Galatians is a book where we get to see a different side of Paul.
He has been pushed and challenged, and when he’s writing this book, he is angry!
So why is he so upset?
Paul is writing this book towards the end of his first missionary journey, where he
focused mostly on the region of Southern Galatia.
For close to two years he had traveled through the area, where he proclaimed the good news
about Jesus, planted many churches, and lived out the power of the Holy Spirit.
This missionary journey marked the beginning of a major transition in the church: for the
first time countless Gentiles became followers of Jesus!
But despite all of Paul’s successes, he has gone through some pretty intense persecution
— including once where he received a public stoning, to the point where they thought he
was dead!
But that isn’t why Paul is angry in this letter.
He is angry because a group of false-teachers have been coming in behind him, and undoing
a lot of the hard work that he had done.
They were leading these Galatian churches astray.
So, who were these false teachers, and what was is it that they were teaching?
To understand this situation better, let’s look back at the close and yet complex relationship
between Christianity and Judaism, and how they each viewed a group we know as Gentiles.
In the first century, Judaism viewed Gentiles as unclean sinners, and contact with them
was unacceptable.
Because of this, Jews would keep a distance to them, so as not to become unclean themselves.
However, there was a provision for Gentiles who recognized the God of Israel and who wanted
to worship Him, but it wasn’t easy.
These Gentiles needed to commit fully to the Jewish lifestyle.
What did this mean?
This meant that they needed to first be baptized, then the males would need to get circumcised,
and then they needed to follow the laws of Moses — especially the food laws and festivals.
These requirements were too much for many Gentiles, so very few fully converted to Judaism.
Some Gentiles, however, took a middle way.
They recognized the God of Israel and were baptized, but didn’t want to go through
with the circumcision requirement.
These Gentiles were called ‘God-fearers’.
And, though they attended Synagogues and were friendly towards Jews, from a Jewish perspective
they were still considered unclean.
This all changed with Jesus.
After His death and resurrection, the disciples of Jesus were empowered by the Holy Spirit
to boldly proclaim His message to everyone around them.
They understood that Jesus was the promised Messiah and Savior of Israel, and that He
was the One to whom everything in the Old Testament was ultimately pointing.
Jesus had now set them free from the burden of following the sacrifices and the ceremonial
works of the law of the Old Covenant.
The only thing required to make things right with God was faith in Jesus!
These first Christians were Jewish, and initially they only thought to proclaim this good news
of their Messiah to other Jews.
After all, they had been waiting for their Messiah to come for a long time.
Through their proclamation of the good news about Jesus, many Jews were convinced that
Jesus was the Messiah, and became Christians.
Unfortunately, the majority refused to accept Jesus as their Messiah.
They chose instead to continue to follow their Old Testament laws and traditions, rather
than become followers of Jesus.
With that, things between Jews and Christians started to become tense, but there was one
thing that made it even greater.
God began calling the Christians to do something bold and completely counter-cultural: to bring
the good news about Jesus to the Gentile world.
As they stepped out in faith and obedience, many Gentiles became followers of Jesus and
joined their community of believers.
As time went on, so many accepted the faith that Gentiles were starting to outnumber Jewish
believers in the church!
As more Gentiles became Christians, some of the Jewish Christians started to become upset.
Even after they became followers of Christ, they continued to hold their traditional Jewish
view of keeping themselves separate from Gentiles.
Now were they to just accept them?
What would the rest of their Jewish community think?
They feared that they might get rejected, or even persecuted for being too friendly
towards Gentiles.
So what did they do?
Out of fear, they compromised the Gospel message.
They decided that faith in Jesus alone was not enough to have a right relationship with
God.
They taught that righteousness before God was earned through faith in Jesus + doing
the works of the law.
They required Gentiles who wanted to become followers of Jesus to go through all the Jewish
laws of conversion.
In other words, Gentiles must convert to Judaism first in order to become followers of Jesus.
This is why these false teachers are called ‘the circumcision group’ or ‘Judaizers’.
So what did these Judaizers do next?
After Paul planted a church in a city, and then moved on to the next location, they would
come in after him and attack Paul’s credibility.
They claimed that he was not even a true apostle, but was a false teacher who taught them an
incomplete Gospel message.
They accused him of proclaiming an easy Gospel to the Gentiles for the sake of getting a
lot of converts, however he was leaving them as unclean God-fearers.
The Judaizers would then teach this new church what they called, “the real Gospel message
— what Paul didn’t tell you.”
They had strong influence in some of these early churches, turning new Christians to
what Paul in this letter calls “a different gospel”.
So why was Paul angry?
Because Jesus has given the Galatians the greatest gift in the world — they were justified
though faith in Him, and they were throwing it all away.
They were trying to earn His favor through fruitless works, rather than accepting the
one and only path to salvation.
Now that you know some of this background, and how the Judaizers were compromising the
Gospel message, how does it help you when you now read the book of Galatians?
What is Paul’s message to the Galatians, and how do we live that message out today?
When we truly learn to stand firm in our faith, and walk in the freedom God has
for us, this is the Galatians Effect.