Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Galatians 1:7 - A Gospel Metastrophe

"...which is not another, if not some are the [ones] troubling you, and wanting to turn about the Gospel of Christ."

-Trouble.  Difficulty, problems - or the act of causing the same.  Those who do so are refered to as troublemakers, and to be sure, nobody likes a troublemaker.  Not Paul, at any rate.  But some of these had shown up in Galatia, in the assembly of believers which he had helped to found, and were teaching a ‘different gospel’.

-Paul clarifies that in fact there is only one Gospel.  Just one Good Message.  The one and only.  Any teaching which conflicts with it is actually no good message at all.  There are no other gospels, not really.  There is only one.  One truth, one way - Jesus.  Grace.  Faith in Him.  Just that one Good Message.

-But these troublemakers, they were wanting to change it, distort it - a metastrophe.  Not quite as bad as a catastrophe, but we are talking about a big bad change (cf Acts 2.20 - same word).  The same thing happened in Antioch in Acts 15.1, troublemakers showed up in that predominantly-gentile assembly, distorting the message of grace (Acts 15.9-11), and the apostles and elders in Jerusalem said the very same thing that Paul is saying here - they did NOT want to trouble those from among the Gentiles who were responding to the Good News (Acts 15.19).  Salvation is not by works, it by grace alone through faith in Christ alone.  Anything else, anything which somehow reverts to a system of working to try and earn God’s favor is Metastrophic.  And Paul lets us know in no uncertain terms in the next two verses just how he feels about that...

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