"Anathema" Galatians 1:8-9 Sunday Evening Worship Service

I've spent much of this week reading about the time period in Martin Luther's life between the 95 Theses and the Diet of Worms.

That period of time where he spent ministering in Wittenberg, teaching still to his church, discipling other preachers and teachers and sending them out, and really filling in the blanks of his theology.

A period of only a few years transpired in that gap there between when he had to stand before the emperor and the council to recant his faith, which of course he declined to do at the Diet of Worms, and was ushered out, given safe passage, and then ultimately kidnapped and put in a castle where he devoted his time to studying Hebrew and translating the Bible into German, eventually returned to Wittenberg where he would get married.

But there's a few years between when he nailed the 95 Theses on the castle door and when he was summoned to Worms.

And in that time period, you really do start to see his convictions solidify.

It's unclear to me in 1517 if he understood really what we would even consider the gospel now.

You could see the wheels starting to spin in his mind, in Luther's mind.

You could tell that his reading the 95 Theses, his main concern with the Catholic Church was the selling of indulgences.

He thought it was abusive, it was exploiting people that he he viewed himself as a pastor and a shepherd of those in his congregation.

And he saw the selling of indulgences as exploiting the poor and the weak in the church.

It was even unclear how much of the selling of indulgences was actually sanctioned by the Pope.

It was certainly unclear to Luther.

If you're not familiar with this time period, it's the 1500s, early 1500s, and the Catholic Church had just returned from what's called the Babylonian captivity of the church, where the Pope had spent 70 plus years this sequence of popes in France.

And so the Catholic Church felt in many ways powerless because Rome had lost her pope, and now the papacy had returned to Rome and was exercising power over Europe and trying to restore its primacy in the political scheme of Europe.

But not everybody was happy with the return of Catholicism to Italy.

For example, the Germans were not stoked about it, and they viewed the selling of indulgences and the rebuilding of the cathedrals back in Rome as a way of plundering the Germans for the sake of the Romans or the Italians, and they weren't weren't happy about it.

To get even a little bit deeper, you have to know a little bit about how Catholicism works.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope, of course, is the head of the church.

He sits in the chair of Peter, he's Christ's representative on earth, and he basically rules the church.

You enter into the church through the sacraments, beginning with the sacrament of baptism, as an infant where you have Adam's sin in a sense removed from you, and you kind of have starting with a blank slate, then where you have some kind of volition and freedom of the will to live your life.

And as you live your life, you, of course, sin and you accumulate debt.

You have the availability to have your debt or your uh the punishment owed to your sin removed through other sacraments, for example, through confession, through confirmation in the church, and then through confession, uh, where you confess your sin to a priest, and then you have some kind of penance to demonstrate the reality of your confession, some work that you do, be it a prayer maybe, or some kind of sacrifice giving in some sense.

You can be married in the church and receive grace that way.

Of course, the whole system hinges on ordination where uh the priests are uh ordained to have the capacity to practice the mass and to administer penance.

The mass, of course, in Catholicism, the the bread, the wafer is said to try and substantiate to really become the actual body of Christ.

The wine becomes the real blood of Christ as the priest holds it up and and breaks the wafer.

This is the body of Christ broken for us.

And in a real way, the priest is recreating the Calvary at every celebration of the Mass.

And so in Catholicism, all of that is a means of grace.

All of that is a way that the worshipers or the communicants receive grace.

They live their life accumulating sin.

They can receive grace through penance, through the celebration of the Mass on their behalf, uh, through marriage in the church, even through burial, where last rites are performed on the person who died.

None of that is ultimately able to take away your sin.

None of, no matter how much penance you do, you can't atone for your own sin.

And so even in Catholicism, there's this concept of purgatory.

It's the safety net where when you die, you go to purgatory, where the remaining sin you have in your life is purged from you.

Purgatory is not like a waiting room.

A lot of Americans view purgatory as like, you know, a waiting room at the dentist.

You know, there's boring magazines and you sit there for a long period of time until ultimately you're called back into heaven.

But that's not what Catholicism has taught about purgatory.

Purgatory is a place of punishment, of fire, of flames, and it purges you through the suffering of the sin that you've done.

And so that's the whole kind of overview of Catholicism right there.

