Galatians Intro - Acts 15:1-2 & Phil 3:2-6

Good morning. So today, what Roger and I have decided all some months ago that we would study the book of Galatians. And so we're going to share the teaching on this. I'll do three or four weeks and he'll do three or four weeks. And so we'll get through it. And so today we're going to talk about introduction and try to set up why the book of Galatians is so important to us as believers, especially in contemporary Christianity. And what was the issue? And who were the players? And so with your handouts, you've got a sheet that we're going to try to answer four questions today. Where was the Galatian church? And I'll show you if I learn how to use this thing.

Who were they and who were the Judaizers? And the Judaizers are a very interesting group of people because, believe it or not, we have legions of those people in the church today. And the last question would be, and what did they teach? So, obviously, you know, everyone would agree that the letter was written by the Apostle Paul and probably between 49 and 52 AD.

We read this morning Acts chapter 15, and this creates the issue that certain men, and we're going to talk about who those certain men are, came down from Judea and talked to brethren and said, except you be circumcised after the manner of Moses, you cannot be saved. So, interesting that that is the issue. Unless you, you cannot. So first, then, let's talk about see if I can do this right back and forth. Not working at the pedal, right? Right, pedal.

Let's talk about let's talk about the location of the Galatian churches. So about 25 BC, during the first century, The term Galatia was used in two different senses. The first sense, it was used geographically, and today we would call it Turkey. All of this land is today Turkey, most of it. And it was also used politically, and politically by the Romans. They used it to designate the province of Galatia and its various cities. The official use of the Roman Empire and the government included the cities, you can see in the south there, that are, I don't know if I can see them from here, they're Iconium, Lystra, Derby, and those kinds of towns. And then also some in the north, which are Ankara, Presonus, and Gangra.

The popular view excluded the area in the cities to the south, which we'll see in a minute. It's kind of kind of weird because in southern Galatia was where everything was happening in Galatia. It's where the cities flourished. That's where the flow of commerce across.

Southern Asia Minor happened, and so it was a natural result of the geographical possession and position in history. And in ancient times, the rulers of Greece and other places, as they came and went, would set up towns and colonies along this main road that went from the west to the east. And so when the Greek kings ruled in Syria and Asia Minor, they set up towns between Syria and Ephesus. And he had to pass through southern Galatia to get there. And then the Greeks came in and they did the same thing. And then the Romans came in after them, and they established even more cities.

And the idea was, I don't know if you remember, some of you aren't as old as I am, But back in the 50s, one of the first things I remember about our Congress appropriating money was to appropriate money for the for the freeway system in the United States. You know what the reason they did that?

This was Eisenhower's idea. He said that if we ever go to war, we need to have really good roads. We can get the guys around in the army. Well, that's not a new idea. It's the same idea here. It creates a place where the Roman or the Greek army could get someplace in a hurry. They wouldn't be encumbered. And along those roads would come the cities of commerce and culture and that kind of thing.

So you see it in Denver. You notice the construction along the I-25 corridor, especially since the light rail has gone in. It's all there. You get a mile off of I-25 and nothing's really happening. But it's all happening up and down the light rail stations because that's where the flow of traffic is.

So it's the same idea that the Romans and the Greeks did. And Paul was in the province of Galatia on all three of his missionary journeys. And he was in these cities for specifically that reason. But the letter itself was written primarily to the Christians who lived in the southern cities. OK. Who were where were they located?

Who were the Galatians? If you when I went to high school, one of the classes we had to take mandatory was Latin. I don't think they do that anymore. But when you take Latin, one of the things you study is Caesar's Gallic Wars, right? Well, according to those books, the Gallic Wars all took place in places like Britain and France.

But these Gauls were a really interesting group of people. In 278 and 277 BC, about that time, they were all living in pretty much in southern Europe and they moved to Asia Minor. And after 232 B.C., this area became known as Galatia because of these people called the Gauls. Then in 25 to 35 B.C., they had a king, Amentus, and he must have been a guy who wasn't willing to stand up to the Romans because he was the last independent ruler and he handed the kingdom over to Rome.

