Paul’s Authority of Divine Origin — Galatians 1:11–24

But do I not persuade men of God, or do I seek to please men?

For if I yet please men, I should not be the servant of Christ.

But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man.

For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.

For ye have heard of my conversation in times past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God and wasted it, and profited it in the Jews' religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.

But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb and called me by his grace, to reveal his son in me, that I might preach him amongst the heathen, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood.

Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me, but I went into Arabia and returned again unto Damascus.

Then, after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.

But other of the apostles saw I none, save James, the Lord's brother.

Now the things which I write unto you behold before God I lie not.

After which I came into the regions of Celia and Cilicia, and was unknown by face unto the churches of Judea which were in Christ.

But they had heard only that he which persecuted us in times past now preaches the faith which once he destroyed, and they glorified me.

And may the Lord bless the reading of his most precious word.

Amen.

So we're still in the opening of Galatians, and Paul is still laying out his spadework for the letter.

He's arguing where he gets his authority from.

In these verses, Paul lays out his defense of his authority to teach and preach the gospel.

And he does that by pointing not to man, but to God himself.

Two sentences.

Paul states very clearly that he was not taught by any man but by divine revelation of Jesus Christ.

Talk about a bolt face.

Here's Paul saying he hasn't been taught by any man.

And he also talks about how the churches have glorified God for such a change.

Because remember, Paul was going out when he was going to Damascus on his journey when he was solar Tarsus.

He had arrest warrants.

This was a man that was going around to the early Christian churches, the Jewish congregation, arresting the Jews wherever they were, and he had the temporal authority to do so, so that the Romans were quite happy with that as long as it wasn't a Roman city.

And dragging them back to Jerusalem.

If we would have had some trouble in Damascus with that, because Damascus was a Roman city and he would need to get permission, but he was there.

And these two messages he was taught by revelation of Jesus Christ directly, as though he'd been alive and with Christ when Christ was alive, sorry.

And that he, the churches, when they heard, glorify God to show such a miraculous change.

This is the central part of this opening piece.

In a way, it describes all new believers.

You know, we start off as persecution of the church.

We've ordered it.

For those of us who didn't grow up as Christians, and I certainly didn't, we persecuted the church.

We made fun of it.

That's persecution, making fun of something.

We laughed at folk that went to church.

Imagine what was said when I went to church and it was High Church of England, and I was going around in a big black frock, as my mother called it, you know.

And yet when Paul becomes a believer, and he takes everything he learned by being taught at the feet of Galileel, who was one of the greatest Jewish teachers of the time.

Suddenly the church can glorify that a sinner has been saved by grace.

And that applies to everybody who's been saved.

Paul begins with a startling claim I neither received it from man nor was I taught it, but came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Paul was of the tribe of Benjamin, taught by one of the greatest teachers of the time in uh Jewish law and tradition.

He would have known how to argue his point.

He had the finest human education available, and yet he insists very clearly that none of that produced the gospel he now preaches.

Paul is saying my message is not human, my authority is not human, my gospel is not human.

He's comparing himself to the Judaizers that have come around with the authority from the temple authorities, who've been trained by the temple to use all the right words and the right phrases.

And Paul is saying they've been taught by man, they've authority is human, but my gospel is the gospel of Jesus Christ taught by him directly to me.

And then he goes on to say that if the gospel comes from Christ Himself, then no man has the right to alter it.

How I wish the churches today would listen to those words again.

And he moves from being a persecutor to a preacher.

Paul reminds the Church of Galatia about his past.

He was not indifferent to Christianity.

He certainly wasn't just ignoring it.

He hated it.

He did not merely disagree with Christians.

He hunted them down.

He said, I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it.

And he travels far and wide in the Jewish Despora at the time, arresting anyone who was a known convert to this new cult.

And that's what Christianity was.

It didn't spring up to be the church as we know it today.

It was a subcult of Judaism.

And Paul was a rising star in the Jewish world.

He was zealous, he was ambitious and utterly, utterly convinced that Christianity was a threat to the law of Moses and to the stability of Israel under Rome.

I want to digress a wee bit here.

Because I want to say that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a threat.

It's a threat to the lawmakers of this nation.

It's a threat to the stability of this nation.

And it is a threat to the stability of the world.

And I don't mean that in a horrible way.

Because Christianity makes us look at ourselves and says, This is what God wants you to be.

Are you there yet?

And the answer has to be no, just look around.

God made the world so that every living thing would have enough.

And yet we just see the rich getting rich and the poor getting poorer.