In you put the what's going on in Germany and the 1500s into that, and you get the Catholic Church that starts selling indulgences.

You can buy a certificate that excuses you or reduces your time in purgatory, or in some cases, even removes your time in purgatory altogether.

You would think, why would you, as a church, allow the selling of indulgences if that means you don't need the other sacraments in order to have your sins remitted?

I mean, wouldn't you want a system that keeps people tethered to the church?

And the answer to that is yes, you would, but that system is constructed such that when even if the person who buys an indulgence can still accumulate more sins in many cases and still is reliant upon the other sacraments.

What was happening in Germany is you had indulgences being sold for the dead, people who had already died, who were already in purgatory, and so you could buy an indulgence to get a dead person out of purgatory.

And the money, of course, would go from the Germans that bought it to those in Rome building new cathedrals.

This was horribly offensive to Luther and who was at this time working through this concept of faith, working through the concept of righteousness, who himself was distraught with his own sin.

He had gone down the penance route.

He had walked up Pilate's stairs in Rome, trying to, you know, say the rosary at every stair, trying to have his sins remitted, and he noted with his own humor that he ran out of stairs before he ran out of sin.

It was not an optimistic encounter for him.

So he's working through that, and he is distraught over the selling of indulgences.

And so he writes the 95 Theses, which are, you know, pleading with people, and pleading with the church, really, to stop selling indulgences for the dead.

Stop saying that if you buy an indulgence, you can have your sins forgiven.

You're only Luther saw it for what it was.

It was exploiting the poor, it was exploiting the gullible, it was emotional manipulation.

It was, you know, if you had a granddaughter who died as an infant or as a baby, wouldn't you want to mortgage your house, so to speak, to get her out of purgatory?

If you had a grandmother who died, wouldn't you want to sell all you had to get her out of purgatory?

It was very much emotional manipulation.

And Luther saw that.

And as Luther is studying the Bible, he recognizes this is just not what the Bible teaches about any of this.

None of this is in the Bible.

The whole thing is not there.

But the indulgences were the low-hanging fruit.

So he goes after that.

Of course, he writes the theses, nails them to the church door, the castle door.

They're translated from Latin into German, they're reproduced, they're published, they're spread everywhere, and this starts a big-time problem.

And it was a problem for Luther initially.

He wasn't trying to get thrown out of the Catholic Church.

He wasn't trying to turn the world upside down.

He was trying to tell German priests to stop letting indulgences be sold in their districts.

It was an appeal to politicians, too, to the German leadership, to stop allowing this.

I really do think Luther may have even been unsure about how the Pope would have responded to this.

When the Pope did receive a copy of the 95 Theses, he didn't really respond.

In fact, he commented, Urban Luther has this quote in his book, Rescuing the Gospel.

The Pope commented that Luther is nothing but a drunk German.

He'll wake up sober in the morning.

Just let it go, in other words.

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

NBD.

But Luther did not sober up in the morning.

He just kept doubling down and kept preaching against indulgences and kept preaching the gospel based upon faith.

He was summoned to different debates against Catholic theologians, and he held his own very well.

But the third and final debate against Eck was the one that got him in the most trouble, because Eck was more gifted than the others he had debated before, and was able to get Luther to very clearly articulate things that were contrary to Catholic doctrine.

Until that third debate, Luther was very wise in his words by saying things like, I obviously wouldn't say anything against the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church believes the Bible and all I'm saying is in accordance with the Bible, right?

And so he made it very difficult to nail him down.

But the third debate, he was most certainly nailed down, and specifically on the issues of free will.

And that's where Eck went for on free will.

In the Catholic Church, free will means you have the ability, the capacity to do good and righteous things.

Luther, who had been reading Augustine, knew that this isn't true.

That Augustine taught that you have sin that corrupts every part of your life, and that even your best works are tainted by sin.

That's a very much an Augustinian doctrine that sin taints all of your works.

Even as a believer, you have sinful and mixed motives and so much of your life.

And this is just kind of basic anthropology.

It's a basic biblical worldview.

Sin enters the world and it corrupts everything.

There's nothing uncorrupted by sin.

Sometimes known as the doctrine of total depravity.

You can see, though, in the concept of Catholicism, why that doctrine would be lethal.

