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THE GOOD NEWS OF GOD'S GRACE FROM GOD IS THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW GOD : PART 2Galatians 1:11-24INTRODUCTION Our world is awash with stories of salvation. I don’t know if you’ve every thought about this but virtually every commercial you see on TV is a story of salvation. One of my favorites shows a guy going to work in an office where all the other employees and the bosses are chimpanzees. The guy is trying to get work done but the chimps act like chimps and thereby frustrate the guy’s attempt to be productive. The chimps mock him, don’t appreciate him and spend their time goofing around. The punch line at the end of the commercial is “Need a new job?” It then advertises a job search web site. Think with me about how this is a story of salvation. First, there is a problem identified and diagnosed. Your job is frustrating and unfulfilling. You are miserable because every day you have to work with uncooperative people who do not recognize your potential or your significance. Second, a solution, a salvation, is offered. You need a new job where you will be able to work with motivated people who appreciate your contribution. We, the web site, can give you what you need. We can save you from your misery and give you salvation, a great job. Third, we are told what we must do to participate in this salvation. You must trust the company and show your trust by coming to their website, paying the fees, filling out the forms and letting them find you that perfect job. Salvation is being rescued from misery and brought into a better condition. In every story of salvation you are required to trust the one who gives you the diagnosis of the problem and promises the salvation. This is the plot line of every story of salvation. Every human being is daily making choices on who or what salvation they most need and which “savior” they are going to trust to give them what they need. Every day voices are shouting at us to persuade us to believe their account of salvation. The voices range from the grossly material, “what you really need is a new house;” to the immoral, “what you need is a new wife;” to the religious, “what you need is the Paradise offered by Allah.” Into this morass of competing claims of salvation steps Jesus Christ who says, “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one can come to the Father but through me.” “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for me will save it.” “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life…” Jesus Christ claims to have the only ultimately true description of what is wrong with us, what we need and the only way to escape our trouble and gain salvation. That is what we have seen so clearly in the opening paragraphs of this letter written by the apostle Paul to the churches of Galatia. In vv. 6-10 he says that the message he preached to the Galatian churches is the only message that can save. To reject this gospel is to reject God. To reject this gospel is to consign yourself to eternal suffering in hell. Paul has described the consequences of not believing that the gospel he preached is the only message of salvation. But now, in vv. 11-24, he goes on to describe why it is only this gospel that can save people. In these verses he seeks to give us reasons we should trust in the good news about Jesus Christ alone for salvation. MAIN POINT Only the good news of God’s grace through Jesus Christ can save you because…I. It’s the only message that comes directly from God (vv. 11-24) The main point of vv. 11-24 is to show how the Galatians can be sure that the gospel that Paul preached is the only gospel from God. His point is to counter the claims of the false teachers who have come behind him in the Galatian churches. The false teachers claim that he is not a true apostle and the gospel he is preaching is not the true gospel. The false teachers have been telling the churches in Galatia that Paul’s credentials are not as good as theirs, in fact, he used to murder Christians and so he should not be trusted. Paul, for his part aims to show how it is that the gospel he preaches did not originate with any man, either himself or anyone else. He wants the Galatians to know that the gospel he preached to them and that they believed came straight from God. That’s the main point of vv. 11-12. The gospel Paul preaches is not a contrivance of men. It’s one thing to claim that the message you are preaching did not come from men but from God, it is another thing to prove it. Let’s look at the line of argument that Paul makes to convince these churches that the gospel he preaches and they believed is the only salvation story that is from God. The first piece of evidence that Paul brings forward is his former way of life as a Jew. Paul’s point is that he was not out looking for another way of salvation. He was Jewish. He was zealous for the teachings of Judaism that he had first been taught by his parents and then his local rabbis and finally in the most prestigious Jewish school in the world, the school of Gamaliel. He was so convinced that keeping the Jewish law as taught by Moses was the only way to know God and be accepted by him that he sought to destroy the Christian church. He viewed the claim