We see people sleeping on the street.

This is where I was talking about James's letter before, about good words.

Charitable giving has to flow from Christian belief.

We are in the state we are in because we've never really had Christian belief.

You may think we've had in the past, you know, you look back to the time of the Victorians and the Edwardians, and maybe even before.

I do wonder about that type of Christianity.

Then Paul's looking.

Because Christ intervened.

One day Christ will intervene again.

And on the road to Damascus, Paul was confronted by the risen Christ.

He was blinded, he was humbled, and he was undone.

He goes on to Damascus eventually, and his sight is restored, and he is baptized, and everything he thought he knew was turned upside down.

That should be the mark of a real Christian.

When we become baptized or when we declare for Christ, maybe before we're baptized.

That everything we thought we knew gets turned on its head.

And we see the world in a very different light.

We don't have this rosy glow anymore of, oh, are we wonderful people?

We know we are nothing more than wretched sinners, that we need a saviour.

We know how bad we are.

Nobody can point to a Christian, a proper Christian, and go, do you know how bad you are?

You're two-faced, you're a liar, you're a pervert, and all the rest of it.

They can't do that.

Because we know.

We know the devil has our souls.

We know we're greedy and self-centered.

We know why?

Because the Bible tells us so.

But I'll tell you something else, brethren and sisters.

The Bible tells us that God so loved us that he gave his only begotten Son, who will secure the balm of Gilead for our sinful nature.

And for those of you who have declared for Christ, and for those who hear this who have declared for Christ, what you were before you met Christ is very, very different to what you are now you are in Christ.

And I want you to take that message home, if anything else tonight.

The persecutor becomes the preacher, the destroyer becomes a defender, the enemy becomes the apostle.

Not the work of man.

Man can't do that.

Has to be a work of God.

And Paul then makes a crucial point.

After his conversion, he doesn't go to Jerusalem straight away.

Jerusalem was the center of the church in those days.

The church in Jerusalem was the main one.

It was run by James, who was the brother of Jesus Christ.

That nails another falsehood about the perpetual virginity of Mary in there.

Instead, he goes where?

He goes back to Damascus.

Of all places, the very place where he had intended to arrest the Christians.

And what did he do when he walked in?

You can imagine, you know, oh, look out, here comes Saul of Tarsus.

We're all in trouble, we're all going to get arrested.

And he starts to begin preaching Jesus Christ.

That must have been an earthquake of a moment for the Jews in Damascus, to the Christians, the early Christians, to be there afraid that they're about to be carted off and maybe murdered or ritually slaughtered by the Sanhedrin, as the Jewish law would allow.

Suddenly to hear this persecutor preach about Jesus Christ.

It's almost a bit about strangers hearing the Archbishop.

Can't ever preach about Jesus Christ?

Yeah.

And three years later, took three years before he went to Jerusalem.

And even then he had met only Peter and James.

He didn't meet everybody.

He stayed 15 days, hardly enough time to be trained, shaped, or instructed in the new religion.

That means that when he went and talked to Peter, Peter, remember, had been the rock that Christ is going to build his church on.

He must have been able to convince Peter he knew what he was talking about.

And James, the brother of Christ, who was head of the church in Jerusalem, must have been able to teach him, tell him, and come.

Because I don't think this was a meeting of oh hi, come and stay with it.

I think this was more like a semi-formal interview.

You know, are you excusable?

And yes, and Peter then takes his ministry to the Jews, but for Paul to the Gentiles.

Paul is showing the Galatians that this gospel that he has is not secondhand, it's not borrowed, it's not inherited, just as the Judaizers would have it, it is revealed.

And after Jerusalem, Paul travelled to Syria and Cilicia, the regions of his own town, Tarsus, on the coast of modern-day Turkey.

So he's going home essentially where he would be known.

He deliberately stayed away from the churches of Judea.

They don't know him personally, they know the stories.

They'd heard the report.

He who once persecuted us now preaches the faith he once tried to destroy.

And what was their response?

They glorified God.

They didn't glorify Paul.

They didn't glorify the apostles.

They didn't glorify the church in Jerusalem.

They glorified God.

They gave God the glory because only God can take a sinful man like Saul, like you, like me, and make him into a man like Paul.

And if God can do it to Saul, he can do it to you as well.

Before Christ, Saul was a radical Jew, a Hebrew of Hebrews, and he later described himself as he later described himself.

He was steeped in the law, trained in the tradition, and fiercely protective of Israel's identity.

