructed them to go out to bring the gospel to the whole world and to disciple the nations, he was sending them, that is, expanding their responsibility from learning to proclaiming, from taking in to giving out. That instruction transformed the disciples into apostles.

      So how does Paul figure into that picture? Paul and Barnabas were officially commissioned by the church in Antioch to bring the gospel to people who had not yet heard it. They were sent, and that is what made them apostles. Paul did not simply adopt the title without authority.

      Still, it is interesting that he himself does not refer to this commissioning from the church of Antioch, but insists his apostolic authority is not from men nor through men. Rather, it comes directly from Jesus Christ and God the Father, the same God who raised Jesus from the dead.

      Apparently there were numerous people at the time who were more than a bit skeptical of this claim by Paul. We probably would be also if someone nowadays made a similar claim, I’m an apostle because God appointed me. No church, no council, no synod, no missionary organization, just God. So we find Paul addressing this question over and over again in his letters, and already here in the very first sentence of his letter to the churches in Galatia he makes the claim to apostleship. We have no serious doubts about it now in the twenty-first century, but there were a lot of people back then who remembered him as a fierce persecutor and they were not absolutely convinced that what he was teaching was the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

      3. It is also worth noting that Paul points out an item concerning God and Jesus that he obviously considers a matter of first importance, that God raised Jesus from the dead. There are a good many Christians today who seem to consider the item of first importance that Jesus died for our sins on the cross. This makes the crucifixion of prime importance, whereas Paul makes the resurrection central.

      We might be curious about why Paul puts so much importance on the resurrection. It’s because this was the central feature of his conversion outside the gates of Damascus. Paul had been resisting the claim that believers were making that the man whom they put to death on a Friday had come back to life on Sunday. It can’t happen, he thought, and the notion drove him into fanatical defense of the sacred Torah, arresting Christians wherever he could find them and delivering them to the religious authorities in Jerusalem for punishment.

      But when he lay there on the ground at the gate of Damascus, dazed by sunstroke, Jesus appeared to him and immediately Paul knew beyond any doubt that Jesus was still alive even though he could not be seen physically. So that conversion experience was what told Paul that the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ was indeed true, and that it centered on the fact of Jesus’ resurrection.

      If we study all the letters of Paul, as well as the descriptions of Paul’s work in the book of Acts, we will see clearly enough how Paul weaves his understanding of the gospel around the resurrection as the chief feature of the message of salvation. Just briefly, the connection is this: when we come to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, something similar happens to us. We are raised out of a life of sin – like Paul out of his life of persecution – into a life of holiness and truth. Paul, again and again in his letters, insists that we share in Christ’s resurrection when we believe and are delivered out of a self-centered lifestyle. Already in this life and in this body. Now before we die. We die with him and we rise with him to a new life.

      All of that gives us some idea of why Paul would write as he did about God raising Jesus from the dead. For him resurrection was central in the gospel.

      4. One more point here. Paul writes that this letter also comes from the brothers who are with me. He does not identify them. Perhaps he means his partner Barnabas. Perhaps also all the elders in the church at Antioch who had commissioned them to make their earlier visit to the province of Galatia. But it seems, does it not, that Paul does not want to write on his own individual authority, but that he writes as a representative of the Antioch church as a whole.

      Accordingly, it seems that Paul was at Antioch when he wrote this letter, very likely not too long after he and Barnabas had returned from their first missionary trip, the one in which the Galatian churches had been started. There will be more to say about the setting of this letter as we work our way through it, because it is clear enough that he wrote this letter as a result of hearing some disturbing things about what was going on in those young churches.

      5. I’ll use this occasion also to state my opinion about when this letter was written. When I was in Seminary we were taught that it was probably written rather late in Paul’s career. This opinion was based on the similarity in some doctrinal points with the letter to the Romans. Romans was written during the latter part of his third missionary trip, so Galatians is also assigned to that general time period.

      For myself, on the contrary, I think Galatians was the very first extant letter of Paul, written between the first and the second missionary trips. I think this mainly because of the content of the letter and the brusqueness of its tone. He and Barnabas have just started some churches and now hear that some serious issues are arising in them. He is incensed by this development, confronting it for the first time and becoming almost disrespectul in his condemnation of it. His later letters do not betray this same intensity of criticism, or at least not the same intense language to express it. One might imagine that Paul learned that a soft answer turns away wrath but that harsh language only serves to stir up more wrath. The fact that he identifies himself as an apostle in the very first sentence suggests something of kind of criticism he himself has been receiving out there in those churches, and which forms the reason why he writes this letter at all. He is extremely unhappy to hear what is being said about him and the gospel he brought, questioning his apostolic status.

      To the churches of Galatia:

      grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,

      who gave himself for our sins

      in order to liberate us from the present evil age

      according to the will of God our Father,

      to whom be praise from age to age:

      Amen.

      Galatians 1:3-5

      1. When we today hear the word church there are all sorts of connotations associated with it that have developed over the twenty centuries since the gospel began. It was not so, of course, in the beginning. There was simply a small group of people who believed in Jesus and who assembled from time to time to confirm and strengthen that bond of faith. The term Paul uses is ekklesia, which means called out. These believers, at that early time, were probably mostly persons of Jewish background whose traditions were those of the Jewish synagogue. Very likely their meetings were simply continuations of synagogue meetings, only now centered on Jesus rather than on the Torah. In time other problems and traditions would appear as persons of non-Jewish background were welcomed into the fellowship of believers.

      2. What we see here is the standard form of letter writing customary in those days. The writer would first identify himself and then identify the recipient. By way of contrast our customs in letter writing have usually been to identify the recipient at the outset and the writer at the end.

      3. So Paul identifies the recipients as the churches in Galatia. Notice the plural, churches. So far as we can tell there are three, possibly four, of these congregations, situated in the cities that Barnabas and Paul visited with the gospel during the last half of the first missionary trip. These are Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe, with possibly Antioch of Pisidia also included, all of them in the heart of the country we know as Turkey. Very likely Barnabas and Paul had visited these cities because they had sizable Jewish populations where they would have a hearing right away.

      If I am correct in surmising that this letter was written shortly after this first missionary trip, then the churches there would have been not more than two or three years old, and not very much advanced in understanding the ramifications of their new faith in Jesus. Their faith in Jesus was real and genuine but not yet mature. As we shall see, these good people were subject also to other evangelists coming in and presenting the gospel in different ways.

      3. Grace to you and peace. The Greek word for grace is χάρις (charis) and means in its root form, to rejoice, be glad, be joyful. The Greek word for peace is εἰρήνη (eirene) and means much the same as the Hebrew shalom, a condition of peace and prosperity and general goodness. These terms were used

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