Imagine you travel as a missionary, far from home into an area in which the Gospel has not been preached, and you start planting churches. Many hear and receive the message of Christ and are baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
You spend many months or even several years in each place preaching and teaching converts all about who Christ was, how His coming was foretold, His relationship with the Father and the Spirit, what He did on the earth, what He did for them personally, where He went, where He is now, and what He promised to do in the future. In due course, converts come to deeper understand of key Christian doctrines of God, Christ, the Trinity, atonement, justification, sanctification, Scripture, etc.
Imagine you are quite careful to ensure that what you teach, and what they learn, is the historical truth and the authentic, correct message of Christ as it followed and fulfilled the history of God’s people and His promise of a Messiah. Your teaching is carefully checked with others who lived with Christ and ministered alongside Him, and whose apostolic doctrine and teaching you know to be accurate.
When it’s time for you to leave and to plant a church full of converts in a new location, you are confident that you have faithfully taught the Gospel of Christ and the way of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. As far as you can discern, the people you are leaving understand who they are in Christ – elected, chosen, saved by grace from their utter depravity and sin, redeemed from certain hell, and you are sure they are under no false illusions that they have somehow “contributed” to their own salvation. They brought nothing to it, they can add nothing to it, and they can take nothing away from it.
They are believers in what Christ has done, not what they themselves have done.
You have developed some leaders, and you have placed them in charge of the church. Things are in good order, and you leave them in good hands.
Next imagine that as you are winning converts in the new location, news comes to you that the people in the church you founded are in the process of becoming Mormons! Some Mormon missionaries came in as you were leaving, and they began teaching that Jesus is not God, that Satan is Jesus’ “spirit brother,” that Jesus did not have eternal pre-existence as the word of God, that everything you taught them was “apostate” (wrong, perverted) instead of “apostolic,” that there is not one eternal God but an infinite number of Gods who were once men like us, that the Holy Trinity is a myth, that salvation by grace through faith alone is a lie, and that unless they renounce your teaching and get baptized in the LDS church, they are not saved and will never one day become Gods themselves. Of course, if they DO convert and become card-carrying, special underwear-wearing Mormons, they may then strive by their own works to become worthy enough to gain entry into the third level of Heaven and become Gods themselves.
How would you feel about this? What would you do? I don’t know about you, but I would be very upset, and I would probably be on the next ship back to hopefully undo all of this dangerous, false teaching and Satanic doctrine, and if I could, to drive the heretics out.
No doubt this is how Paul must have felt concerning the Galatians, for their story is similar to the above. The Judaizers were teaching doctrine that was not only false but was incompatible with and destructive to the true message of Christ which Paul had taught them. Paul’s response, which we call “Galatians,” is the letter Paul wrote to reprimand the Galatian converts and refute the Judaizers, hopefully to cause their rejection by the Galatians. Paul hoped to return the Galatian believers to the true Christian doctrine of salvation by grace through faith, and not works of the flesh.
Why was this doctrinal matter so important to Paul? I can think of a few reasons; you might think of more:
1. This sort of heretical false doctrine would very possibly stop the Great Commission in its tracks;
2. Whether the Galatians had truly been converted to saving faith had at least been brought into question;
3. The Galatians, if allowed to continue on the path of heresy, would teach countless others to believe in false doctrines, doubtless mislabeling the resulting religion “Christianity” (as do Mormons), causing the destruction of many;
4. Rather than growing the Church by spreading the Gospel of Christ, all Paul would have accomplished is the personal success of the parasitical Judaizers, whose exploits would place them in great esteem with Jewish authorities, who would greatly appreciate their “re-Judaizing” these Christians;
5. Rather than advancing a “New Covenant” Paul would, in retrospect, only have succeeded in dressing up the Old Covenant of laws and Judaic rites, establishing himself in history as one more in a long line of mere rabbis teaching ethical and moral lessons. There would, in other words, be no knowledge of a Savior in whom resides all of the saving power of Christ the True Messiah;
6. Having gained a foothold of false doctrine and denial of the power and efficacy of Christ’s work of atonement and justification, the Judaizers’ and their disciples would doubtless follow up with more false doctrines, until all vestiges of apostolic Christianity were completely erased; and
7. Paul would have utterly failed in carrying out the commission and mandate which he received from Christ Himself.
Today, many so-called evangelical and protestant denominations, along with Roman Catholics and others, accept various aspects of this same false doctrine. They may not link it exactly to circumcision, or to the observance of Old Covenant Jewish temple rites, but they nevertheless buy into the idea that works of the law are necessary to either achieve or hold onto salvation. Old Testament Law is invoked as being the basis of works believers must obey if they are going to “keep” or secure their salvation.
This is very dangerous and destructive thinking and believing. It casts doubt upon who Christ is, what he did, and what God has done to save His people. It calls into doubt the sufficiency of the work of Christ, and whether His election and salvation can be frustrated by what his elect do or don’t do. It questions where and in whom the power of salvation is vested. It attacks the believer’s security in Christ and in the grace of God. It raises the issue of whether the believer still lives under the Law, or under grace – and whether we are under the Law or in the Spirit. It confuses matters of bondage and freedom. It confuses the Scriptures, and it places man’s own reckoning ahead of the word of God.
Paul rejected the false doctrine of salvation by works of the Law; the Reformers of the 16th century soundly rejected it; and the great Christian leaders and theologians of the post-reformation, protestant age also rejected it. Those who are Christ’s are transformed and set free from the curse of the Law; they are changed, and they learn to live in the freedom of the Spirit of Christ. Against the things of the Spirit, there is no law.
We are saved by grace, not by works. Paul holds this forth forcefully in his letter to the Galatians and elsewhere throughout his New Testament writings.
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