Salutation Part 1

All right. So we've got PowerPoint up. You guys can see the slides there. We're in. Now, is this this is lesson three, right? Of our Galatian study, Bob, Bob gave us our overview for our background and overview last couple of weeks. And. And it's something that Bob mentioned at the end of last week's lesson. was just the suggestion that we read through the Book of Galatians during the week as we go through this book, as we study it.

And I think that's a really good suggestion, so I want to just second that. I encourage that if you can, take the time, even just once or twice through the week, just sit down and read through the whole letter. I think if you do that continuously as we study this, you're going to really get a handle on the overall message and context of the of the letter.

I emailed out a printable copy of the entire Book of Galatians that I think can be printed out for you guys there, so you should be able to print some copies. It's not something that you have to have for the class. It's just something that I always, when I'm studying through a book, I always make myself a copy like that on paper. And you can get, a lot of these New Testament books, you can get in, you know, five or six pages, single-sided.

And I use that to just mark up and read through. And I find it really helpful in studying. So, anyway. I send it in the NASB. I mean, if you prefer a different translation, you can make this quite easily. I'm sure it violates copyrights, but oh well. So, Bob gave us some important keys in the last couple of lessons.

Last week he gave us an outline, a very simple outline to the Book of Galatians, and I just want to review that quickly. If we kind of subtract the introduction and the conclusion, we have just a very simple threefold We've got Paul's defense of his apostleship, basically chapters 1 and 2. Paul's defense of justification by faith alone, chapters 2 and 3. And then Paul's call to liberty in chapters 5 and 6.

So keep that in mind as we study through our course this morning. We're in the introduction. I'm not quite into that yet, but I just want to highlight this morning that Galatians is a very practical book for us as Christians. It's not abstract theology. It's very important, very practical to us in our Christian life.

And as Bob pointed out, I think, in his first lesson, he talked about the occasion of the epistle. In other words, the reason that Paul wrote this letter. And the reason was the error that that was being propagated in the churches of Galatia by the Judaizers, we sometimes call them. And that was the era that the Law of Moses is to be the rule of life for Christians. And, you know, the Galatians really actually gravitated towards this teaching.

In Galatians 4, verse 9, Paul says, you desire to be enslaved. I'm not going to put all the scriptures up on the screen, by the way, this morning. I just thought I'd get to the first scripture here and I realized that. So, if you have Galatians open in front of you, you know, if I mention some, you know, some text in Galatians, just, you know, look at it in your own Bible. just helps familiarize you with the text.

So in Galatians 4.9 Paul says you desire to be enslaved and in 4.21 he says you want to be under the law. You know, it's just an interesting thing because we find it's really no different in the church today.

The flesh always gravitates towards law, being under a legal system, because the flesh always wants to earn merit. We want to deserve something or earn some credit. And, you know, we may be born again, right? But our flesh is still the same flesh. We still have the same sin nature. And so we gravitate towards systems of law just like the Galatians did. These ideas still are quite popular in the church today.

Paul writes this letter to correct that merit mentality amongst the believers in Galatia. This letter is specifically written to correct born-again believers who have slipped into the error of thinking that the Christian life is lived by works of law. So that was Bob's, sort of summarizing the reason that Paul wrote this letter. And the way that Paul goes about correcting them is, I think, really important to understand. Paul applies a principle to correct the Galatians. And this is what I think the principle is.

Maybe we can say it different ways, but we can say that God's righteousness can only come by grace through faith. And logically, we can make some inferences out of a principle like that. If righteousness is by grace, then logically works can never produce it. If God's righteousness is only by grace through faith, then works can never produce God's righteousness.

So what we might call this is the principle of provided righteousness versus produced righteousness. And it's very important that we understand this as a principle. Okay, so what is a principle? Can someone give me a description or definition of a principle, basic terms? Did someone say something? I didn't catch it. Well, I know it, but I can't remember it. No, it's okay.

