02.15. ESSAY NO. 15

ESSAY NO. 15

"If ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another" (Galatians 5:15). The Galatians had ceased "running well" and were biting and devouring each other as a result, apparently, of their having "fallen away from grace" into legalism. Paul, who knew from his own past how loveless, bitter, and cruel the legalistic mind could be, and who wrote, "The power of sin is the law" (1 Corinthians 15:56), warned "Take heed that ye be not consumed one of another"; and advised, "Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh." This declension of the Galatians refutes the theory that the addition of the legal prin­ciple increases the power of the gospel to make superior Christians. The Galatian Heresy As an antidote for a righteousness of their own according to the law unto which the Galatians were sinking, Paul prescribes in this epistle pure, complete Christianity, which comes to a climax and focus "in the power of the Holy Spirit." God the Father planned Christianity before the foundation of the world, and worked toward its realization some 4000 years after he created Adam, before God the Son became man in order to add the human element; after this, God the Spirit, fulfilling Christ’s promise to his apostles, "Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you" (Acts 1:8), with a burst of power on Pente­cost brought it to perfection as the divine instrument of redemption. Christianity is, therefore, the grand total of the combined workings of God in these three aspects. God is for, Christ is with (Emmanuel) and the Spirit is in Christians.

God the Spirit through Peter on Pentecost preached perfected Christianity for the first time, promising pardon and that he himself would dwell in Christians as his temple. Under Paul’s preaching, the Galatians ac­cepted this same Christianity in its entirety, but were persuaded later that they did not need it all. Conse­quently, they substituted a dead religion of the flesh for the spiritual, crucial, crowning part of living Christianity. Christianity thus devitalized and shorn of its power to save men from the practice of sin is not the religion that God created. It is the fatally perverted gospel that aroused Paul to his depths and led him, "being moved by the Holy Spirit,’ to write a dateless, "living and active" book, which could bless all men for all time.

It is significant that Paul, who had led the Galatians out of heathenism into Christianity, nowhere in this book feels the need to prove that Christians possess the Holy Spirit, but takes for granted that the Gala­tians knew the Spirit indwelt them. In Galatians 3:2, he asks, "Received ye the Spirit by the works of law, or by the hearing of faith?" In Galatians 4:6, he reminds them that "God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father." Now, in Galatians 5:18, he admonishes, "If (since) ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law," and closes the chapter with, "If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk." Paul could not see how the Galatians, who still believed that in Christianity justification was graciously given, could be, concerning their sanctification, so foolish and in­consistent as to supplant the climactic, character-forming portion of Christianity, in which God personal­ly contacts, vitalizes and renews man’s fallen spirit, with the "weak and beggarly" fleshly religion of human merit.

What wonder that Paul is "again in travail" for his Galatians? They must be saved from deadly heresy! He insists that Christianity, being an indivisible, must be accepted either all, or none; that to think they do not need in their stern struggle against "the flesh" to be "strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man" (Ephesians 3:16), is to challenge the wisdom and integrity of God, who fashioned Christian­ity ; and that to refuse the deep, inner workings of the Spirit is to counteract the whole of Christianity.

, Does Paul really teach all this? It behooves us, by reading the Bible honestly, to find out. It will be well, if new wine bursts old skins. But we do not understand how the Spirit works! Are we required to do so? Will Christianity fail to work unless we know all of its in­finite workings! When we understand how Satan works in man’s flesh, probably we can understand better how the Holy Spirit, without overriding man’s will and depersonalizing him, works in his spirit.

Flesh Versus Spirit

Having discussed uncharitableness as one way of abusing Christian liberty Paul proceeds in the last of Galatians 5:1-26 to discuss uncleanliness as another way. "The flesh" is not merely the human body. Bodiless angels have committed some of the sins listed here in Paul’s "works of the flesh." As Adam, before he sinned, and Christ prove, flesh itself is not sinful. Satan makes his attack on men through their flesh. When they yield, he makes the flesh the seat of further operations against the whole man, "spirit and soul and body." "The flesh" is man’s fallen, sub-human nature, with its inbred sin. Individual man, with his nature maimed and his flesh already invaded by the enemy, is doomed in this unequal struggle unless he gets divine support. And Christianity, all of it, is this imperative divine support. Blind and foolish indeed, ignorant of himself, of Satan, and of God, is he who dares this warfare without putting "on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil" (Ephesians 6:11). The responsibility of Christians is to make the ideal crucifixion of their flesh a reality in their lives. They are not promised exemption from temptations of the flesh, but that, seeing they are not under law, but grace, superhuman aid shall be supplied according to their need (See 1 Corinthians 10:13), thus assuring victory over "the flesh." Probably, if we Christians could but realize how miserably we fail to live up to Christian standards, we would not be flesh-sufficient and self-righteous. When we realize what it means really to love our brethren as ourselves and to fulfil the lofty requirements of love as defined by Christ, Paul and John; realize how unruly our tongues, how envious (not to mention our secret joy at the setback of a rival) of the success of others, how touchy of our "rights," reputation and position; and realize, how self-centered we actually are, lifted up when praised and honored, cast down when slighted and set aside, and how little we really love and care for others when we realize that all of this, and more, is of the flesh, which is ideally dead, is it not time to ask ourselves whether or not we have "fallen away from grace" in­to the flesh and legalism, trying to lift ourselves by our own boot straps?