And he saw Jesus as a threat to that.

He saw the church as a danger, and he saw the gospel as heresy.

But you know, when Christ confronted him, and I I often wonder about this, and I wonder about stories when people say they become saved.

When Christ confronted him, Saul realized that Jesus was not the enemy of the Lord.

He was the fulfilment of it.

Saul realized that he wasn't a contradiction to the prophets, but he was the completion of it.

And this is when Saul is nicknamed Paul or renamed Paul.

And this is why he becomes such a powerful witness.

He doesn't abandon his Jewish heritage.

This is what people don't get.

He doesn't abandon his Jewish heritage, he sees it fulfilled in Christ.

Saul becomes Paul, and Paul becomes radical in a new way.

He sees that the gospel for the whole is for the whole world, for the Jew first, and also for the Gentiles.

He sees that salvation is not through the law, but through Christ.

He sees that the promises made to Abraham find their yes and amen in Jesus.

I want to make something clear here because when I was writing this stuck in my head, I'm missing something.

So this is a clarification point.

A Christian is not under the law as a way of earning God's favor.

Christ has fulfilled the ceremonial law and borne the penalty of the moral law on the cross.

But the moral law still speaks to us today.

The moral law still speaks to us today.

And it shows us a number of things that we are must remember.

I'm going to say this is a must.

This is not a might, but a must.

It shows us God's character, it sets healthy boundaries.

It exposes our sin and it guides our steps.

And in Matthew 5, where Jesus talks about the law, you'll find the comms, it goes, you will heard it say by men or them of old.

It tends to be how the passage opens.

Jesus in Matthew 5 does not relax any of the commandments.

He deepens them.

So we do not ignore the law as some Christians seem to want to do.

We do not, under any circumstances, ignore the law.

We see it, however, and we must always see it through the lens of Christ, who fulfills it and then writes it on our hearts.

So there is only one God.

We honor our parents, we do not steal, we do not lie, we do not lust after.

Paul becomes a man consumed with one mission, and that is to preach Christ and him crucified, risen and reigning.

And Paul tells his story not to draw attention to himself, but to draw attention to the God who saves, the God who calls, and the God who sends.

Because if God can reach Saul the persecutor, he can reach anyone.

And if no one is beyond God's mercy, then there is no past too dark, no heart too hard, no sin too deep.

This is mercy for the lost.

Paul insists that he didn't receive the gospel from men.

He did not adjust it, he did not soften it, he did not modernize it.

In every age, including ours, there is pressure, pressure, constant pressure to reshape the gospel to fit the culture.

But a gospel shaped by culture is no gospel at all.

This is the warning for the proud.

True conversion produces visible change.

I often say, don't I?

You've heard me say it many times.

I can't tell who is saved or not, but I know what to watch for.

If I've known you long enough, I know what you were like, and I know what you're like.

And I can take a good guess as to whether you are actually converted or not.

I normally point to Gary because I actually know Gary's story, but he's having a good day off today.

The churches in Judea do not know Paul Persons.

They'd heard about him, but they'd never seen him.

He now preaches the faith he once tried to destroy.

And they saw the evidence of grace, you see, and that's a great marker of grace when somebody who was once against Christ starts to talk of Christ.

And the question for us is simple.

Is there anything in my life, your life, that causes others to glorify God?

And I'm not talking about perfection, I'm talking about direction.

I'm not talking about sinlessness, but about repentance.

I'm not talking about pride, but about humility.

And I'm not talking about self-reliance, but Christ's reliance.

Paul's testimony is not about Paul, it's about the God who interrupts, the God who rescues, the God who redirects, and the God who sends.

And your story, my story, however ordinary it might feel, is also a testimony to the grace of God.

Your past does not disqualify you.

My past certainly did not disqualify me.

Your weakness does not hinder him.

My weaknesses don't hinder him.

Your limitations do not limit him.

My limitations have not stopped him.

If Christ has called you, then Christ will use you.

Paul's concern in Galatians is not law versus no law.

It is law versus identity.

The false teachers.

The false teachers were using the law to define who belongs, who is clean, who is acceptable, who is real Christians.

But Paul points that Christ alone defines the people of God.

So the law becomes a mirror or a guide, a boundary, but it's never a badge of belonging.

So let us hold fast to the gospel that comes from God.

Let us rejoice that grace can reach the hardest heart.

Let us walk in such a way that others glorify God because of us.

And let us remember that the same Christ who met Paul on the Damascus Road is the Christ who meets us today.

Amen.