Is it like something that's true all the time? Yeah, that's a good, good basic definition. Sure. Yeah, I mean we can, I think the one Mike always uses is gravity. Go ahead. I suppose the way things work consistently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like gravity, right? It works. Yeah, I'll demonstrate. It works here in Canada, right? It works here in Canada, it even does it in Colorado, right?

I'm not floating up off my chair here. It's a principle that applies, so it's a single principle, right? One truth, we could say, but it has broader application, multiple applications, right? So you can take that principle and you can apply it across the board, we could say.

And so, this principle of provided righteousness is really behind everything that Paul writes in this letter. Because this is a principle, it must apply both to the believer's standing, as well as to our condition or walk. So, on the basis of this principle, we have a righteous standing that's provided by grace through faith, and we also have a righteous walk. that's provided by grace through faith. And the Lord has provided for both of those. And our responsibility is to believe him about it. Because that's what's consistent with this principle, right? It's by grace through faith.

So we have to exercise faith in what the Lord has provided for both our righteous standing and for a righteous walk. And so what Paul is able to do in this letter is he's able to demonstrate that there is a logical inconsistency. in saying that the believer is justified by grace through faith only to live or walk by law.

So Galatians 3.3 is where he really just summarizes that inconsistency through a rhetorical question. Are you so foolish, having begun by the spirit, are you now being perfected or made mature by the flesh? So it's that we understand it contextually. the Galatians had begun by the Spirit, which is that they put faith in the gospel and the Holy Spirit regenerated them. And if that principle was on the basis of provided righteousness by grace through faith, are you now going to turn around and walk or be matured by works of the flesh?

And so Paul is showing not consistent. So he's using this principle to correct this error that the Judaizers were teaching. And the message of the Judaizers, sometimes we call them the legalists, was actually just like you hear in most churches today. And that's the message that, yes, you're born again by grace through faith, but the Christian life is hard work. Have you ever heard that? You know, in some way, shape or form, they always bring the necessity of your good works back into the equation. And that can only lead to bondage to sin. That's all that law can produce, is bondage, right?

You know, Miles, we often talk about the principles of God, too. So, I mean, in a sense, that's a fundamental property of His righteousness, right? So, I mean, the principles of God cut through from Genesis to Revelation, right? But here, this principle is being sustained in terms of the walk. So, I just wondered about that term used in general of God's righteousness, and it's a fundamental, you know, pillar of truth. Yeah. Yeah, you know, this is a principle that stands from Genesis to Revelation, right?

Everyone who's ever been justified has been justified by grace through faith. The basis of that righteousness has always been the crosswork of Christ, even before it had been historically accomplished, right? But the basis was always the same. And the same for a walk, right?

So now we do know that prior to the church, you know, the law was the rule of life for the Old Testament, for the Jewish believer in the Old Testament, but even there, they found that they couldn't keep the law. They didn't have the heart within them to keep the law. So they've always needed an external righteousness, and that's what the new covenant promises to the nation of Israel, is that God will give them a new heart, such that they will be able to actually obey the law. But the heart issue, the righteousness still has to be provided. For us, the righteous life, the righteous walk is provided apart from the law, separate from the law, right? So, all right, so let's Let's talk about a bad situation, okay? This was, we could say, a bad situation in Galatia.

And you know, Paul is concerned about it, right? And to make it worse, Paul wasn't able to go to Galatia to deal with this problem in person, though he wanted to. Galatians 4, 19 through 20, he says, my children with whom I am in labor, Sorry with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you But I could wish to be present with you now and to change my tone for I am perplexed about you So Paul was concerned he wanted to be with them in person But he wasn't able to so the glacier had this this terrible problem with the Judaizers and then turning The believers against Paul and a message of grace Paul wanted to go there in person. He couldn't get there and I just want to draw our point our attention to the fact that God God is providentially working in all of this.

