Getting  to the Point
Galatians 1:6-10

The Galatian believers were moving in an unwise and dangerous direction, and the apostle Paul wasn’t having it. His opening words reveal their spiritual immaturity. What are the symptoms?

1. Lack of depth (1:6)
2. Ignorance (1:6)
3. Confusion (1:7)
4. Gullibility (1:8-9)
5. Eagerness to please people (1:10)

The more I ponder these verses and consider them in light of the rest of the Bible, I get more worked up about them. The truth of the gospel is so simplistically beautiful that I’m coming to appreciate and desiring to defend that more and more. The more we realize what God has done, the quicker we ought to be to say, “Case closed. What more can He do?”

These are Paul’s words to the Galatians. The Galatian churches are in error. They are slipping in their understanding of the grace of God and what the gospel truly is. They are being encouraged to do that by those who are wrong, those who will add something to the simple gospel. What’s noteworthy in the scheme of Galatians is that back in the first century in this culture they would write letters all the time. They would begin with a greeting and some sort of salutation and then almost always a word of commendation. “I thank my God on every remembrance of you” – that sort of thing.

You see that in so many of Paul’s letters. All of his letters to churches include a commendation except this one. He goes directly from his benediction about the Lord and his greeting, “to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen,” to “I am amazed.” He is getting to the point without any flowery speech.

Galatians 1
⁶ I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel;
⁷ which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
⁸ But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!
⁹ As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!
¹⁰ For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.

It seems to me that when we’re new at something we are the most vulnerable. In our home we have furniture that is primarily pine. As our boys learned to walk, it seems they hit their heads on it regularly and we were reminded of how vulnerable a little child can be when they’re just getting started.

Of course, the more vulnerable are those who are the more daring, whether it’s walking, skiing, snowboarding, driving a vehicle. At some point when we are beginners we cross some sort of an unseen threshold into new confidence; it’s a false confidence; it’s not tempered by experience and it tends to lead to disaster.

Being new to something can lead to deadly mishap. I brought an anecdote by an individual who was engaged in World War II in the battle for Okinawa. It was a brutal struggle as the Japanese were defending, basically, their homeland at this point. I’ll read a quick excerpt from an individual who was a part of the 6^th Marine division on Okinawa.  This is what he recalls:

“You get used to death. You have to. You can’t get carried with that, that’s the way it is. There are too many things that have to be done, things that have to be taken care of whether you want to or not.

“I think that in my statistics that I kept I company had about 117% casualties and K and L had a little more than that. That means we got replacements so we had new bodies in there all the time, and you’d lose them too.

“The original guys were ok. At the end of Okinawa it was really a sad state of affairs. Here I am, I was this 19-year-old kid, I was acting platoon sergeant. But it depends on who was around at the time. Some guys in there were 39 years old. They could have been my fathers. One of them had six kids. I said, “Good Lord, what are they sending to us?”

“These guys were right out of boot camp. They went through boot camp training, maybe a little infantry training, but they certainly they were not tried and true performers. It got to be a little on the nervous side. You tried to help them stay alive; sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t work. Most of the replacements would be dead the next day.

“You put them in the foxhole and the next day they were dead. I always thought if I kept them for three days they were on their own and would be fine. I couldn’t do much more than that.”

Being new is a dangerous place to be in many ways. I met a man named Mel Sumrall, a retired pastor of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas. Brother Mel travels the world establishing Bible training centers for pastors and church leaders. It grew out of a burden that he saw in Africa where thousands and thousands of people were coming to faith in Jesus. Evangelism there was not a problem Conversion really wasn’t a problem, there were many.

Mel would go to their services and find that there was no content there. All they had were a few verses and some choruses and that was only good for a while. Then groups would come in who would lead them into another direction. He felt the burden to get involved in getting these individuals grounded in their faith. Getting their roots down, because prior to that they are in a dangerous and vulnerable spot. It’s true in Africa and it’s true here.

It was clearly true in Galatia. That’s why the church is called to make disciples, not converts. People in Galatia were moving away from the gospel. Paul says, “I am alarmed.” What we find as we work through these verses, I call them symptoms or signs of immaturity, indicators that an individual is spiritually vulnerable to being led away in a dangerous and erroneous direction.