Because if you have a system that works upon your participation, it you doing good deeds, you receiving the forgiveness of sins through penance, and they're teaching that penance can remit sins, and the Augustinian worldview says, no, even in your act of penance, you are having more sin.

Even in your repentance, you're sinning.

Because sin corrupts all things.

This is a very, you might think, arcane theological point.

Are you sinning even when you repent?

And, you know, we would say there's always measures of mixed motives in all things that you do.

But do you understand how that attitude will corrupt a works righteous system all the way down?

It makes it impossible.

Because if your works are just digging the hole deeper, you're not getting out of the hole.

You get that?

If what you're supposed to do to dig yourself out only goes deeper, then it's an impossible situation.

So they went after that with Luther.

And Luther, through those debates, was able to articulate and clarify that he was really teaching that you are saved by faith alone, not on the basis of works.

Not on the basis of works.

After that third debate, Luther wrote a book, which was a plea to the German nobility to stop allowing the indulgences to be sold, to stop allowing people to be taught that salvation had to be obtained through sacraments.

Luther in that book isn't even arguing against the sacraments necessarily.

He's just arguing that you can be saved apart from the sacraments.

In other words, apart from the Catholic Church.

He was arguing that you can have faith in Christ.

It doesn't have to come through an ordained priest of the Catholic Church.

That was basically what Luther was arguing.

When that book began to catch on and the German people begin to follow Luther over the Pope, is when the Pope, Pope Leo, finally decided to act.

He acted in the form of a papal bull on June 15th, 1520.

The bull is titled A Rise, O Lord.

I want to read a couple paragraphs from it.

It's quite long.

I'm not going to read you the whole thing.

But I do want to read you a couple paragraphs.

This is a bull, so it's something from the Catholic Church signed by the Pope.

It's a document that is essentially excommunicating Luther, but it is written and published for all the Germans to see.

It's called a Rise, O Lord, because it's the first word of it.

So notice this bull, it's excommunicating, communicating Luther, but it's written from the Pope who sits on Peter's chair to the Lord.

You're going to see that in this bull, he's appealing to the Lord.

He's appealing to Peter and to Paul.

I mean, he's appealing to everyone here.

Arise, O Lord, and judge your own cause.

Remember your reproaches to those who are filled with foolishness all day long.

Listen to our prayers, because foxes have arisen seeking to destroy the vineyard whose wine press you alone have trod.

And yet, calling Luther a fox, that is destroying the winepress.

When you were about to ascend to your father, you committed the care, rule, and administration of the vineyard, an image of the triumphant church to Peter as the head and your vicar and his successors.

This wild boar from the forest seeks to destroy it, and every wild beast feeds upon us.

Luther has been called a fox and now a wild boar.

Rise, Peter, and fulfill this pastoral office divinely entrusted to you, as mentioned above.

Give head to the cause of the Holy Roman Church, mother of all churches, and teacher of the faith, whom you by the order of God have consecrated by your blood.

We beseech you also, Paul, arise.

It was you that enlightened and illuminated the church by your doctrine and martyrdom like Peter's.

For now a new porphyry arises, who, as the old once wrongly assailed the Holy Apostles, now assails the holy pontiffs, our predecessors.

So he's calling Peter here not just a fox and a vineyard, but now uh uh poison, really, poison set forth in the church that will corrupt even Peter and Paul's martyrdom and the long line of hopes ever since then.

Let all this holy church of God, I say, arise, would the blessed apostles intercede with Almighty God to purge the heirs of his sheep, banish all heresies from the lands of the faithful, and maintain the peace and unity of his Catholic Church.

So now the bull is appealing to all the saints of all ages to stand up and what are they supposed to do?

Get rid of Luther.

Stop reading his books, unless he repents, recants in 60 days, he will be excommunicated and made anathema, cut off from access to the sacraments, which means cut off from salvation.

He has 60 days to think about this.

And then it goes on to list all of the errors of Luther's teaching.

Reading that list of errors of Luther's teaching, by the way, it's very interesting now with the 500 years of theology after this to understand the Pope really didn't get what Luther was arguing.

He didn't quite have connect all the dots.