He just gave it to them. because he probably didn't want to fight them. And so that's when it became a Roman province. So Paul went about establishing churches around the capitals of all of these Roman provinces. And then what he would do was he would establish them in the main cities and then he would establish that smaller churches would be established and they would be linked to the main churches along this road. So he was following Actually the same pattern that if you think about that doesn't it makes a lot of sense for him to do that And so there's a chain of churches along the main roads and then smaller churches, but you understand and this time churches were Primarily in people's homes. There wasn't the first Baptist Church of Caesarea, you know, there wasn't a place that more than a few people gathered so maybe a big church would have been 35 people so But this whole principle that he used along the roads was really important because it meant that the spread of Christianity, just like the spread of the Greek and the Roman culture, could move back and forth because that's where the commerce went.

So on his first missionary journey, upon arriving in Antioch in Syria, see if I can go back here, notice that there's two Antiochs. There's one in Syria. up by Pisidian, and then the other one over here, Antioch, where the first church was made. It was where he went to start his whole complete ministry. Well, Paul took his first missionary journey to Antioch in Pisidia, and he got sick there.

And so he couldn't go very far because he was sick all the time. So it made it necessary that he abandoned the projected tour of evangelism through all of the Greek cities in Asia Minor. And in Antioch, he preached the gospel, and there he was pursued by the Jews. Everywhere he went, the Jews were after him. But he couldn't continue westward to Ephesus because of his illness.

So the only thing he could really do was sort of head back home. And as he did, he was establishing churches on the way. He came back through Tarsus where he lived. And after establishing the churches, instead of going back to Assyria and Antioch, he went home through Tarsus. He didn't go home through Tarsus. He retraced his steps to establish the young converts in faith that he had started in the churches.

And he'd probably, by this time, he'd gotten better. Among these people, very interesting people, the Gauls were there, there were Jews there, and there were Gentiles, primarily Romans and Greeks. And the Gentiles, the Gaul group, were heathens probably is the best way to describe them. And they had a religion, and it was pretty much sensuous, and it could hardly satisfy the pseudo-consciousness of a Roman citizen or a Greek because it was just too sensuous for them. So the Romans and the Greeks began to influence the West and brought their civilization to the Galatians.

And what happened was that those that liked the Greek philosophy and liked the Roman morality They created a more noble human idea of duty and what government should be. They were much more organized, much more disciplined. And thus, education became really important to them because the Greeks stressed education. And they were stirred up by what they were beginning to learn.

But into this conflict of Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Galatians enters the Jewish synagogue. Because of dispersion, the Jews had gone that way. The Gentiles began to show up there too, as we've talked about. However, while the Gentile gave adherence to the exalted exalted ethics of the synagogue, yet they would have nothing to do with the sacrificial system that centered in the Jerusalem Temple. The Gentiles liked the Jewish religion, but they didn't understand the sacrifice of it. So you think about that. Here comes Paul in this mix. And how would they react to the way he was teaching, the message that he had to give? They gave him a friendly welcome at first.

In the synagogue of Antioch in Acts 4.13, the Jews heard how the law was ineffectual, and especially for salvation.

The Gentiles, though, hearing the same message, what they heard was that salvation by the cross was given to the entire world by faith. not just a Jewish thing. So from the beginning, both the Jews and the Gentiles, they recognized a couple of things. One was that Paul was the foremost champion of the Gentiles. They knew that. And he was an adversary of Judaism, which later had been set aside by God at the cross. And that's what Paul was teaching, that Judaism had been set aside.

I can't imagine Paul coming into a synagogue with Orthodox Jews and saying, well, all and everything that you teach, God has set you aside and we have a new program now. It's called Christianity and it's based on grace, not law. And the Jews would rebel against that. They would say, wait a minute, how about the priesthood? And how about all that's been put together that God gave us? And Paul would say, That's all apostate now. Made it a little tough.

So as it goes out in his first missionary journey, the churches primarily that he visited were synagogues, and it was primarily Jewish in content, and the teachers were all Jewish, and they all taught Old Testament background. So while interpreting the Old Testament in a new light, what did Paul He didn't really get them to fix their focus on a different law. But what happened was, if you remember when Verne was teaching in Acts 7, 8, and 9, there was a paradigm shift there. And the paradigm shift happened when Stephen, who had just finished giving it to the Sanhedrin, when they were about to stone him to death, he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father.