Lack of Depth (1:6)

The first symptom, I would call lack of depth. Paul says, “I marvel, I am amazed,” and not in a good way, that you are so quickly changing, so quickly moving away. The New American Standard says “so quickly deserting.” That is to say Paul had been there only recently, probably within a matter of months. I would suggest that among all those churches in South Galatia the longest any believer had been a Christian was less then 2 years.

Paul had been there; he had established churches. He had come back through and visited and strengthened and appointed elders and done what he could do. He returns to Syrian Antioch and word soon reaches him that there are problems in the place he just left. He can’t believe it! You people are moving so quickly. You have no depth. Your root system hasn’t had opportunity yet to go down deep and take firm hold. There hasn’t been enough time.

The apostle is troubled and the reason this is so is because in their case and in our case the flesh is always stronger than we think it will be.  The appeal to go any other way than toward the pure gospel of Jesus is strong as well. Our minds take time to be renewed.

The apostle later in Romans would say, “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” That word “prove” means “live out in action.” It takes time. Paul is concerned. There hasn’t been much time. Their memories seem to be short and he’s bothered by it.

He hasn’t been gone very long and the Judaisers arrive and say, “Oh, you’re Christians. Isn’t that great!” “Oh, isn’t it neat that you have Jesus as Messiah and He died on the cross for your sins and you have come to him by faith. But there’s more. There’s at least another step you have to take. You can contribute something to your eternal well being. You just have to become a Jew. You have to undergo the rite of circumcism and then you’ll really be on the inside. We have something extra for you.”

The appeal to the flesh and in their minds, which are not grounded in the Scripture, made that a real attraction. “Oh, we can be real, full, complete believers then?” “Oh, yes.” “And who is this Paul anyway? What does he know? Listen to us.” They are there among them, agitating them, telling them this and many are taking steps in their direction.

Jesus talked about soil and a sower who went forth casting identical seed on four different soils. Remember that second type? Immediately the plants spring up but because the soil isn’t deep and because there are rocks underneath that absorb and hold the heat from the sun they quickly sprout up but have nothing to hang onto and find themselves pulled and distracted. They need time. They need training. They need to engage their minds. The apostle is concerned there is lack of depth.

Ignorance (1:6)

Secondly, there’s ignorance. The two go together. We’ll see that one of these readily lends to another. A person who hasn’t been a believer a very long time can’t be expected to have very deep roots, even if that person is a celebrity. The biggest problem, if I had to pick one, and if I had to camp on one, it would be this one – and that is ignorance.

Look carefully at how this verse reads. Paul says, I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him.  When the apostle Paul was on the road to Damascus many years before this, it was not a body of doctrine that confronted him and knocked him to the ground.

It wasn’t an alternative belief system, even one that would appeal to the flesh. It was a Person and Paul remembered that very well. What sets Christianity apart from any other faith pursuit is that we are dealing with a living person and a relationship with Him.

The apostle says it’s one thing that you’re starting to believe differently. We can fix that. Don’t desert the Person. No doctrinal statement died for you on the cross. A Person took your sin. A Person – and He wants you, and more than that, deserves you and your loyalty, your relationship, your time, your devotion, your everything. It’s a Person and they have forgotten they are dealing with a Person. I think we forget that too.

I love the little story in book two of the Navigators 2.7 series about “My Heart Christ’s Home.” There in my heart, which is an allegory to a home, I’m running down the stairs and who should be in the sitting room waiting for me, but Jesus. His point isn’t just that I need to spend time with Him. I do. The point goes beyond that. He says, “I spilled My blood for you. I deserve you. It’s a relationship, not simply a belief system. They have forgotten the One who called you by grace. They have forgotten who He is. They have forgotten what they may have known.

Many of these were converted out of a background of Judaism. They should have remembered what their Old Testaments told them about Messiah – that He is God in the flesh, that He is God the Son, that He is God the King, that He is God the priest, that He is God the Anointed Deliverer. Here He is, wanting to have relationship with them, having shed His blood on the cross for their salvation, and they’re saying, “Oh, I don’t know. This looks a little better to me.”

The apostle is offended. He’s amazed that they would leave a Person for a practice of some sort, that they would turn their backs on a relationship of this nature in order to feel better about their religion. It’s not sitting well. They have forgotten that He is Messiah; they have forgotten that He went to the cross, that He endured the pain and suffering, that He shed His blood, that He died for their sins and the sins of the world and suffered the Father’s wrath. All of this He did personally, He didn’t order it done, He did it.