Um he says some things that sound, he's saying that there are errors that Luther was saying, and you read them and they're like, yeah, that is kind of an error, but it isn't really what Luther was saying.

So it's not the best representation of Luther.

But there's a few things the Pope accused Luther of that I want to call out.

He says one of the errors that Luther teaches it's wrong is that the gospel can save as well as the sacraments.

Okay, so that's that's key, because that's going to get to the nature of the gospel.

He says the gospel can save you.

Luther says the gospel can save you just as well as the sacraments can save.

Also, that penance, for it to be accepted by God, requires repentance from sin.

That would be an error that Luther taught, according to the Pope.

That forgiveness comes through Christ and not through the merits of the saints.

So Luther taught that your your forgiveness came directly from Jesus to you and did not require the other merits of the saints of the church.

This one the Pope hated.

He said that Luther teaches the Pope is not the infallible head of the church.

Okay, I love this one.

Luther wrongly teaches that John Huss was not a heretic.

So sometime between his second and third debate, Luther discovered the writings of John Huss, who was, of course, excommunicated, burned at the stake.

Earlier, Luther discovered his writings and realizes, you know, I actually like this guy.

Luther teaches that purgatory doesn't exist.

And he teaches that if purgatory did exist, there would still be sinning, that's no freedom.

So catch that point.

That Luther taught, first of all, purgatory doesn't exist, but if it did exist, work this through in your mind.

If there is a place called purgatory, and you're going there to have your sins purged from you through suffering, do you recognize that even in purgatory you would still be sinning?

Which means you're expanding your time there.

There's no escape if you're capable of sin there.

Luther teaches that free will is a myth, and the sinful man is not free to do things meritorious before God.

And then finally, Luther wrongly teaches that indulgences deceive the faithful.

So Luther did not wait sixty days.

He immediately wrote a letter, and in his letter back to the Pope, he recants some of the things he said.

But listen to his recantation.

One of them, he says, I was wrong, and I admit it when I said that the indulgences were the pious defrauding the faithful.

I recant.

Instead, I say indulgences are the most impious frauds and impostors of the most rascally popes, by which they deceive the souls and destroy the goods of the faithful.

I'm sorry when I said that indulgence is deceive.

What I meant by that is that they're horrible and horrific and deceive everyone in the whole world, destroying their very soul.

My bad.

And Luther then burned the bull.

So that happens.

That led, of course, to his trial in forms.

I think most of us are familiar with that trial.

Twenty years after this, 20 years after Luther received that letter excommunicating him, the church held the Council of Trent.

This would be the formal excommunication of not only Luther but all Protestants.

The Council of Trent lasted nearly 20 years.

In that council, no less than 151 anathemas were levied to the Protestants.

And what an anathema is, is a declaration that if this person who's subject to the anathema is cut off from salvation and excommunicated from the church, which the Catholic Church can do remember, because in their system, your only access to saving grace is through the sacraments.

And so if they deprive you of the sacraments, then you are cut off from the hope of salvation.

That's how an anathema works.

You're cut off.

As I mentioned, this Council of Trent lasted, I think, 18 years, something like that.

And they had 151 different anathemas passed in those 18 years.

When somebody is anathematized, they are said by the Catholic Church to be delivered to the devil.

And they have a whole process of what the anathema looks like.

I want to read this to you, and I hope I hope you find this interesting.

I I'm fascinated by this stuff.

This is from the Catholic Encyclopedia.

It describes what an anathema ceremony looks like.

In passing the sentence, this is me reading from the Catholic Encyclopedia.

In passing this sentence of an anathema, the pontiff is vested in his stole and violet cape, wears his mitre, and is assisted by twelve priests clad in their vestments, holding lighted candles.

So you have the Pope here surrounded by twelve priests.

They're wearing their scarlet and they have the long lit candles.

The Pope takes a seat in front of the altar.

Amid that, amid the other twelve, he pronounces the formula of anathema, which ends with these words.

Wherefore, the name of God, the all-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us, binding and loosing in heaven and on earth, we deprive, and then put the name there, himself and all of his accomplices and all his abettors of the communion of the body and blood of our Lord.

We separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother, the Church in heaven and on earth, and we declare him excommunicated, anathematized.

We judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels, to all the reprobates, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demons.