of Christians that the crucified Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and the only savior in the world to be an insult to God. He was committed to stamping out what he viewed as a cancer on the body of Judaism. He viewed the Christian story of salvation as a lie and a deception and thus it was God’s will that the church of Christ be destroyed. He was serving God by killing Christians. Paul was not in any way predisposed to believe the gospel of Christ but was completely opposed to accepting it as the message of salvation given by God. You could not find a person more opposed to Jesus Christ and to his gospel than Paul. Therefore, the fact that he now preaches that Jesus is the Messiah and savior cannot be attributed to any human factor for there was no human way for him to be persuaded to abandon Judaism and embrace Christianity. The only explanation has to be that this gospel of Christ has come from God for he would not listen to any man and there is no way he would ever accept it without divine intervention. In vv. 15-16a Paul, in a very succinct manner, describes exactly the divine activity that took place in order to persuade him to believe that the gospel of Christ as he preached it is the only message from God by which humans can be saved. This brief statement is his explanation of what happened to him on the road to Damascus. Here he was, on his way to arrest, torture and imprison any Christians he found in Damascus when, contrary to everything he deserved and against every expectation, the Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him and spoke to him. He saw with spiritual eyes what he was blind to prior to this, Jesus is the Messiah and it is only through faith in him and not by any works of the law that humans can be made right with God. The only rational explanation as to how a guy who was going to Damascus to kill Christians arrived in Damascus and began to preach what Christians were teaching is that God himself confronted him and changed him on the road to Damascus. Only sovereign grace can explain what happened to Paul. There is no other explanation. Upon being converted and told by Jesus that he was to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, what did Paul do? He went immediately into Arabia, which is the land of the Gentiles east of the Jordan River and south towards Egypt and he preached the gospel there for three years. He left behind all the power and authority he had as an emissary of the Jewish ruling council and went to live as an exile and an itinerant preacher among non-Jewish people. What did Paul gain for his abandoning Judaism for Christ? Did he get money? Did he gain power and prestige? No, he lost everything for the sake of Christ. This message has to be from God because he gained nothing but God as a result of his radical departure from Judaism to being the chief spokesperson of Chrisitanity to the non-Jews. He adds that he did not consult with any human being prior to going to preach the gospel in Arabia. He didn’t go to Jerusalem to find out if the gospel he was preaching was the same one the original apostles preached. He was absolutely confident that this message was straight from the Lord Jesus himself and therefore he knew the gospel they preached and the one he preached was the same, without going to see them as both they and he had received the gospel from the same source. He preached the gospel for three years in Arabia and then he went up to Jerusalem to visit Peter, to make his acquaintance. He didn’t go in order to check out his gospel but simply to establish a relationship with one who shared in the apostolic work. He was only there for 15 days and did not meet with any of the other apostles except for James, the half-brother of Jesus. Do you see what he’s saying? “Peter accepted me as a peer and as one who preached the same message he preached even though I had never been instructed by any of the apostles or by any other Christian. We had a visit but that was all. I was only there for a short visit because I didn’t go there to have Peter teach me the gospel because my gospel does not come from men but from God, just like Peter’s came straight from Jesus.” I don’t think it is accidental that he mentions James, the half-brother of Jesus. If you will remember, throughout the gospels the brothers of Jesus, the sons of Mary and Joseph, did not believe Jesus was the Messiah. They mocked him and on one occasion they came to forcibly take him home because they were sure he was crazy. Yet here and in the book of Acts we find out that right after the resurrection James, who persecuted Christ when he lived on earth, is one of the leaders of the Jerusalem church. How did this happen? In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul tells us that Jesus appeared to James personally after his resurrection, just like he appeared to Paul. While James knew Jesus while he was on earth, he didn’t become a follower of Jesus until after the resurrection, just like Paul. Paul now utters an oath. What he’s doing is like what we ask people to do before they get on the witness stand in a court of law. “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” The point of an oath is that you are calling God as the witness of your honesty. You are saying that if