He saved them personally and they have turned on that. They have forgotten knowledge of a person, first of all, in their ignorance, and secondly they have also forgotten knowledge of truth. Here the text does something for us. It says, I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you.”  What it literally, basically says is, “Who called you by grace.” Not by the grace of Christ, some manuscripts throw that in, the earlier ones don’t.

Think of it this way. You have so quickly deserted Him who called you by grace. That means absolutely everything. What it does not mean is that Jesus showed up, issued you a summons and you in a moment of smitten conscience perhaps or resolution to turn over a new leaf say, “Oh, I think I’ll try that.”

It isn’t even you or me floundering around in the waves of the stormy sea of life and here comes Jesus tossing us a life ring and with whatever morality and spirituality we may naturally possess, we grab the ring and he hauls us on board his good ship grace. It’s not that. It’s you or me lying dead on the floor of the sea, totally deserving to be there and Jesus dives into the water, pulls our carcass from the bottom of the sea and breathes His life into us. That’s grace.

He called you by grace, not by your merit. He didn’t look down on the race of people and say, “Oh there’s a pretty virtuous soul, there’s a sincere one. That one’s not a hypocrite – I’ll take them.” He looked down on a spiritual cemetery, on Davy Jones’ locker, and He gave life. That’s grace.

Grace isn’t God coming up with a good idea and hoping people will lay hold of it. Grace is God looking at a race of hopeless and ill deserving people and stepping into their business and making fixes that people can’t fix. That’s grace and Paul is saying, “You have deserted a Person who steps into your business and fixed what you couldn’t fix. That’s grace.”

You want to turn your back on that? You want to be careful, move real slowly. That’s why he’s getting to the point. That’s why there’s no commendation. He’s impacting them with the seriousness of the direction they started out in. He is saying do not take one step further. You are so horribly wrong. Don’t do it.

There is another little nuance here that makes a pile of difference in this verse and that is between verses 6 and 7. “Who called you by grace,” I’ll leave it there, “for another gospel which is really not another.” In those two expressions the apostle Paul uses two different words and he uses them deliberately.

In the first place, the New American Standard has it correct. He says, “who called you to a different gospel.” The word is the word from which we get heterogeneous – two different origins. Hetero is the word – a different one, another of a different kind, another gospel of a different kind.

Then he elaborates with his next expression, saying, “It is not another of the same kind.” There isn’t another gospel of the same kind. There cannot be. There is only one gospel. There are not choices among gospels. Any time you add works, performance, any sort of addendum to the gospel of Jesus, it’s no longer gospel. Suddenly it’s no longer God by grace doing what only God can do.

Now we can do it too, and that’s not good news because the Bible will tell us we are not inclined to do it. We are dead and won’t do it. If God doesn’t do the saving, nobody gets saved. That’s what makes it a gospel and Paul says if you add anything to it, it’s not good news any more. It isn’t a gospel of a different kind; it isn’t a gospel at all.

If you had to reduce the book of Galatians to one problem in one verse, that’s where it is. Any time, whether then in the first century in southern Turkey, or today in our world, whenever anybody wants to add anything to the finished work of what God has done for us that has just become a different gospel. It is no gospel at all. It’s somebody’s notion of working your way to heaven.

Working your way to heaven is not good news because it can’t be done. The Bible is very clear about that. “Not by works of righteousness which we have done. For by grace are you saved through faith, not of works.” The Bible is full of that clear, clear truth. Only by trusting Him. Only. Adding to that, suddenly we no longer have a gospel.

Here’s the problem. If we have to say, “Who is stirring up trouble?” What is the trouble here in these churches? The story is told in the first verse of Acts 15. The sequence of events goes something like this: after the apostle Paul in about A.D. 48 visited these four locations, Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derby, revisited them and went back to Antioch and Syria all in the space of about 2 years time – A.D. 47 and A.D. 48 – remember all the trouble he had in those places was brought on by individuals who were called Judiasers. They were those who wanted to add Jewish stuff to the gospel and they gave Paul grief there.