After the Pope declares that, the priest there responds with fiat, fiat, fiat.

The pointiff and his twelve priests then cast to the ground the lighted candles they've been carrying, and the notice is sent in writing to the priests and neighboring bishops of the name of the one who has been excommunicated and the cause of his excommunication, so they may have no longer any contact with him.

So that is a pretty insane ceremony, right there, is the point of that.

Who is the subject of that kind of ceremony?

Who receives those kinds of anathemas?

As I mentioned, the Council of Trent declared 151 of them.

I am gonna read them all.

No, I'm not going to.

But it's a fascinating mix of stuff.

For example, if you deny that there's a historical Adam, you are anathema.

So if you say Adam was not a real person, anathematized, according to the Council of Trent.

Some of them cover marriage, some of them cover burial, they cover all the sacraments, really.

But when it comes to Justification, that's the key.

That's where the action is, at least for us Protestants.

Let me show.

By the way, as it argues justification, it is all over the map.

For example, they deny those who say that you're saved by works.

So let the person who says that salvation comes through works be anathema.

They also deny those who say that you're not capable of doing works because of your salvation.

So they deny both of those.

They anathematize both of them.

But let me show you a couple in particular.

If anyone says that by faith alone the impious are justified in such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to the obtaining of grace and justification, that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will, let him be anathema.

So to even smith that down even more, he's saying, if you say you're saved by faith alone and you don't have to do anything to prepare yourself for salvation, you're cut off.

And by prepare yourself, they mean as works to receive salvation.

They're very clearly teaching, it's a long section here, but they very clearly teach that you, as a sinner who's been baptized, so you know you've had Adam's sin removed from you, now you just have your own sin.

You have to do something meritorious to move yourself towards God in order for Him to give you faith and to energize the rest of your works.

You have to initiate your salvation, in other words.

Secondly, if anyone says that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sins for Christ's sake, or that this confidence alone is that whereby we are justified, let him be anathema.

This is essentially a quote directly from Romans 4, but it's fascinating to me.

It's basically saying if what the passage we read tonight in Romans 4 is true, if you believe that, you are anathematized.

And Paul very clearly says Abraham was justified before circumcision, before any works he did.

And the Council of Trent says, if you believe that, you are anathema.

The third one I'll share with you.

This will be the last one I'll share with you.

If anyone says that a man who is born again and justified, I find it so fascinating to use the phrase born again, and justified, is bound by faith to believe that he is assuredly in the number of the predestinate.

Let him be anathema.

In other words, if you think that because you are born again, you are predestined by God, you are anathema.

So notice they grant the concept of predestination.

They grant the concept that there are those who are predestined, namely those who will be in heaven, but they deny the idea that you can know that you're predestined based upon your faith.

So even if you know for certain you're born again, you cannot then reason to the fact that you are predestined by God.

I mean, take the whole system together.

They would say you're not saved by works alone, you're not saved by faith alone.

You are saved by faith plus works, and the works happen before salvation and then continue on after salvation.

So in other words, you're saved by works that are energized by faith that occur after your salvation, after your so-called salvation or your conversion.

Works come after faith.

And those works contribute to your salvation just as much as the ones before your faith.

If you believe that, you are anathematized.

Now that brings us to the word, our concept of anathema.

It is a biblical word.

It is used, I don't know, five or six times in the Bible.

You'll recognize some of these verses.

1 Corinthians 16, verse 22.

1 Corinthians 16:22

If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be anathema.

Followed by Maranatha.

Maranatha, O Lord, come is how it's translated.

But if you don't have love for the Lord, you're anathema.

Notice the difference between what the scripture says about an anathema versus what the Council of Trent taught.

Scripture teaches that lack of love for the Lord is what separates you from heaven.

Which is fundamentally different than saying lack of works.

Romans 9, 3, another verse that uses the word anathema.

Paul says, I wish that I myself, I could wish that I myself were anathema.

A curse is how it's translated, and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers.

Paul said, if I could trade in my salvation so the Jews would be saved, I would.

I'd like to be an anathema.

Of course it doesn't work like that, because Paul does love the Lord.

But I want tonight, just in our closing time, to look at two more uses of this word in Galatians 1.

I want to look at verses 8 and 9.