you are lying then “may God see and punish me accordingly.” Serious people do not make oaths except under the most extreme need. Paul feels the need to take such an oath because the false teachers have been spreading lies about him. They have been saying that he got his gospel from men and that the apostles were in complete disagreement with his gospel. Paul is giving his evidence to contradict what these false teachers are saying about him. His oath is another confirmation that the gospel he preached came from God, not men. Finally, he calls another witness in his behalf. He calls all the churches in Judea from which these false teachers claim to have come. His point is that even though he never met any of those churches and they never heard him preach, yet they acknowledged that the gospel he preached was the same one they believed and preached. These churches, whom he at one time persecuted, admitted that he was preaching the same faith he had tried to destroy, which is the faith they had because they were the ones he sought to destroy. They even praised God for his conversion and preaching of the gospel. How did he have the same faith as they if the apostles and other Christians never taught him that gospel? It can only be because God himself revealed Christ to him on the road to Damascus. The gospel that Paul preached could not have come from men but could only have come from God. Let me help you think about how what Paul is doing in these verses can help you. There are some of you who just cannot accept the claim of Paul, of Christianity that it is the only message from God and therefore the only description of how to be saved. For you, anyone who claims to have the exclusive truth is just wrong. Others of you are skeptical of the claim of Christ to be the only Savior because you just don’t see the evidence. You think that faith means you have to believe in spite of the fact there is no evidence to prove it is true. Still others of you want to believe it is true but you struggle with doubts that this gospel is really true. Let my ask you to ask Paul with me, “Paul how do you know that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only message from God and the only way to be saved?” How would Paul answer that question? He would answer it in two ways. First, he would say, I know that this is the only way of salvation because God himself, opened my blind eyes and enabled me to see the glory of Christ as the Savior of the world. I believe because God himself enabled me to believe. He would say that the only way that anyone will ever trust that Christ alone can save them is by the gracious work of God through his Holy Spirit giving new hearts and the gift of repentance and faith. However, he would also say that here are some reasons to believe . He would describe what happened to him and ask you to explain his experience apart from God. He would argue that his conversion is evidence of the truthfulness of the gospel. Now listen to me. Does the story of Paul’s conversion and preaching of the gospel without any consultation with any other humans demand that you believe in Christ? Does his story require belief? No it does not. However, his story shows that belief is reasonable. There are good reasons to believe that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God who became a man and obeyed God’s law perfectly and died on a Roman cross to pay for sins and rose from the dead as the reward of his obedience and is now waiting at his Father’s right hand for the moment when his Father tells him to come and end this world and create the new heavens and the new earth. What Paul is doing here is showing the reasonableness of faith. It is like what happens when you go to the doctor. Let’s say you don’t feel well. You go to the doctor. He asks you some questions and does a few tests. He comes back to you and tells you that you have a particular illness. Then he gives you a prescription for some pills that he tells you will make you well if you take them for the next seven days. Why will you go to the pharmacy, pay money for those pills and then take them? Do you do it because you understand the chemistry and biology of the drugs? Do you do it because you investigated the doctor and made sure he actually went to medical school? How do you know that the pills will help you and not harm you? Is it irrational for you to trust the doctor? Are you nuts to take the pills? Of course not. While you cannot know for 100% sure that the doctor is not a quack and that the pills are not poison it is right to trust the doctor and the pills for a variety of reasons. Your faith in the doctor is not ungrounded. You are trusting the institution that hired him, the school that trained him, the pharmacist that gives the pills. Perhaps you had a friend who recommended the doctor. Your interaction with the doctor confirmed his trustworthiness. Faith is not: believing something is true without any evidence. Faith always has reasons. Faith depends upon the faithfulness of the one who makes promises and it has reasons for doing so. While faith in Christ is ultimately a work of divine grace, yet God assists us by giving us reasons to believe. The conversion of Paul and his preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles, without ever consulting another apostle and at great cost to himself is a good reason to believe that this gospel is the only one from God and therefore the only one that can save you. Only the good news of God’s grace through Jesus Christ can save you because…