We can ask ourselves these questions. What if the Judaizers had not been teaching this error in Galatia? What if the Galatians had not been drawn into it? And what if Paul had not been kept from coming in person to Galatia? What would we not have today? We wouldn't have the book of Galatians, right? This wouldn't be a part of our Bible because there wouldn't have been a problem to address and there wouldn't have been a reason for Paul to write.

And so God used this bad, I put bad in quotes on my notes, he used this bad situation in order to bring about this particular epistle which has powerfully defended grace for nearly 2,000 years now, right? So what we see here is that God is perfectly efficient in what He does.

He never wastes anything. Even these bad things were used by God to accomplish His good purpose. And when I think of situations like this, I think of Galatians 50 verse 20, Joseph's words to his brothers, right? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. And you know, the Lord is doing the same thing in each of our circumstances. You know, things that look bad to us are all a part of what he's doing.

So don't be discouraged. God is working out situations and circumstances in just the way that he pleases to be Accomplishing his his goodwill for some reason, right? I find myself on zoom in Canada when Really? We'd like to be in person, right? But the Lord is sovereign over those circumstances and it's the same in your lives as well. The Lord is is Working these things together so Yes, please, but then we wouldn't see the Canadian basement Yeah Yeah, that's right. So yeah. Yeah, I hear you. All right.

So let's Let's get into the salutation here. We're dealing with verses 1 through 5, and we're not going to get through them today. We've got two weeks to go through these verses, so we're going to get to go through them with a fine-toothed comb here and learn some detailed things. So, Paul uses the standard Greek salutation, which can be very brief.

In its briefest form, you have the name of the sender, to, the name of the receiver, and greetings. What's important to understand about that is that though that was the bare minimum, when a writer of a letter included additional information within this formula, the additional information was significant. It bore significance. So that gives us a clue that we should pay careful attention to the additional information or additional content in the greeting.

Because what that does is it really gives us a sort of a summary of what Paul intended to communicate throughout this letter. It's kind of like the subject line in an email where we kind of give a, we're supposed to give a bit of a heads up as to what the email is about. I love it when someone forwards an email and it's got the same subject line from an email, you know, months ago and you're thinking, well, are we still talking about the same subject? Anyway, Paul is giving a heads up about what he's about to write in this letter.

And what we'll actually see is that by the time we work through this salutation, Paul has actually outlined his whole letter in simple form. At first glance, it doesn't really seem like that. When we really dig into it, we see that there's a basic outline embedded there. And it matches, of course, Bob's outline that he gave us last time. So let's read the salutation, and then we'll They can do it.

Galatians 1, 1-5. Paul, an apostle, not sent from men, nor through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ, and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brethren who are with me, to the churches of Galatia, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, so that he might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forevermore.

Amen. So who's the author? Paul, obviously, right? That's the format. The name of the sender comes first. But is he just Paul? What does he say? In the Greek, it's halos apostolos, okay? And the structure, this doesn't come across in a lot of English translations, but the Greek structure actually puts the word Paul and the word apostle on the same level. It's not really saying Paul, who is an apostle, it's kind of putting Paul and apostle side by side.

So, This is both Paul and this is an apostle. And these are Paul's, we could say, his credentials, or his two different titles, perhaps. Both of these things, both being Paul and being an apostle of Jesus Christ, qualify Paul to write this letter. And we could say that as Paul, He was personally prepared to be a vessel to carry this message, and as an apostle, he was divinely appointed to carry this message.

So, we're going to ask two questions here in today's lesson. First question, what is it about being Paul that qualified Paul to write this letter? And then our next question is, what is it about being an apostle that qualified Paul to write this letter? So, first question. What is it about being Paul that qualified Paul?

And what it is, is that the Holy Spirit was providentially working or had providentially worked in Paul's life to prepare him to be a vessel. And this is similar to the way he providentially prepared the circumstances for this letter to be written at all. But this goes all the way back, really, to Paul's birth. So what we see is that all throughout Paul's life, the Holy Spirit was preparing him as a vessel.

