Galatians

The book of Galatians.

1. Paul’s Authority and Gospel

4: Jesus gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age

The age is evil because of our sins.

6-9: Christians use this passage as a justification (ha-ha) to curse one another over different definitions of the gospel and different schematics of soteriology.

Very dangerous. You may either be purity spiraling and quarreling with other Christians over petty definitions in order to seize more authority for yourself over people's consciences OR apathetically failing to safeguard the most precious message to mankind, the mystery of salvation and how to be adopted by God, and allowing a distorted version of it to be spread.

This is why the gospel can only be entrusted to men of good character and clean consciences.

10: Pleasing God means serving Christ, and often making mankind uncomfortable.

11-17: Paul received his revelations directly from God. As he was reaching the highest levels of prestige in the Jewish world and seeking to destroy Christians, God revealed Christ to him and he had to abandon everything.

18-24: Paul's understanding of Christ developed seperate from the other Apostles, through revelation rather than through earthly experience of Jesus.

2. Paul Opposes Peter

1-2: Only after 14 years did he go before the apostles and elders in Jerusalem to verify that his gospel account was true.

3-5: Paul refused to compromise on the circumcision issue so that no Gentile would reject the Gospel by also being forced to go through Jewish rituals to receive any Christian fellowship.

6: God shows no partiality. He is not a respecter of persons. So Paul did not mind disagreeing with the very disciples of Christ when he thought he was correct.

There is no one on earth in the church who you are not allowed to disagree with because they are so great and apostolic and atop the hierarchy. You simply must be more correct about Christ than they are.

7-10: James and Peter and John initially approved of Paul's missionary ministry to Gentile cities.

11-14: Everyone in the church, James and Peter and Barnabas, was caving on this issue. Paul had eaten with Gentiles due to his vision but then folded back in due to the Judaizers pushing stricter observance. Barnabas followed them. But Paul fought it all the way. While previously they had had private meetings (2:2), this time Paul opposed it publically because it was a public issue of ministerial hypocrisy.

15-16: Your justification before God is not based on ritual observances like circumcision or clean eating, which are the works of the law, but on faith in Christ.

17: Not that Christ will be a servant of sin.

18-19: ??

Does he mean it would be transgression specifically rebuilding the old ritual observances again, or building some kind of new law?

What does it mean to have died to the law?

20: By faith in Christ is how we live. We endure sorrows and pains and death itself for the sake of the kingdom of God, the sanctification of his people on earth.

21: Christ died for no purpose if we can attain righteousness through our observances. Rather, righteousness comes as God's gift, either in the transformation of our hearts within, or outside in the providential circumstances that allow us to see rightly and do rightly.

3. Justified by Faith, Not Law

1-2: The Holy Spirit comes from hearing with faith when the gospel is presented, when the crucifixion of Christ is presented.

3-6: We care about the promises of God being fulfilled. We care about the fruits of the spirit in our hearts, and miraculous deeds done by God to heal us and protect us and provide for us. Ritual becomes irrelevant in this context.

6-9: This is the same type of faith as Abraham. We want the same type of blessing: we want God to make a great and holy nation out of us.

Funny anachronism from Paul it seems. The scripture was preaching to Abraham although it was written about him rather than to him, no?

10-14: The works of the law can't be relied upon. They bring curses with them. Christ took that curse upon himself and concluded it, so that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles.

What all is included in the blessing of Abraham? Paul seems to focus it on righteousness by faith, and receiving God's spirit. That is the greatest inheritance.

But in Genesis the blessing of Abraham also involved having a great lineage.

15-18: That great lineage, Paul says, with an extremely funny and rabbinical argument, was not all the people who spread out over the face of the earth, but specifically just Jesus.

All along, it was about a promise. A promise of Jesus.

3:19-21: Lot of debate over this.

This is huge. These might be one of the most important and confusing verses in all of scripture, right here.

Presumably, it ties in with the Angel of the Lord and the teaching that Christ himself, the intermediary of God, is also one with God, and Christ taught Moses the law.

Why have the law if everything is a promise, if everything is a grace? Because transgressions do deserve punishment.

As long as there are transgressors, there must be a law. Insofar as we are godly, the law is irrelevant, and we are grasping ahold of the spiritual inheritance that Christ has delivered for us: perfect righteousness by faith. His Spirit.

22: Law and Scripture imprison everything in sin. What does this mean?

It was to hold the descendants of Abraham in a kind of stasis, or captivity, or guardianship, "before faith came", before the time of Christ.

If we are all sons of God and no longer need a guardian, than why do we need teachers or scriptures at all? Don't those perform a role of guardian, holding us captive? When we need teachers and scriptures, we have not fully grasped the righteousness available by faith. We have to be punished and we have to be protected. We are not yet fully mature.

27-29: Does anyone who is baptized, even an ignorant child, have access to this inheritance that can only come through faith? Well, they at least partially begin to receive the goods of this inheritance, by the blessings of all the love of all the Christians who are around them, though if they prove unfaithful they leave and cut themselves off from the overflow of God's blessing that was hitting them.

God is not a respecter of persons and no personality differences can affect our oneness in Christ, insofar as we truly have become sons of God in his kingdom.

We are part of the fulfillment of that original promise to Abraham of great heirs to rule over all the earth. We grasp hold of this inheritance by faith.

We belong to Christ. We belong to this covenant. We receive its blessings in this life and in the life to come.

4. Heirs of God’s Promise

We must stop thinking of things like consumers and instead start thinking of ourselves as heirs: heirs of the promises to Abraham and David and Christ, sons of God, born to rule the world but only attaining it insofar as we rule over our own hearts, having the Spirit, the fruit of self-control and faith and hope and love.

1-7: Like children we were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world, to big ideas good or bad, religions and angels and passions, good or bad. Curses and princes and powers. The forces and the vibes and the flow of things.

But God's son has redeemed us from the curses of the law, either Jews who were under curses for failing to uphold the law, or Gentiles who were under curses being outside of it. Now we are heirs.

9-11: Who needs rituals? Who needs traditions when you have the SPIRIT OF THE LIVING GOD?