11 May 2023
A few days ago I mentioned how Paul's letters to Thessalonica were some of his earliest. It's quite likely Galatians was a bit earlier, and his earliest writing, but we simply don't know. The historical context is much harder to pin down. All we have to go on is the strong resemblance between the church conference in Acts 15 and the arguments Paul makes in the Galatian letter.
The term "Galatia" includes the cities where Paul planted churches on his first missionary journey: Lystra, Derbe, Iconium and Pisidian Antioch. It was these churches that first suffered the invasion of Judaizers outside of the Levant. Back in Syrian Antioch, some Judaizers had made their appearance and stirred up the Christians there by demanding that the Gentiles pass through conversion to Judaism in order to claim Christ. These men had come out from the Jerusalem area. If you know how Jews operate in their own ethnic interest, you aren't surprised at how quickly this program got organized and implemented.
It was a question of strategy for Paul. He and his friends were preparing to go back and visit the surviving disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem, but he needed to get the message back to the churches in Galatia, too. Thus, we believe this letter was his best effort to respond to this crisis for them.
After a short intro, he launches immediately into a warning that the gospel he brought to them is not the same stuff the Judaizers were bringing. If there is one thing Paul knew about, it was the Talmudic crap that once shaped his whole being. Without boasting, Paul cites his record with the Pharisees, a record anyone could confirm easily. Paul got his PhD in Talmudism earlier than his teachers had gotten theirs. He was on track to become one of the greatest Talmudic rabbis of his day. That is, until the Lord got his attention that this was simply not the path to peace with Jehovah.
Jesus is the Son of God, and if Paul couldn't embrace that, he probably would have died. This is where Paul reveals that he got his three years of time with the Risen Christ while hiding out in Arabia, so that he was on equal terms with the Twelve who walked with Him for three years before His crucifixion. After that, he established himself with the Peter and James as one of them. Then he worked in the gospel for 14 years in Syrian Antioch. Following that, he had some concern in this own mind that he might have drifted from the truth, and so consulted again with the first-hand followers of Jesus in Jerusalem.
But there was a serious problem: Among some of those early Jewish disciples of Jesus were some who bore a residual disdain for Gentiles as unclean. Among them was Peter, the man who first opened the door to the Gentiles. This thing got downright silly, with these Hebrew Christians refusing to eat with the new Gentile believers, due to the scolding presence of those first Judaizers. This is how Judaism operates.
It is here that Paul puts the smack down on Judaism. Christ on the Cross opened up the Covenant to all humanity, on a basis quite other than anything like the Jewish identity. The Talmud was wrong wholly, and it must be rejected without mercy. But the actual Old Covenant itself was a matter of human national identity, whereas the New Covenant was a faith identity. That famous memory verse in 2:20 is part of his speech to his fellow Hebrew Christians. From that anchor point, he goes on in his letter to warn the Galatian churches against drifting away from the gospel.
This is where Paul trashes the Jewish identity. They claimed to be children of Abraham, but they were not children of the Promise, because they had rejected the grounds on which that promise stood. Because of the path they had chosen, the people of Israel were not the actual heirs of Abraham, but people of faith were, regardless of their DNA.
Paul engages in an extended metaphor to prove this point. He writes that Israel, as an earthly nation, was actually the children of slavery. The blame is not on the Covenant, but the people who chose to ignore the personal commitment inherent in the Covenant. We learn that every covenant from God has a human component, a means to manifest the higher truth. It's a law code, but by itself, a human conformance to that law code means nothing. The code is just the outer surface of the Covenant. Clinging to the code and ignoring the content makes you equivalent to a slave in the Master's household, not actual heirs of faith.
Paul ends by warning that the flesh cannot actually do God's will until it is subjected to the dominance of faith. He talks about various measures people of faith can take to help someone trapped within the dominance of the fleshly nature. Faith must dominate the flesh. The Judaizer thing was a matter of flesh, not faith. It was meant to boost the human pride, not faith.
Faith is rooted in the heart, not the head. Faith is how you come to peace with God.
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