Galatians 1:1-5: Deliverers and Rescuers
Larry Kirkpatrick
In many bookstores today, the “Self-Help” section is larger than the “Religion” section. We are raised up in an environment holding “science” in highest esteem. Science is the new religion. In order to sell today, you garb your product in the robe of science. As in many things, you have certain elements that are measurable and others that are theoretical. The measurable elements are often more valid than the other. Much of psychological science is built upon questionable foundations, but rarely questioned with much zeal. Much more, it is preferable to have a new set of problems to replace the old.
The old set of problems had to do with sin. The new set of problems has to do with how we feel. The old set of problems had to do with moral boundaries. The new set questions whether there are moral boundaries. The old understanding was that God marked the moral domains of good and evil with care. The new says that morality is just one more aspect of a socially-constructed reality. What society has developed a consensus on, has agreed upon, is the morality. And we could continue. But our purpose today is to explore two opposing worldviews, two opposing offerings in terms of what the problems are and what the solutions are. In short, today we pause to consider deliverers and rescuers. Our launch-point is Galatians 1:1-5.
God Speaks
The first five verses of Galatians will highlight that which God says:
Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;), and all the brethren which are with me, unto the churches of Galatia: Grace be to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father: To Whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Paul is an apostle—one who is sent. He claims that He was not merely sent from men to men, but from God to men. He claims he is not merely appointed an apostle by means of men, but he claims that his office was made him by a divine decision. These things are true because they were determined by God the Father and Jesus Christ. He is writing to the churches of Galatia on behalf of not only himself and all those who are with him, but also on behalf of God.
The opening regularly given by Paul in his epistles is his prayerful request of grace and peace for the recipients. Living as a Christian in his age wasn't the same as it is in ours. Christians were persecuted, murdered, harassed, hated, and variously hounded. Yes, there is some of that in our age too, in some places, but few of us have really experienced that. The common situation for us has been far less challenging than what Paul and his friends faced.
Notice the solution in Paul's writings, for it points us to what the problem is: “Jesus Christ, Who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father.” There is a problem separating us from God: It is our sins; it is our choices to join the rebellion against God. What does solving this problem necessitate? Since none merely human could pay the penalty for sin, the Lawgiver Himself must give Himself. His character alone could match the holiness of the divine law. God's law represented His character, it represented what moral goodness is. To set it aside would be to set aside God's goodness.
But upholding the law and dying in place of man, counting Jesus' life in place of man, was only part of the solution. Notice again what is said: “that He might deliver us from this present evil world.” Some translations have it to “deliver us from this present evil age.” Deliverance is now.
From What are We Delivered?
What are the components of “this present evil world”? What makes it evil, what makes it a universal experience?
- Man's broken nature
- Man's inhumanity toward other beings and toward his environment
- Nature's warped state because of the curse of sin
And the solution? A gospel to repair man and a plan to restore earth, and a Savior to effect these changes and lead the fallen children of humanity back toward home.
In contrast, the scientific worldview says
- Man's nature is not broken in particular, but he matures in a poor environment
- Man's ill behavior toward others can be solved with better education and social programs and improvements in his environment, and by his evolution to a more civilized state. We climb out of the primitive animal background we came from, continually becoming more superior to previous examples of the human species, who we may recognize more and more clearly as being dangerous and outdated.
- Nature as we see it is simply the way it has always been. Survival of the fittest is its normal situation
And the solution? Making a few improvements in the human condition on our own as a species.
A Great Controversy
But let's rewind for a moment to the beginning of the conflict between good and evil. In heaven, a being, the chief of those God had created, Lucifer, an angel, the shining bright son of the morning, chose to rebel. Originally created sinless, he began to entertain brooding thoughts of personal glory. He began to desire within himself the worship of his fellow creatures. He began to covet God's place, and desire to take it for his own.
He deceived many of the angels. God saw what was developing all along, but He would not overrule the free choice of the angels. He put forth His evidence, Lucifer his. Lucifer became an adversary of God and was thereafter known as Satan (Hebrew for “adversary”). An open war developed and at last Satan was cast out of heaven. He was imprisoned on earth. He was permitted to set one trap. He was granted one place in the garden of Eden where he might slyly tempt the new beings God was about to make.
Adam and Eve were instructed that there was but one prohibition for them in all their paradise. There was one tree whose fruit they could not eat. Thus was set the test; a tiny test, but one with grave consequences.
These things format the nature of the problem and the solution, the kind of Deliverer necessary. The Bible teaches that humankind was originally created good, but Adam and Eve chose to rebel. They chose to distrust God and do the very thing He told them not to. Their decision would have destroyed the race but for God's mercy.
God was not taken by surprise. He had a plan in case the free people He made, in their immaturity, chose to follow Satan. He would provide a Deliverer for those willing to return to their Maker. He would have free people, yet informed enough people that they would be able to understand the ultimately self-destructive nature of sin. He would demonstrate the goodness of His government while Satan showed the bankruptcy of his plan to infect the universe with selfishness.