And Paul's life can be divided, we could say, into two parts. I call them pre- and post-Damascus road. And as believers, we all have that same sort of division, right? Pre- and post-justification. So, you know, all sorts of things go into the preparation that the Lord is carrying out in a person's life. Things like the family you were born into, the culture that you were raised in, all your experiences are used by the Lord to prepare you for a very specific role. So what is it about Paul's background under the law, pre-Damascus road, that prepared him to be a messenger of grace? So the first thing is his birth.

Galatians 1.15, you see I put the references in brackets there, most of these I don't put on the screen.

So Galatians 1.15, I'm going to point to some of those. Paul says, when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb. Now, that's not Calvinistic predestination.

Paul is talking about God's work of setting him apart as his apostle to the Gentiles, of the gospel of grace apart from law. From his birth, the Lord was preparing Paul through placing him into a specific set of circumstances to be the messenger who would bring this message. And what was Paul from birth? A Jew or a Gentile? A Jew, right? Paul was a Jew by birth. So, Paul was born as a Jew under law, and he was raised and trained very strictly in the law, and this is all important to the message that Paul must now bring.

For instance, Paul knew very personally that circumcision was of no spiritual benefit. He knew that circumcision doesn't get a person any closer to God. He says in Romans 2 verse 25, For indeed, circumcision is of value if you practice the law, but if you are a transgressor of the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. In other words, circumcision is only a benefit if you can keep the entire law. And of course, any honest person knows they can't, right?

And so Paul, through his first-hand experience being a circumcised Jew, could tell these Gentiles that circumcision would benefit them nothing. By the way, circumcision comes up a lot in this letter to the Galatians. It's exactly what the Judaizers wanted the Galatians to do, right? That's step one. You've got to get circumcised. And Paul was able to say, uh-uh, it's not going to benefit you anything. It's not going to be of any value because you can't keep the law.

Okay, so that's Paul's birth. Paul also had claiming in the Mosaic Law, and his training made him an expert in what the law actually said. Galatians 1 verse 14, Paul says, and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries. among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions." So, we know from Acts 22 that Paul had been educated under Gamaliel in Jerusalem, right? And Paul was his star pupil, right?

He was advancing beyond his contemporaries. And so, what that resulted in is that Paul's handle of the Old Testament Scriptures and the Law of Moses allowed him to stand toe-to-toe with any legalist, any Judaizer, and he could point out their misunderstanding of the law. Because he knew it. He knew it forwards and backwards.

And one critical mistake that Paul could point out to the Judaizers is what he says in Galatians 3.10. In Galatians 3-10, Paul is quoting from Deuteronomy, from the law.

Deuteronomy 27, verse 26, and he says, For as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse, for it is written, Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law to perform them. So Paul knew this, and he could present this to these people that wanted to put the Galatians under law, because he knew the law better than they did, right? And Paul knew that the law demands perfect and total obedience. You can't be under part of it and not all of it, right?

Paul would have some really scathing words. We think he was hard on the Galatians. I think he would have some really scathing words for the Reformed theology shenanigans that go on today, where they dismiss certain parts of the law and put Christians under other parts of the law, right? We've got the, well, we're under the moral, but not the ceremonial. Paul would have none of that, right?

So Paul's training in the law prepared him to handle the Old Testament scriptures with razor-sharp accuracy. Now, to be clear, he didn't understand correctly. He was missing some key interpretive principles in his understanding of the Old Testament law, but he did know what the law said. And I think when he became a believer, all of that kind of snapped into focus.

So we've got Paul's birth, we've got Paul's training, and third, we have Paul's failure. And this is important, an important part of Paul's preparation. Paul had to learn what the law could not do. Paul had to discover through personal failure that the law could not make him righteous before God. And Paul had to go through the failure of trying to earn his own righteousness. And that was very critical for Paul to be able to see that he had to have a righteousness that was apart from the law.