I'm a read starting in verse 6 where Paul says, I'm astonished you're so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and returning to a different gospel.

Not that there is another one.

You can see Paul recognizing his own contradiction right there.

You guys are leaving for a different gospel, to be clear.

There's no other gospel, so I don't really know where you're going.

But there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

But even if we are an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be anathema.

As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be anathema.

This is the biblical concept of an anathema.

Someone who preaches a gospel different than what the New Testament preaches, different than what Paul preached.

Now, Paul planted this church in Galatia on his first missionary journey.

This was an early church that was planted.

Galatia's a region.

There were probably several little churches that have been planted there.

This is before Acts 15.

It's before the council in Jerusalem, where they work through should Jewish converts keep the Mosaic Law, should Gentile converts subject themselves to the Mosaic Law?

They haven't worked through that in Acts 15 yet.

And so Paul has preached the gospel in Galatia.

The church has started.

He spent time ministering there.

And now he's left, and the people who are there are trying to submit themselves to the Mosaic law to continue on the justification process, to continue on their salvation process.

They're teaching that they must, and you can piece this together throughout the whole book of Galatians, but it's not just in these verses, but you piece together that this idea was taking root in the Galatian church that you would continue on the justification process by keeping the old covenant law, by keeping what the word commands from the Old Testament is what continues on the process of justification.

That is a different gospel than the one Paul preached when he was there.

Paul did not preach that you have to maintain the Mosaic law in order to keep your salvation.

Instead, Paul preached that you are saved by faith in Christ and that it is instantaneous.

The one who places his faith in Christ is instantly forgiven of his sin.

You're not forgiven based upon works, works of the law or works of the flesh.

You are forgiven based upon faith alone in Christ alone.

That was the gospel he preached.

And now in Paul's absence, the Galatians are succumbing to a different gospel.

They're succumbing to the teaching that the law plays a justifying role in eternal life.

And Paul's astonished at this.

He's astonished.

That word in verse 6 is just a shocking word.

I'm astonished.

Not just that they're leaving the faith, the church that he group of churches that he planted and loved, not just that they're leaving the faith, but he's astonished at how quick they're doing it.

He wasn't even gone that long.

And they're being lured away.

And they're notice the phrase he uses in verse 6.

You start to see a little bit of the foreshadowing of the problem here.

If you drag your eyes back up to verse 3, Grace to you.

Most of his letters begin that way, but here it's significant.

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from this present evil.

In other words, it's the giving of the Son and the Son's death on the cross and his resurrection.

That is what secures your salvation.

You experience in time through grace alone, not through works and effort of merit, but through grace, that grace is manifest in your faith, whose object is Christ alone.

There's no works in that except the works of Christ.

So, verse 7, he says there's not another gospel.

There are some who trouble you and they want to distort the gospel.

That word distort is interesting.

These people aren't coming to the Galatians and saying Jesus was just a good man.

They aren't coming to the Galatians and saying Jesus didn't really rise from the grave.

They aren't coming from to the Galatians and saying Jesus was just a moral teacher, and so the gospel's, you know, and the stories of Jesus, that might be interesting stuff to read, but it's not true.

They're not denying the gospel.

Do you see that?

They aren't saying Jesus didn't exist.

They're not saying the Bible's not true.

They're distorting it.

So they're saying what you believe about the Bible and about Jesus and about the gospel is true, but you're not seeing it clearly.

It has to be skewed just a little bit.

You have to contribute something to it.

And as you go through Galatians, you see the way they're distorting it is by saying you must contribute your works.

You must do things in order to receive your salvation.

Now, a Roman Catholic would probably disagree with this next sentence, but do you understand that the letter to the Galatians was written roughly 350 years before the Roman Catholic Church began?

As Paul writes this, I would say I would put the start of the Roman Catholic Church in the fifth century.

But regardless, even if Peter is the first Pope, this is before Acts 15.

Peter hasn't even taken over the papacy in the Roman Catholic system yet.

I mean, this is this is very early on, and it's so early, and Paul is telling them there's this is the gospel that you're saved by faith, not by works.

There's no sacraments here.

So he's not the Galatian heresy was not embracing the sacraments.

The Galatian heresy was not saying that you need penance to a priest and you need the transubstantiation of the mass in order to receive salvation.