II. It’s the only message that confronts our real problem (vv. 13-14 & 23) When Paul describes his zealous pursuit of righteousness by keeping the law of Moses and his hatred of the gospel of Christ and those who believed it, he is seeking to hold himself up as the #1 example of the sinfulness of human beings. He is using himself as a case study in what the doctrine of total depravity looks like in a human life. He was a man who claimed to love God. He claimed that his passion in life was to please God by obeying the law. He knew the OT backwards and forwards. Yet he was completely blind to reality. He was actually fighting against the God whom he claimed to serve. He was dead to God when he thought he was alive to God. He could not see that his religion was worthless; that the righteousness that he thought he had was nothing before the righteousness of God. Paul’s experience is the experience of every human being apart from the gospel. We are self-deceived and self-righteous and blindly opposed to the God whom we claim to serve. The vast majority of human beings claim to know God and to serve him in the various religions of the world, just like Paul. However, the majority of humans are blind to reality and merely using “God talk” to justify their own preferences and likes. We are by nature God-haters even while most of us say that we are God lovers, just like Paul. We are not interested in knowing the truth. We are only looking for ways to justify our version of reality. But not only are we blind, dead haters of God but we are haters of men as well. Here again Paul uses his life to display the wickedness of the human condition. He arrested, tortured and murdered innocent people merely because they didn’t agree with his version of reality. He was a member of the powerful class and he used his power to oppress the minority class. His hatred of God revealed itself in hatred of human beings who didn’t share his particular view of life. What Paul is showing us is the inseparable connection between our being rebels against God and destroyers of those made in the image of God. We naturally love those who love us and agree with us but we naturally hate those who don’t love us or don’t agree with us. This is the cause of all the anger and fighting in our lives. This is the cause of racism and wars and slavery. We are happy to love those who make us happy but we refuse to love those who harm us and seek to harm them in return. When humans are given power to carry out the passions that are in their hearts, as Paul was given, then we do what Paul did, torture and kill innocent people. Do you ever wonder at the mass genocide that happened in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia and on the list goes? Do you ever think, “what was wrong with those people?” How did Hutu’s pick up machetes and hack to death their Tutsi neighbors? How did Germans turn over their Jewish neighbors to the gas chambers? Paul’s seeking to destroy the church shows that it just comes natural. When deceived God-haters are given power they use that power to oppress those whom they despise. What kind of religion can help a person like Paul? What will you tell him he must do? He just needs to try harder to be good? He needs to keep a different set of rules than the ones he is keeping? This man was more religious than you and I can ever hope to be. He read the Bible and prayed and memorized the Bible and went to temple and kept lists of religious rules. He spent his time thinking about God and talking about God. There is no human solution to this man’s problem. As far as he was concerned, he was completely justified in arresting Christians. There was no possible line of argument that could convince him he was wrong. Can you imagine a Moslem cleric offering salvation to anyone who arrested and tortured Moslem’s just because they were Moslem? Can you imagine Hindu’s offering Nirvana to those who persecuted Hindu’s? The teachings of both these religions are clear. There is no forgiveness possible for those who persecute their faith but only judgment and death. It is only in the gospel of Jesus that the enemies of God are offered salvation. Christianity is the only religion that has a solution to the real problem of human beings: hearts that hate the true and living God and those made in his image. Only Christianity has the power to forgive its enemies because only Christianity has a savior who suffered the just punishment due to such violent, evil people as Paul and us. Paul’s life shows that our problem is not outside of us but within us. We are hard, dead and blind to who we really are and what we really are capable of. Salvation must come from outside of us. Only the good news of God’s grace through Jesus Christ can save you because…