So, all of this background that Paul had under law prepared him to say things like he does in 3, verses 20 and 21, where he says, If a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law, but the scripture has shut up everyone under sin. The scripture, the Old Testament scripture. It should shut our mouths, as he says in Romans, because it shows us that we are all under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.

So Paul had to learn this lesson through personal experience and failure. He learned through failure that the law was not capable of making a man righteous. And that's, of course, very important for Paul's ministry. What you'll find, actually, is that people who have been most deeply enslaved to law become, can become anyway, some of the greatest defenders of grace once they come to see it. You know, there may be things in your own life that you regret or that you're ashamed of, your own failures, but like Paul, we can know that the Lord is using these things to pair us for what he has for us. So... Hey, Miles? Go ahead, yes.

Something that's really impressed me about Paul's life is the way God used his personality. He was very zealot and went overboard in condemning the Christians. Yeah. And so God used his personality as a believer to go overboard and he is very zealous in preaching the gospel.

Were you reading over my shoulders? No, that's exactly right. You know, in my original outline I had Paul's birth, training, zeal, and failure. And then I took it out to make things shorter. But that's right. He had tremendous zeal. Both, you know, under law, but then also under grace. was able to select a man with that kind of, you know, personality, whatever you want to call it. And that's good. Yes, Robert. Yeah. You know, you may be going back to this.

I saw the previous slide that you had Galatians 2.21 there.

You know, we always quote 2.20 for the walk, but I think 2.21 is so powerful because it says, I don't want to put aside the grace of God, I'm paraphrasing, but in fact, if righteousness comes by the law, The cross is void. It's vain. I mean, it has no bearing at all. I mean, isn't that incredible? I mean, we always quote 220, but if in fact we're putting ourselves under law and living by that, the cross really is not valuable. It's incredible. We think of it only as justification, but it really relates to the walk. Yeah. And then he's tying that thought in here in Escalations 3, 21, right?

If the law had been able to do this, then righteousness would have been based on the law, and that's tied to the idea that, no, the cross was necessary. If the law could do it, then the cross was needless, because the law would have been enough. If the law wasn't, we couldn't. And it's not that there's anything wrong with the law, right? There's something wrong with us. Because we had a sin nature, we could never keep the law. And this is that principle of provided righteousness versus produced righteousness. If we could produce righteousness of our own through works of the law, we wouldn't need to cross. But we can't, right?

Thank you guys. I appreciate it. So, just a kind of, you know, closing thought on Paul's failure is that the Lord has a way of taking the things that we most regret and turning them into the very thing that qualifies us to minister to others. So, that's Paul's pre-Damascus road preparation. So, what about after becoming a believer, okay? post-Damascus road. And what we see here is a really interesting symmetry between Paul's preparation as a Jew under law and his preparation as a Christian, as a born-again believer. First, just like Paul had a physical birth, he had a new birth. He was born spiritually. On the Damascus Road, Paul's eyes were blinded, but his spiritual eyes were open.

And over the next few days, I think, as Paul sat in blindness, physical blindness, his spiritual eyes were opened, and it all became clear for him, as he writes in Galatians 2.16, He says, nevertheless, knowing that a man is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, since by works of the law no flesh will be justified. I think that's what he was grasping in those days that he sat in blindness. He realized this is the truth. And so through faith in Jesus Christ, Paul was born again.

And it goes without saying that this was a necessary step in Paul's preparation. He had to enter into the body of Christ before he could minister to the body of Christ. So a necessary step of preparation. And second, Paul, just like he had training under the law, Paul also had training as a Christian.

And Paul was personally trained by Jesus Christ. In Galatians 1, 11, and 12, he says, For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man, for I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. So directly from Jesus Christ. Jesus was training him in the gospel that Paul was to eventually turn around and share. And this happened in the three years before Paul went back to Jerusalem.