That little prohibition it turned out was connected to something much larger. God had a law. There is something His government is founded upon, a concise expression of His character, the constitution, if you will, of His creation, Ten Commandments.
God's law would be upheld. Satan's lawlessness would be shown for what it was. Jesus would come as a human, pay the penalty for sin by dying in our place, and give to us the strength we need to overcome in His power. Humans would forever keep their free choice, but would never again choose to sin. The universe would be forever free. Unselfishness would reign. Satan and his selfishness philosophy would be eradicated. The deliverance would come now, in this present time.
Man Speaks
Modern, or to be more accurate, post-modern men and women propose a different problem, a different solution, and a different Deliverer and delivery. The new way of thinking now tightening its grip on the western world is post-modern thinking.
Postmodernism says that reality is radically relativistic. It is only what you and I determine it to be. Absolute values have no higher origin point than societal consensus. Therefore they are never absolutes. The only absolute truth is that there are no absolutes. There is no center either. If there is a center it is made of what comes out of the combination of the intellectual might of the most radical institutions of higher education blended with the inflow of stray ideas entering society from "the arts." Popular culture makes its contribution too, so that the cesspool is inhabited by the values of Hollywood, San Francisco, Paris, Madonna, Eminem, and the elitist cultural snobbery of academia.
Needless to say, the values here are altogether different than the world presented in Scripture. The world that Jesus came to as Deliverer had moral right and moral wrong. The idea of God was accepted. There was cultural snobbery in Christ's day too; that is nothing new. But sin was understood to be the problem, and God's plan, to empower us to rise above it.
The new world we face today sees our mindset as part of the problem. Since, as they hold, there is no external moral determination, anyone insisting on moral absolutes is a trouble-maker. Live and let live they say. There is no moral center. Sin and guilt are viewed as defunct categories left over from outmoded societal constructs, old ideas carried over too long by rigid folk who refuse to see with the new eyes. Man can improve himself and dig his way out of the hole of ignorance he is in. Science will help him.
Science has been responsible for enabling man to accomplish many things. But science has its own presuppositions, illusions, and failings too. It rules out that which it cannot access. If it cannot be observed or measured, if evidence in support of something cannot be given in some empirical way, science refuses it. Science wants to test things, arrive at careful results, reach findings which are repeatable. Nothing wrong with that.
Where things have gone wrong is when the sheen of neutral, unbiasedness has been extended to that which is inaccessible to science, new myths have been made. The processes supposed to have been involved in the making of our solar system, our planet, and of course in the origins of man, all rely upon more than that which is readily observable. They are built upon what have been called super-theories. Really, no one human was present a billion years ago to record what exactly was happening then. The events of the past are taken by scientists—really—on faith. But theirs is a faith in man's capacity to reconstruct via guesswork and theory the way things were.
Revelation—the idea that God intervenes in our world by revealing that which is inaccessible to us—may be scoffed at by those expounding scientific solutions to problems, but it actually admits something which they don't wish to admit: that there are things beyond our capacity to know without intervention from beyond. Christianity admits a need that is beyond itself; science does not.
Scientific findings are published in “refereed” journals. Supposedly, this process means scientists review each other's work, ferreting out faulty procedures and conclusions. Thus, as the end of the day science appears to be an unbiased, rational method for discovering truth.
Unfortunately, this “unbiasedness” is only illusion. Just as the Christian, the scientist begins with several ideas. He sets the rules so that there is no room for Deity to peek through. Singularities (suspension of the laws of physics as we know them) like a worldwide flood, a moment in which planet earth is spoken into existence, or when the entrance into the world twists the environment with the curse, cannot be observed. They cannot be reproduced by us. So the demand arises for that which is beyond our capacity of explanation. As we said, society measures everything against science.
Remember, in the world as understood by science, there is no Creator, there was no fall, there is no sin, there is no Savior, and there is no salvation. This life is it, all there is. And if you think about it, you will realize that we never hear about atheist suicide bombers. The atheist thinks this is it, all there is, so his life plan is simple: run out the clock. Take as much of life as you can get because that is all there is.
Two different worldviews propose two different problems, and two different solutions.
Those Who trouble You
Then there are the false rescuers, the wolves in sheep's clothing, the religious con-men. Their falsity is proven when challenges come to God's flock and they flee. They allow the sheep to be torn and damaged without intervening. They bring people into bondage. They may seem to deliver but then you find yourself under their control. Paul mentioned this sort again and again in Galatians.
In Galatians 1:7 and 5:10, 12 these are the “some that trouble you.” In Galatians 1:8-9 they are “the accursed.” In Galatians 1:10 they are men pleasers. In Galatians 2:4 they are “false brethren,” spying out the liberty God's people have in Christ and seeking to renew bondage. In Galatians 3:1 they are those who bewitch. In Galatians 4:17 they are those who zealously affect, they are those who divide. In Galatians 5:7 they are those who “hinder” so that God's people are led to “not obey the truth.” In Galatians 6:12 they are those who “desire to make a fair shew in the flesh.” And their ultimate goal is revealed in Galatians 6:13. It is a power-trip they are on, a control-issue: they “desire to have you circumcised, that they may glory in your flesh.“
Why do they have this power-trip? They “desire to make fair a shew in the flesh” for themselves, and they desire to “glory in your flesh.” Why is that? It is something very fundamental.