III. It’s the only message that reveals Jesus Christ (vv. 15-16a & 24) Acts 9, as we heard it read to us describes the events that surrounded the conversion of Paul. Verses 15-16 tell us what God did in and through these circumstances to save Paul. Notice what Paul says. First, God, before Paul was born set him apart for salvation and for apostleship. Paul didn’t know it until on the road to Damascus but the fact is that God, before Paul was born and had done anything good or bad, determined to save Paul and commission him as his messenger to the Gentiles. God’s determination to save Paul was not conditioned on anything Paul did but in spite of all that Paul did. God freely, sovereignly with no reason other than it pleased him to do so set Paul apart from before his birth to be saved and to be the apostle to the Gentiles. Second, God accomplished what he had decided by calling Paul to himself by his grace. This is not just referring to the voice of the resurrected Christ speaking to Paul on the road to Damascus. This means that God, when he spoke to Paul changed Paul’s heart and effectively called him out of the deadness and blindness of his sin and gave him a heart of flesh and eyes that could see. God gave him the power to believe what God commanded him to believe and to do what God commanded him to do. Finally, the result of God’s predestining and calling of Paul was Jesus being revealed to him as the Savior of sinners. If you were to ask Paul, “what was the primary thing that occurred to you on the road to Damascus?” He would say, “I saw that Jesus Christ was the glorious God-man who alone can save sinners by his life, death and resurrection. What God’s effectual calling did in my heart was enable me to see the blazing beauty and glory of Christ so that I trusted in him alone as my wisdom, righteousness and sanctification.” In another place Paul says, “For God who made light shine out of darkness has also made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” Paul would say, “I saw in that moment that all of my obedience to the law was nothing but that Christ’s obedience to the law was everything. I saw how righteous God would be to destroy me for my stubborn, proud rebellion against him and how Christ had born God’s just judgment against me by his death. Christ became everything to me as he was revealed to me in all of his divine, saving glory.” Again as he says in Phil. 3, “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.” Notice at the end of v. 16, that what he preaches is Christ. The gospel is Jesus in his entire divine, saving glory. The good news of God’s grace is Christ himself, not the benefits that Christ gives to his people. Faith is in Christ, not in being forgiven, not in going to heaven, not in being part of the church. What Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, seeing Christ as the glorious Savior, is what he then went on to preach, Christ is a glorious savior. Christ is the good news for sinners. Whenever you add something to Christ, you immediately cloud the glory of Christ. You do nothing to contribute to your salvation. Christ has done it all. He is the only hope for sinners like Paul. Upon what basis could anyone argue that Paul should be forgiven by God in light of his open hatred of God and murderous violence against God’s people? This goes for all of us. What have you done that can be any argument for God forgiving you? Why should God care about you at all? Your halfhearted religious observances are nothing compared to the righteousness of God. Your anemic prayers and miserly acts of kindness are nothing in view of your enormous rebellion against the God who made you. Your pledges to follow Christ, your supposed decisions to accept Jesus, how are any of these things an argument for God to be kind to you? Your only hope is that God would consider your sins born by Christ and count you righteous with the righteousness of Christ. Your only hope is that God would call you by his grace and so reveal the glory of Jesus Christ as a Savior for sinners like you. You have no other hope but him. The fact that God determined to save a man like Paul and then made him the main apostle to preach Christ to the Gentiles is nothing but amazing. You may have a friend or child or spouse or parent who is stubbornly resistant to the gospel of Christ. You should not lose hope. Look at Paul. Humanly speaking there was no one as far from Christ, as opposed to Christ as he was and yet God by grace saved him. You may despair of ever being saved yourself as you see your doubt filled, lust filled, unbelieving heart. Look at Paul and how God, contrary to what Paul deserved, overcame all of his resistance in a moment and turned him into the most passionate follower of Christ. Ask God to do for you what he did for Paul. Ask him to call you by his grace and to reveal Jesus Christ to you and don’t stop asking until God answers and grants to you a heart that sees and trusts Jesus Christ. Christian, don’t think about what you are doing for God, think about what God has done for you in Christ. What matters is not what you do but what Christ has done for you. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your faithfulness is what matters most to God. What matters to God the Father is that God the Son perfectly obeyed the law for you and bore the curse of the law for you. Fix your attention upon Christ, not upon you. Only the good news of God’s grace through Jesus Christ can save you because…
© Copyright
2005 John Swanson.
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