Because he says in Galatians 1.17, he says, Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia, and returned once more to Damascus. Then, three years later, I went up to Jerusalem. So, this is in that three year period where the Lord Jesus personally trained Paul, but Paul's training didn't end there. After Paul's first brief visit to Jerusalem, he was sent away to Tarsus, where I believe he spent 14 years, that we read about here in Galatians 2. And then he was sent for and he came back with Barnabas to Antioch after 14 years. So what this teaches us, we've got three and then 14, all before Paul actually came to Antioch and began to minister alongside Barnabas.

And what that teaches us is the principle of time in preparation. You know, the Lord took at least 17 years to prepare Paul before he really got heavily engaged in ministry, though I'm sure he was doing things and teaching and so forth, but mostly, I think, preparatory. And so time is essential in our preparation, so don't try to rush it, okay? The Lord is taking time in your life. Don't try to rush ahead of him. And now this is where we have another really interesting parallel.

We talked about his failure under the law, but sometimes we forget about Paul's failure under grace. I put in brackets that Romans 7, because that's where Paul's failure as a Christian is described. It's really important to know that Paul experienced failure as a believer because that failure was critical preparation for what Paul is going to write to the Galatians. Paul had to fail at trying to live the Christian life before he could understand that the same principle applies to our Christian walk as to our Christian birth. Like we talked about at the beginning, right? A provided righteousness by grace through faith apart from works.

So there's a lot of personal conviction behind verses like Galatians 3.3 where he says, Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit? Are you now being perfected by the flesh? Well, Paul had been so foolish himself. He had tried it, right? And so he was able to express this with real deep personal conviction. So that's Paul's preparation.

What is the result? The result of all of this preparatory work, I think Paul summarizes it in Galatians 2, 19 and 20, knowledge. It's a very important message, the principle of provided righteousness as opposed to produced righteousness. And what Paul was able to teach is that God has provided for both a righteous standing and a righteous walk, and that both are provided through the cross.

There we have it. Galatians 2 19 and 24, through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. Right there we have both the fact that Christ died for me and the fact that I have been crucified with Christ. That's the basis of our life and our walk.

So all this preparation that we looked at led to this understanding. I think these verses summarize the whole Christian life in a very brief form. This is kind of like Galatians 6, 7, and 8 in two verses. So that's Paul's personal preparation. We've answered our first question, and now with four minutes left, We're going to talk about the second question. What is it about being an apostle that qualified Paul to write this letter? And the good news is, if we don't get through this, we've got next week. Of course, we still have, you know, we're not even through the first two words of our passage, but hey, we'll get there.

So first of all, what is an apostle? The English word doesn't really help us because it's really just a transliteration of the Greek word. But apostolos comes from the verb apostello, which means to send or to send out. So the noun apostolos means one who is sent out. And the idea behind an apostle is that they are someone sent out to complete a task or a mission on behalf of the sender. And that carries the idea of being a representative of the sender. And as long as an apostle is carrying out the mission of the sender, he operates in the authority of the one who sent him.

In 1 Thessalonians 2.6, Paul says, even though as apostles of Christ, we might have asserted our authority.

So Paul's authority to say what he does is delegated to him by Christ. Not his own authority, Christ's authority. And as Bob pointed out last week, Paul goes to great lengths to defend his apostleship in this letter. And the reason that he does this is because it's an issue of authority. Paul wants to be crystal clear that his authority is not sourced in men, but in Jesus Christ himself.

And if Paul is an apostle of men, then his message is questionable. But if he's an apostle of Jesus Christ, then that message has absolute authority. So we see in verse 1 that Paul's apostleship is not sourced in man, not from men, nor through the agency of man. Or as Wiest rendered this, he said, not from men, nor even through the intermediate agency of men. And then Paul affirms that his authority is from the highest level, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father.

That phrase does show a distinction between Jesus Christ and God the Father, which is biblical, that there's distinction within the Godhead, but it also shouldn't cause us to think that Jesus is less than God the Father, because in reality, these verses show us Jesus' equality with God the Father.