More on Man's Nature
The Bible comments again and again on the nature of man. Genesis 1:31 says that when God had finished His creation with its crowning jewel, humankind, He surveyed all He had made and pronounced the divine evaluation: it was “very good.” But that was before man made his fatal choice to sin, to rebel. Again, Solomon declares in Ecclesiastes that “God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” The Bible also tells us “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
God's purpose for every human that would ever live is positive. Man was created by God. God made us a certain way, with certain traits as a race. We are creatures able to discern right from wrong, and designed to cleave to the right. We were created with a moral alignment that was described as "very good." But we were also granted free choice, a gift to be rightly used, or to be misused with all the attendant consequences of that misuse upon ourselves and upon others.
After man sinned the race was changed. Something catastrophic had happened to our species. Still worshipping beings, now those inclinations would take on a destructive form, leading us no longer to look out of ourselves and up toward God for our greatest fulfillment, but now inwardly. Self-glory was what now we would seek. This is the same spirit that Christ's opponents, the Pharisees, manifested toward Him. It is the inevitable direction taken by every member of the broken race until they return to God. Even then we have within ourselves this dark propensity, this dangerous desire to be bound by religious systems permitting us to indulge self-glorying.
Look with me at this fact in Galatians. Join me in a careful reading of Galatians 4:8-9: “Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?”
Notice what Paul tells the Galatians. He reminds them that when they knew not God, before they had come to Christ, they "did service unto them which by nature are no gods." They served other things; they lived their lives day by day subjecting themselves to "the weak and beggarly elements" that they chose. They selected their interests in harmony with their nature, and their nature is one that seeks out many devices, the nature of a worshipping being turned away from its natural course to the unnatural. The life that God designed they would live joyfully, not seeking their own glory, was now turned outside-in, so that the twisted nature now sought its own glory.
And so Paul asks the Galatians why they desire to return to those empty religious sidetracks and blind alleys? Why, he asks, drop out of the liberty of Christ, why forsake the victory over sin He makes possible through the strength He provides, and trade it for the self-destructive indulgence of our broken human desire to be in bondage?
That is the situation of fallen humanity. If we refuse to come to God we remain slaves. Fallen man cannot obey. He is powerless, he has not the spiritual strength to do what some part of him knows he wants to do. Deep down inside somewhere we all desire still the good, even though we are inclined to the evil. No, we do not have a spark of goodness in us that makes us good. Hear me carefully. We have a desire for goodness, an ancient echo from before the fall. But that desire is not the only desire.
To glorify self is the overmastering desire afflicting us all. To bind ourselves at any cost to ourselves to whatever sly deception presents itself tailor-made to our fallen tastes is our inward goal as fallen beings. So some cleave to self outside of religion. Others seek to accomplish it while clothed in religious guise. It is only the difference between a counterfeit ten dollar bill and a counterfeit twenty.
Heaven's Plan of Hope
God offers a different plan altogether. He will change the broken, He will heal the sin-sickened soul, He will wash the wounded, and cleanse the self-inflicted stripes that lacerate the body of the damaged soul. Where there is sorrow and despair, He will give gladness and joy and hope. Where there is bleak nothing for future and only guilt and self-hatred and loathing, He will replace with true fulfillment, and a life of self-respect. He will make noble the fallen soul, and turn a child of the devil into a child of the King. He will make you ready for His Father's household.
He will hear the cry of the despairing soul and embrace him with a grace unlike any other. He redeems, He buys back, not to sin, but from sin. He gives something so much better than we would take. He undoes the bondage and frees us from our own prison-house of sin which we have so diligently bound together with the cords of our transgressions. He is looking for those who will hear His appeal, and receive from Him His plan for their repair. He is Jesus Christ “Who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father: To Whom be glory for ever and ever.”
Conclusion
The human plan offers no realistic analysis of the problem of man's behavior. He evolved wrong, but will eventually evolve right. Then there is the con-artistry of the false religionists, who seek to let us have the cake of sin and eat it too. They want to bind us in prison-houses of our own making.
But God revealed to us something very different. He showed us exactly why “the present evil world” Is the way it is, and provided a solution in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. And there is hope for us today because of it. We may embrace our bondage-prone nature; we may coddle it and preen it and stroke it and follow it. But we will never be happy, we will always hide just behind our eyes a mind crushed under a trainload of guilt, living in our hopeless estate. We can enjoy the fancied solutions of science, the glamor and glitz of our age, the toilet-paper that flies up onto your antenna and trails there boldly on your way to Riverside California while you are on the freeway.
Or we can give our Creator and Redeemer an opportunity to recreate and to redeem us, to buy us back, to do in us what He wants to do, and deliver us from this present evil age. No one said that would be the easy way to go. But it is the way that has in it heaven's hope. What do you say? Won't you accept the embrace of the One who would be your Savior? He is waiting for you with outstretched arms today. | 