Acts 15

1 Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”

They are adding to the gospel. “It’s faith in Jesus, plus . . . “ That sparked a huge discussion in the early church resulting in what they called the Council of Jerusalem, and they said, “No, that’s bogus, that won’t work.” But in the meantime, those same types of people have been saying in Galatia, “You have to add. You have to have more. You have to be Jews if you’re really going to be saved Christians.”

That was no small thing to say. They knew some things that confused them. They knew that salvation would come through the Jews, that the Messiah would be Jewish, that the Jewish people were the ones who were given exclusive access to so much of God’s special revelation. Who wouldn’t want to be included in that?

They were torn. They were pulled that way. That was natural for them to be drawn to, “If you want to be a complete believer you just have to join our camp now that you have this faith in this Messiah. Come and be complete Jews with us.” It was a serious draw, so serious that the apostle addresses it here and elsewhere.

It’s easy to believe something like that. We must never forget the natural inclination of our hearts is pride and if there is any way we can somehow have something to do with getting ourselves to heaven, we jump on it. So would they. And many were poised to jump.

Their hearts and our hearts have considerable in common. We naturally gravitate toward people who say, “There’s more.” We like that because we want to make that fleshly contribution to our salvation, but the Bible says no, God gets all the glory. You get none. He gets all the merit; you get none. Not a soul will ever stand before the Lord in heaven saying, “Am I ever glad I figured it out.” They didn’t figure anything out.

Jesus came and invaded your life or you would still be spiritually dead. That’s His to do. So Paul is arguing for this, saying, “Trust only Him.” The Judaisers are saying, “There’s more.” This Paul knew: There cannot be more. There isn’t room for more. Romans 8:32 is a verse we should all have committed to memory.

Romans 8
32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?

There isn’t any more than Jesus. There isn’t any more than this. And He is gloriously enough. Paul is saying, “Add to God?” That’s laughable. You don’t add to God. He gives you Himself. What more can there be? Not a thing. There cannot be more.

Confusion (1:7)

Really at this level there shouldn’t be confusion. It should be fairly simple. Jesus plus nothing.

The text says that certain ones are disturbing you. That’s the same word that’s used for the Pool of Bethesda, where the angel stirs the waters; the same word used in Acts 17 where the crowd is stirred up by the Jews and incited against Paul and the others. Someone is agitating you people. And by the way, they are doing it now even as Paul writes.

There shouldn’t be any confusion there. You’ve come to Jesus, you trust Jesus, and you give your heart to Jesus. He has paid your entire debt. You just give Him everything. That sounds pretty simple, there’s not a lot of room for confusion.

I remember when I was a new Christian, I was in the Navy, and I didn’t know anything about being a Christian or the Bible. So I figured I’ll see who does. I saw there were some individuals who carried their Bibles around and I thought they must be Christians, so I’ll follow them. One thing I did know – I knew Jesus had died on the cross for my sins and I knew I had surrendered my heart to Him.

I knew I was a Christian and that I needed to read my Bible, that I had a lot to learn, so I fell in with these fellows and they had interesting meetings, did interesting things. Pretty wild, but I do remember at one point being told, “We know you’re a Christian and we’re really glad you’re a Christian. That’s all cool because that means you get to go to heaven, but did you know there’s more?”

More? “God has another door for you to step through.” All this time I thought trusting Jesus was all I needed. They said, “That’s fine, but there’s more.” So they’re encouraging me to substantiate my faith by going to another level with them. That didn’t square with me and I found myself in a state of agitation. I was perplexed. I was confused. I know what that word is saying in here, because I had this foundational belief, I had no doubts about that – but what’s this, having to do more? It messed me up and I was perplexed, agitated, confused. Happily I was also reading the Bible, and as I read the Bible, I became absolutely settled in my conviction that, “No, no. There is no more. You guys are wrong.” I didn’t know much, but that much I knew, and I had peace.

Paul is saying, “You people are stirred up.” Who is not the author of confusion? God is not (I Corinthians 14:33). He is not the author of confusion. When there is confusion, perplexity in the faith, it’s not because God wants it that way. It’s probably because our flesh is being tugged at. These people are troubling you. They are stirring you up. They desire to distort the gospel of Christ.  They have an aim, they have a desire, and they are bent on this. This isn’t an accident.

Paul goes on to address that issue in a most fascinating way – which we will cover next week.