What's different about that? That was the first man in all of history on the earth that looked into heaven. He's the first one. Different. Then in chapter 9, when Paul is saved, what does he see? He sees the glorious Lord Jesus in heaven talking to him. He's the second man that gets to look into heaven. And what's different about that is that it influenced everything that Paul did.

He began to understand and learn about the heavenly character of the body of Christ, that it was no longer an earthly message. The Jews, on the other hand, were given information like the sermon in Acts 2, that what they were really looking for was that the Messiah was going to come back right away.

And when Stephen finished his, I think today we'd call it, what would the word we use, a tirade against the Sanhedrin, what did they say to him? We will not have this man to rule over us. So that created a delay in the coming of the Messiah and the heaviness of the church came in because the Jews wouldn't accept their Messiah. They wouldn't do it.

So they had their hopes, the Jews did, on a kingdom with a Messiah and a nation that ruled and really controlled things in the world. But now, the newly formed churches were becoming predominantly Gentile. And the Gentiles recognized the Lord Jesus not only as Savior or Messiah of Israel, but also, like I said, as a world Savior. And so the Galatian churches were not, for the most part, the fickle-minded Gauls. of northern Galatia, but the Greeks and Jews of flourishing cities situated on the highway of commerce and government, here comes this Savior message from the Apostle Paul.

Now, oops, oh no, I'm back in the pantry. How'd I get there? How did I get back there? I'll get it from here if this thing. OK. So we talked. So we've talked about where were the Galatian churches located and who were the Galatians. We want to talk about who now are the Judaizers. And this is predominantly what I'm going to talk most about because these guys are with us today. Where did this idea and what does a Judaizer do?

If you want to trace it back biblically, you know how far back you got to go? You got to go all the way to Cain. You notice in the garden, or not in the garden, but after Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel, Adam taught Cain and Abel kind of what they were supposed to do as sinners before a holy God. And what they were supposed to do was to have a blood sacrifice, right?

Because how else would they learn it? As best I can tell, they're the first four people on the earth. So the only place that they would learn it would be from their dad. And he would give them the background of the teaching and why. And so a blood sacrifice was part of what he taught them. Now what does a blood sacrifice symbolize? It symbolizes a death for sin. and a coming Redeemer, who would pay for the penalty of the sins of the world?

Here's the problem. You have two men doing the same thing, well, pretty much the same thing, except Abel wouldn't, or Cain wouldn't offer a blood sacrifice. Why wouldn't he do it? Both of them are willing to go through the ritual, but one of those men had faith and the other one didn't.

And that's where we can take a look at how Judaizers exist today. The offering of such a blood sacrifice in itself would not result in the salvation of the offerer, right? Just because you went through the process, that doesn't mean you get saved. Because people in the Old Testament are saved the same way as we're saved.

The offering was to be only an outward manifestation of an inward fact, namely that the act of the offeror is his faith that what God asked him to do has some significant relevance to a coming virgin-born king who would crush the head of Satan. Faith.

Did Cain have faith? He didn't have faith in what the sacrifice was all about. He was willing to go through the program and go through the sacrifice, but he wanted to not do it God's way, he wanted to do it his own way. Cain was a really religious man. He followed all the dictates, except he got the substance of the sacrifice wrong. So without the act of faith, the offering of the sacrifice would just be a form or a mockery in the eyes of God. Cain, who was a very religious man, reaction to the instruction was that he rejected the teachings of salvation through faith in a substitutionary sacrifice, blood sacrifice, and substituted it his own personal merit and good.

He said, I'll do the thing, but I'm going to do it my way, God, so that you can look at me and say you did good and you merited my favor. Abel followed the instructions of his father precisely, and he had faith that really jumped across the centuries to the cross. And he is declared righteous because of it. So, since that time, these two men, our two diametrically opposed tendencies are seen in the human race. We see them in the history of Israel. In Israel, there's always been a remnant.