That's not their heresy, but their heresy is very similar.

It's the same thing the Catholic Church teaches before the Catholic Church taught it.

That there are works you must do to accompany your faith to validate your salvation.

That becomes a gospel not of grace but of works.

A gospel of merit and not a gospel of gift.

It's distorting the true gospel.

Paul says in verse 8, don't listen to that.

Again, this is it's prophesying the Catholic Church in some ways, but if even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be anathema.

Notice the first person plural here.

Paul's putting himself under this.

Paul's telling him, if I show up some Sunday and I preach to you a different gospel than the one I preached to you yesterday, I'm anathema.

It's like preemptive church discipline.

If I show up some Sunday because I'm so mad at Peter and I say that Peter's got to do these works to be saved, you can cut me off, Paul says.

In other words, it doesn't matter who's preaching it.

Be it an angel from heaven.

That's why I read to you the bull the Pope sent, Luther.

See all the people he's summoning?

He wants angels to come to his aid.

He wants the saints through the ages to come to his aid.

He wants Paul to rise up and come to his aid.

But Paul's already cut off that approach.

Paul's already said, hey, even if I were to answer that bull and show up to condemn Luther, don't listen to me.

If anyone, even an angel from heaven, preaches to you a different gospel.

Very interesting reading commentaries are kind of split on this.

Some commentaries say, hey, this is totally hypothetical.

There wouldn't be an angel that would come preach another gospel.

Paul's just using exaggerated terms.

But I don't know about that because you think about all the false religions in the world, and most of them have angelic ties.

I mean, most of them are demon-inspired religions.

Even the Islam, which has it as its basis, you know, that you know, Muhammad received revelation from an angel.

You see so much of the dark religions in the world that are all claim angelic revelation or divine revelation, that I can't help but think that there are angels, demons, you know, angels, demons are angels.

There are demons that are inspiring works, righteousness, religions all over the world.

But even if an angel were to preach you something that sounds like 99% right, like the angel is preaching, the angel shows up and preaches, hey, Jesus is true and the gospel is a free gift of God.

All you have to do is, you know, three monthly installments of 999.

It's so little.

It's so little.

But once your own merit contributes to it is no longer the gospel.

It's no longer the gospel.

There's errors on both sides of this, of course.

There are those that say that you are require works for salvation.

You have to do works for salvation.

And let them be anathema, Paul says.

There are also those who say that no works happen because of salvation.

That you can be saved and still leave an unregenerate life.

You can be saved and still walk in darkness.

And that, of course, is not what the New Testament teaches either.

The New Testament teaches that the gospel actually does change your life, that you receive it by grace through faith in Christ, with no works involved.

It is instantaneous, and that immediate moment you are born again and justified by God.

You are a new creation in Christ.

The old has passed away, the new has come, but now the new is come and you lead a new life, walking in good deeds appointed beforehand to walk in.

And so the person who says you can be saved and not have a changed life is lying.

And the person who says you can be saved, but only by these works is lying.

If you say salvation requires works in order to be saved, you're anathema.

And if you say that salvation will never produce works in your life, you're thinking about the wrong gospel.

And so Paul repeats himself in verse 9.

As I've said to you before, I say it again.

You think, where did he say it before?

Well, just the verse earlier.

As I said before, just one second ago, surely you remember.

If anyone is preaching to you the gospel contrary to the one you received, now it's just general, not just an angel or Paul.

Anyone in the whole world, let him be cut off.

Because the gospel alone can save.

This is the anathema showdown of Luther.

The church declares Luther to be cut off.

Luther says you're the ones that are cut off.

You teach the gospel by works.

You're cut off.

And so the Pope writing Luther the Bull actually only served to solidify Luther's belief.

The Pope trying to force his hand actually did force Luther's hand to be very clear that no, salvation does not come through sacrament, it comes through faith.

It does not come through works, it comes as a gift.

It does not come as wages, but it comes as a free gift of God given because Jesus Christ has paid it all.

It doesn't come through the merits of the saints, it doesn't come through the good works of those who died with excess merit.

It doesn't come from any of that.

It comes through the sufficient merit of Jesus Christ and Him alone.

