Galations 1:1-10
Epistles…! Here we are! We have arrived. We are more than halfway through Acts and only 1/6 of the way through the year. So the remaining ten months will be mostly readings from the Epistles. Letters from apostles to churches with a bit of history and a lot of theology! It’ll be a tougher grind for most of us – but that just means that we’ve got a lot to learn!!
Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father… (v. 1). I can’t say how I know it or how many places I’ve read it, but it has long been in my mind that Paul often labored to defend his apostleship. He needed to exert his authority, since he was not one of the original twelve or of the eleven-plus-one. However, he considered himself fully an apostle, having received his gift of faith directly from Jesus as he was on his way to Damascus, then was further nurtured in the Lord through his three years in the Arabian desert. We will see this defense of his apostleship in more of his writings and in much greater detail in II Corinthians 10-13.
…but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. (v. 7) Here is another continuing thread that we will see in Paul’s letters – false gospels! Somehow he gets word of some bad preaching and he needs to counter that teaching. Today we laud him for that, but back then it must have been a terrible burden for him and his teaching to be challenged by others. Unfortunately for him, he knew from where he had come – and he knew that others knew – and I doubt that he could ever forgive himself his past life. I’ve always felt sorry for him in this regard.
Slava Bohu!
I was struck by the false gospel(s) – a perversion or twisting of the truth. It is harder to see half-truths than flat-out lies. Satan is pretty sneaky, using just a little truth in deceiving us.