They were a smaller group which offered the symbolic sacrifices and an indication of the real living faith in the future of a substitutionary sacrifice. But there always was the larger group, which, while they went through the ritual of the Levitical sacrifices, yet they exercised no heart faith to appropriate a salvation offered in grace. on the basis of justification satisfied by the atonement, but they depended upon personal merit and good works for salvation. So, who were the members of these two groups? These two groups have existed in Israel all the way from the first century. An illustration of who were members of these two groups The group of faith were occupied by Zacharias, Elizabeth, Mary, the mother of Jesus, Joseph, the disciples, except for Judas. The illustration of the other group is the Pharisees, the priests, the Sadducees, the Herodians, who while observing the sacrificial ritual of the temple, yet they ignored its significance and they depended on salvation for salvation upon personal merit and their own good works by practicing the ritual.

Now from the latter group came the persons who would oppose the church. There were two attacks against the New Testament truth and both of them inspired by our friend Satan. He was the adversary, and he wanted to destroy the church before it got going. The first group that he had were those who attempted to substitute good works for faith in Jesus Christ. That heresy was met by the Book of Galatians, and that's why we're going to study it.

The second group was an attempt to invalidate the atoning work of the cross by urging the Jewish wing of the church to return to the Levitical system of rituals in the temple. This was counteracted by the book of Hebrews. The first group aimed at the Gentile wing of the church, obviously the second group at the Jewish wing. The Judaizers were members of this unsaved group in Israel seeking to maintain a corrupt form of Judaism, Jewish national religion, as against the Christian church which had been formed at Pentecost.

So that's basically who these people were. They were religious people. They were people that went through the traditions and the rituals of the temple, thinking in their mind that if I do these ritual things, then God will say, well, gee, Mike, you've done a great job, so I'll offer you salvation. The other group, which are the people of faith trusted in what the ritual was trying to tell them, that there was coming a Savior. And if they believed, if they performed the ritual of a blood sacrifice and believed why it was there, it was a symbol of what was coming, that Christ would be there and they lived by faith. Those are the two differences.

Now, do you think we have Judaizers amongst our church today? Sure we do. If you pay any attention at all to how the salvation message is presented, I would challenge you to, and this is not a fun exercise, but turn on your television tonight and go to the Christian channels and click through them, give each one about four minutes. You will find that the salvation message is presented by these people that maybe faith in Christ is presented, but a lot of times it's not.

You will hear things like, you need to pray that God will forgive you your sins. Why do I need to do that? Didn't he already take care of that? You must receive Jesus into your heart. You must make a commitment to Christ. You must get up and come down forward. Or here's the really big one. You have to make Jesus the Lord of your life, right?

What happens if you do any of those things? You have done what a Judaizer would do. You have contributed your own efforts to your own salvation, thinking that what you have done, God is going to look favorably upon you. And I'm going to join a denomination that has all of these really cool stuff and things that they do, and God is going to be real happy with me because I'm doing them.

Not going to happen. When, on the other hand, What saves us? Simple faith in the gift that God gave us, which is the sacrifice of His Son on the cross to pay the penalty for my guilt and my sin. My faith. I have to trust Him. I'm trusting Him. I'm not trusting me to do anything.

The problem with these people is that they're zealots. And they think they're right. And one of the things about being under a law system is that it causes you to be zealous. And Paul talks about how zealous he was at one point to get rid of these Christians because they just weren't doing it right. So it's a matter of being, not doing. Hopefully we won't go back to the pantry. Fourth question. What did they teach? I want to start with that and talk about Philippians 2 through 6.

Now here's how Paul thought of these Judaizers. He said, beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the false circumcision, for we are the true circumcision who worship in the spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus, and we don't have any confidence in the flesh. Although I myself have confidence even in the flesh, boy, if anybody could say that, Paul the Apostle could, if anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more. I was circumcised on the eighth day of the nation of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as to the law of Pharisee. as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, and as to the righteousness which is in the law, I am found blameless."

That's Paul. So what's he doing here? He's warning the Philippians against these Judaizers. He calls them dogs. which in the Greek means that they are a word of reproach among both Greeks and Jews. He calls them evil workers. This term implies not merely that they're doers of evil, but they actually work against the gospel.