Because remember, the context is a question of authority, the authority in which Paul has been sent. And what he's saying is that the authority is that of both Jesus Christ and God the Father. If Jesus Christ's authority was less than God the Father, why bother mentioning him? If God the Father is the higher authority. But no, this authority that he has is one and the same. The authority of Jesus Christ is the same as the authority of God the Father.

And so by claiming both Jesus Christ and God the Father as the source of his apostleship, he's making them equal to one another. So his authority For his message comes from the the highest level and and you notice in in chapter 1 verse 11 and 12 that that Paul kind of reiterates this the same words from from verse 1 here and Just for I would have you know brethren that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man for I neither received it from man and nor was I taught it but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ and So that's where Paul's apostleship was sourced. And then, of course, we have in 1.16 and 1.17, again, the fact that he didn't consult with flesh and blood. He was taught this directly by the Lord. Miles, that's a direct appointment. Were there apostles indirectly appointed by these apostles that were directly appointed? Yeah, good question.

So the word apostle, if you kind of just do a word study on it in the New Testament, you're going to see that there are a number of people who are referred to as apostles, um, other than, you know, outside of the kind of the 12 and Paul. But their apostleship is, is different, right?

And we can get into a study on that. It's worth, Sorry, I'm just getting a message and my internet connection is unstable, so I don't know. Okay. So you'll find because the word apostle just means one who is sent, you know, to accomplish a task. Well, I mean, that could be, that could have a mundane sense as well, right? You could send someone out as your apostle.

But to have an apostleship of Christ is different. Paul had his own apostleship from Jesus Christ, and that's why he's really trying to emphasize it. He says, I'm not the kind of apostle who was just sent out as a secondary apostle to those twelve in Jerusalem. I know my apostleship comes directly from them. from Jesus Christ. Barnabas is referred to as an apostle in places, but he didn't have this same apostleship that Paul got from Jesus Christ. So, good question. We're going to end there.

So we've gotten through our first two words in verses one through five. So next week, I hope you've got all day, and we'll just finish off the verses, but I think I hope this was valuable to look at the Lord's preparatory work of Paul. Next time, we'll look at that additional phrase that Paul adds on there. It kind of looks like maybe it's just a tack-on. What's the significance of that phrase where he says, God the Father, who raised him from the dead, you know? And we'll talk about some of those other things. So, any other thoughts or questions before we close there? Yeah, Miles, I was thinking, I keep reading in Paul's greetings, he says, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. I've never seen any other, I've never read any of the other apostles appointed by the will of God. Paul is the only one that has that title really. Yeah. Yeah, he did have a very unique apostleship in many ways. He was appointed an apostle by the resurrected, seated Jesus Christ.

And I think that's why I wanted to look at it in this lesson. What exactly is it about Paul as a person and as an apostle that qualified him to write this message? Clearly, the Lord had a significant purpose in his preparation of Paul because he wrote you know, most of the information that the Lord had for the church, most of the New Testament epistles were penned by Paul. And so the Lord clearly had that significant ministry in mind for him.

And like we walked through today, you know, it came through birth, both physical and then his new birth, came through training under the law, but then also additional training under grace to see that clearly, and then failure. and a real personal knowledge of his need for something from outside himself, for righteousness that comes from outside himself, both for his birth and for his walk. And then he was able to share that like very few people could. So, right on. Let's close in prayer.

Heavenly Father, We thank you for the work that you did in the life of Paul to prepare him as a vessel for the specific ministry that you had for him to the Church, to convey these important messages that have been so critical for almost 2,000 years now of Church history.

Lord, if only we would learn these lessons and go back to these things that you taught us in Scripture. We could be saved so much of the confusion and error that we wander into just like the Galatians. Still Lord, I pray that you would teach us from your word. Continue to reveal and open these truths to us in the book of Galatians as we continue to study. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.