02.01. ESSAY NO. 1

ESSAY NO. 1

Racially, the Galatians were Gauls, or Celts, who had migrated from north of the Black Sea into Eur­ope. The main body of these Gauls finally established themselves in northern Spain, France, and the British Isles. But a branch of them crossed the Dardanelles and settled, during the third century B.C., in central Asia Minor. The Galatians, among whom Paul on his first great missionary journey near the middle of the first century A.D. organized several churches, were descendants of these Gauls.

Out of much personal experience with the volatile Gauls, Julius Caesar wrote: "The infirmity of the Gauls is that they are fickle in their resolves, fond of change, and not to be trusted." Thierry, a mod­ern historian, says they were, "Frank, impetuous, im­pressible, eminently intelligent, but at the same time extremely changeable, inconstant, proud of show, per­petually quarrelling, the fruit of excessive vanity." The Galatians as pictured by Luke in Acts and in the epistle Paul later wrote to them answer to these char­acterizations. The Galatians of Lystra, whom Paul at first "scarce restrained" from worshipping him, soon afterward stoned him and left him for dead (Acts 14:8-9). Their fickle character as sketched in this incident is confirmed and developed in their portrait as painted in the book which we are now to study.

Many of us Americans with Gaulish blood, coming mainly through Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and French channels, in us have, as might be expected, some of the characteristics, both good and bad, of our ancient Galatian brethren. Should not this put us on guard against the vanity, instability, and untrustworthiness which were so prevalent in them? Alas, however, the Galatians are but an outstanding example of how prone men in general, from Adam onward, have ever been and still are to "drift away from" the blessings they have received from God.

General Survey of Galatians Theme: Liberty in Christ

This skeletal outline of Galatians is the strong, bony framework that supports the meaty reasoning and the moving exhortation for Christian liberty and spirituality that make up the body of the epistle. Just as Ephesians settles the question of Christian unity, Galatians settles the question of Christian indepen­dence and freedom. "Every argument in Galatians is a thunderbolt."

Galatians, which in fewest words reduces Chris­tianity to its simplest elements, is an inspired classic. It sets forth the gospel, without admixture of legal con­ditions, as the perfected agency of the pure grace of God to rehabilitate ruined humanity. It shows, as we shall see in our studies, the utter impossibility of uniting the religion of the flesh and the religion of the Spirit. Luther wrote: "The epistle to the Galatians is my epistle. To it I am as it were in wed­lock." Referring to Luther’s commentary on Galatians, John Bunyan said: "I prefer this book of Mar­tin Luther (excepting the Holy Bible) before all oth­er books that I have seen, as most fit for a wounded conscience."

Inasmuch, as Galatians is an open book free to all, let us begin and, no matter what we may find, con­tinue our studies of this spirit-breathed, vital, Chris­tian document with an open mind, fully ready to be guided by, "The Spirit of truth . . . into all the truth" (John 16:13). Our method should be both micro­scopic and telescopic that things both near and far may be discovered. May we, "handling aright the word of truth," discern between the great and the small, see truth in perspective, and give fundamental Christian truths their rightful emphasis and place of fixed, dominant centrality.

Antecedent Matter

According to Acts, as Paul first evangelized Galatia, unconverted Jews, "filled with jealousy" because of his success among the Gentiles, incited mobs that forced him to leave several cities. Despite this, the impressible Galatians continued to respond so favor­ably to his preaching that flourishing churches began to spring up over the country.

Then Jewish legalists and partyists in the church, who had never been really converted from Moses to Christ and consequently did not know the power of God’s grace and Spirit over human life, were deter­mined that Gentile Christians should observe the cus­toms of Moses. Paul had led the heathen Galatians to Christ without taking them through Moses, and, if these Judaizers were to succeed in binding Moses on them, they must first shake their confidence in Paul. Therefore they persuaded the Galatians that Paul was not equal to the original apostles in knowledge and authority, and that he did not preach the full, final gospel. They did not repudiate Christianity outright, but said to the Galatian Christians: "Ex­cept ye be circumcised after the custom of Moses, ye cannot be saved" (.Acts 15:1). That is, these bigots conceded that Paul’s gospel was all right as far as it went, but insisted that, being the gospel only in part, it was inadequate and would not save unless it were eked out and perfected by legal ordinances and rites. Since this perversion of the gospel threw the divine part and the human part of salvation out of true pro­portion, to the disparagement of the divine and to the exhaltation of the human, it made an exceeding strong and dangerous appeal to the pride and vanity and unstableness of the Galatians. To Paul, who had himself struggled up and out of Pharisaical bigotry and slavery and knew their blind­ing and blighting power, all of this was utterly intol­erable. He knew as it had been given to no other man to know the insidious nature of this heresy, which really destroyed the very essence and spirit of Chris­tianity itself. That he was vilified had little weight with him, only as it had bearings on Christian doc­trine. His having to hold the confidence of the Ga­latians, lest they be "severed from Christ," explains the autobiographical nature of the first two chapters of the book.