He calls them, and in the King James, in the New King James, it's a great word, he calls them in the concision, And I don't know when you read that, if you've read, you think, well, concision and circumcision, they're similar terms. Well, what do you mean? It means that the Greek word only occurs here in the New Testament. It's the only place you see concision.

It's an associated verb used in the Greek translation of an Old Testament speaking of a mutilation forbidden by the Mosaic law, such as the pagans practiced. and were in the habit of inflicting upon themselves and their religious rights. We have that in contemporary Christianity today. There's denominations that think that somehow mutilation or self-inflicted pain or punishment somehow makes you acceptable. It's a religious right that makes you more acceptable.

But Paul uses the word concision, and he characterizes those who were not of the true circumcision as mutilating the gospel. The heathens mutilated their own bodies. These Judaizers mutilated the message, the message of the gospel, by substituting the works of the flesh for grace. and thus they mutilated their own lives and those of their converts. So, then Paul begins in the letter to, or in this form, to contrast true believers with the Judaizers by saying the former worship God in the spirit, whereas the latter have confidence in the flesh. Really interesting.

We've spent a lot of time, I think, in this church discussing and trying to get a handle upon what does it mean to worship God in the Spirit? And opposed to that, what does it mean to have no confidence in the flesh at all? It means that you and I as believers can worship God in the Spirit, and that's how we're supposed to do it because we're now spiritual beings. and were not to have any confidence in anything that we might do under the heading of good works would be acceptable to God. He is not interested in that.

The best Greek texts were say, worship by the Spirit of God. We worship by the Spirit of God. The implication is clear. The Judaizers did not worship in the energy of the Holy Spirit. They didn't do that. which means that they were probably not saved. The words have confidence. If you have confidence in the flesh, the Greek word says you've come to a settled persuasion about having confidence in the flesh. That's where you are. That's what you think is important.

So these Judaizers had come to a settled belief that the merit of human attainment God would accept. They depended upon their good works for acceptance with God, which teaching goes back to who? All the way back to Cain. You know, some things never change. Then Paul enumerates some of the human attainments and merits which the Judaizers were depending upon for acceptance with God.

The first was circumcision. What did circumcision do? What was it designed to do? Why did God institute it? It was to mark out that the person was a member of the chosen people. They were a member of Israel. They were a separate people of that nation from all other peoples on the earth. And they were chosen through which God would reveal himself and his salvation to the human race. That's what true circumcision really meant.

If you got circumcised, did it save you? Answer, no, it didn't. If you got baptized, did that save you? No. The rite has nothing to do with personal salvation of the Jew and of acceptance before God. It had nothing to do with that. But the Judaizers made it a prerequisite of salvation.

Jim read, certain men came down from Judea to Antioch and they taught the brethren And they said, except you be circumcised after manner of Moses, you cannot be saved. That's what they taught. Circumcision was an obedience to a command of God. Thus, it is included in what we call, what they called good works. All of which means that the Judaizers taught that salvation was only by good works. It's the only way you get it. The second thing that they taught, That acceptance with God was brought about by virtue of the fact that one was a member of the nation of Israel, as of the stock of Israel.

I've had Baptists tell me, unless you're not a Baptist, you're not going to heaven. I've had Charismatics tell me that if I'm not baptized in the Spirit, I'm not going to heaven. all works. So John the Baptist met this teaching upon the Pharisees and Sadducees when he said to them, and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father. For I say to you that of those stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. And even the Lord Jesus said in teaching The Jews claimed to have Abraham as their father, which in fact would provide acceptance with God. He said to them, look, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, if you are Abraham's children, then do the deeds of Abraham. What was he telling them? Abraham was a man of faith. I've got to tell you a story here. And by the way, I have a lot more information than I'm going to be able to finish today, so I'll stop at some point and we'll pick it up next week.

I've lived in the same house for 20 years and across the street a few years ago, thanks to Courtney and Roger here, they sold their property on East Bellevue Avenue, which was a Bible church to a group of Hasidic Jews. and they turned it into a synagogue. So they started infiltrating into our neighborhood, these guys with the black suits and the fedoras and all that. Well, the number two rabbi moved in across the street from me, Zev Pomerantz, and Zev turned out to be just a terrific guy. So Zev and I, Zev wanted me to do a transaction with the synagogue one day where in Passover they have to sell all of the leaven. And they have to show God that, look, we don't own any leaven. We sold it to the Gentiles, right? He wanted me to buy all the leaven from the synagogue.

And I said, how much is that going to cost me? He said, not very much. He just put a deposit down. And he said, but understand, this is an arm length transaction. We don't have to buy it back. I said, well, if I have to pay for it, what's it going to cost? He said, oh, a couple hundred thousand dollars. I said, I'm out.

So he finds somebody else to do it. He finds somebody else to do it. And he comes to me the last day before Passover and he says, look, I've got one family that needs help. Will you do for them? I said, sure. So we go through the ritual with the with the shaking of the hands and the holding up and all of this.

And ten days later, he comes over and he wants to give me the 20 bucks back and tear up the contract. He said, well, you know, I had given him a deposit and he gave it back to me. And I said, well, I can't take that back. You know, it was your 20 bucks to start with.

So we talked and the next week I had lunch with him and I thought, well, this is a good opportunity to sort of push him a little bit. So I said, you know what? I said, I've been studying Abraham. And what I found out interesting about Abraham is that he was declared righteous by God. He said, Yeah, I know. I said, 15 years before he was circumcised. That was the end of the conversation. He never said another word. Because what did I just do? I said, your ritual isn't any good. The only thing that matters with God is his faith, your faith, my faith. Circumcision doesn't mean anything.

But his group bet their lives on a work, on the fact of circumcision. And Abraham was their father. The problem is that my friend Zev isn't saved because he's not a man of faith. All right, third, they taught a religious position in the religious system of Israel, gave one acceptance with God.

That's like me saying, well, I'm an elder around here. I'm in. You're not. You know, or according to say, I'm a deacon. I'm in. You're not. You've got to better find a position. Yeah. Paul said that he could also have claimed that as a Pharisee, He was accepted with God. He went through this long list. Well, look, here's who I am.

And I count all of that as nothing. It doesn't mean anything. The last thing that they would sell is that the faithful observance of the law would provide for them a righteousness accepted with God. Well, Paul speaks of this in Romans 9, 30 through 10, 3, where Israel is said to have failed in obtaining a righteousness acceptable with God because the nation ignored the righteousness of God. Christ gave Christ given an answer to faith and went about to establish their own righteousness by doing good works.

Here's the problem with that. Let's say that you could do that. Let's say that you could obey the Mosaic Law, all 600 plus rules, and at the end of the day you could stand before God and say, I've done it all. What would you have accomplished? You would have accomplished your own personal righteousness. You know what God says to that? Unless you have my righteousness, you don't have anything.

So what does he do? He does a really neat thing. He crucifies, buries, and resurrects us in Christ. unites us to Him, resurrected, and whose righteousness do we have? His. We have His. And it's not a matter of he's over there and he said, OK, I'm going to count you righteous. He said, no, I'm bringing you and putting you in Christ. And because you're positioned in Christ, you have my very own righteousness. That's terrific. And that's grace. Nothing to earn. It's a free gift. So, one last thing and then I'll stop until next week.

So the typical rank and file of Israel, of course, with the exception of the remnant, were talked about way back in Isaiah 64. Isaiah says, For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our religious deeds are like filthy garments, and all of us wither like a leaf. and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. Isaiah 64. So this speaks of the same tendency of Israel all down through the ages when he predicts that the second arrival of the Messiah, Israel will finally acknowledge, they will finally acknowledge that all of their righteousness is like filthy rags in God's sight. Isaiah knew that.

So I'm going to close here, and we'll pick up next week. I've got another little bit to go, and then we'll get into the first few verses. So I'm going to pray, and then Courtney can come up. Dear Father, how we thank you for your word. We do thank you for the book of Galatians. We recognize that legalism is one of the most if not the most dangerous thing we deal with all the time, that we might grow and learn to live under your grace only as we learn more and more about the Lord Jesus Christ and his grace. And we pray in your son's precious name. Amen.