There are those that are just sincerely confused about the difference between the gospel that Paul preached and the gospel of the Catholic Church.

They're just confused because, you know, in many ways the Catholic Church is a chameleon.

It takes on the look of the culture around it.

You know, you're in Mexico and the Virgin Mary looks like an Indian goddess.

And I mean, it's that's true all over the world.

It morphs into the world system it's around.

You go to a Catholic Church in the United States, and you often it looks in many cases like a Protestant church.

It'll have, you know, singing of songs, something that would be very unusual in the global Catholic Church.

You'll see in the United States, you'll see a sermon with a guy with his Bible open and giving a homily from a pulpit.

It looks so similar to the Protestant Church because it is a chameleon.

And so it's very easy to be confused, but understand that underneath the skin of that chameleon is a very different.

What's beating in the so-called gospel of the Catholic Church is a gospel that says salvation is not on through faith alone.

It comes through sacrament, it comes through works, works, of course, that are energized by your faith.

They wouldn't say you're saved by works alone.

Your works are energized by your faith, but you have to have works before you have faith, you have to have works after you have faith.

Straight on into purgatory.

This is why I care so much about the theology of the thing.

I care so much that you understand what total depravity is, that sin stains every part of your life.

Sin affects every part of your life.

There's no deed you can do that is pure and holy before God on your own merit because sin messes everything up.

And so if you if you understand that, you recognize it would be impossible for somebody to be saved by their own merit.

It would be impossible for you to work hard enough to be saved because sin messes up all of your works.

You understand, therefore, why it's so important that salvation be a gift, because you cannot earn it.

When you understand that people are spiritually dead, you understand that they're not going to be the mover in salvation.

You're not saved because you initiated salvation.

God is the initiator.

God named you before you were born.

God numbered you before you were born.

He sent Jesus to die on the cross for your sins before you were born.

And he sent the gospel to you before you believed it.

And his spirit worked in your heart to give you faith before you had faith.

This is his doing.

And when you corrupt that with works, you lose the preciousness of the gospel.

When you say that you initiated this, you moved towards God.

You just deny the preciousness of the gospel.

You deny the saving nature of God.

Do you see how that changes God?

If you say that you had to initiate your salvation by working towards God, that denies that God is a savior by nature.

That God is like mostly okay with saving you.

He just wants a little help.

I mean, that just wrecks your theology in every area.

It makes God impotent, it makes God callous, which is why you fill out the system with the merit of the saints and Mary pleading with Jesus for salvation of sinners, and you've got to have others fulfilling the mercy and the love rule that for us is in God Himself.

But in a system of works and sacraments, it requires to be external to God through saints and Mary and even angels that plead for you.

Because there's some kind of recalcitrance in God in that system.

It just the whole thing gets wrecked when you start to chase it down.

But the thing that makes me the saddest about it is that people get trapped in it.

They get trapped in it because they were raised in it, they get trapped in it because it's all they know.

And they feel themselves dependent on the system for their salvation.

They can't imagine a spiritual life outside of it.

I'm sure there are people that are in the Catholic Church that believe the true gospel.

I'm sure of that.

Especially in the United States, because, you know, there's American Catholics that go to the Catholic Church and there are scripture reading and there is a Bible there, and they'll read the scripture and they'll learn about the gospel from reading the Bible.

Thanks, Luther, for translating it.

And so they read the Bible and they get saved.

And I mean, I can't help but imagine if someone's truly saved in the Catholic Church, eventually they'll have their ears open to what's being said around them and leave.

So I'm not saying that everybody who's part of a Catholic Church is unsaved.

Luther was part of the Catholic Church when he wrote the 95 Theses.

But I am saying that what the Catholic Church teaches about the gospel is anathema.

It is exactly what Paul means in verse 8 and verse 9.

It is a different gospel.

It's a distortion of the gospel of grace through faith in Christ alone.

It's a distortion of the gospel that says that your merit doesn't make you saved.

Your merit is what makes you need a savior.

That's distorted when works are required for salvation.

It's been 500 years, 501 years now since that papable was sent to Luther.

504 years since the 95 Theses in the law.

Think of how eager they would have been to hear the gospel that first time.

Trapped in this Judaizing religion, trapped in a works righteousness religion, trapped in a system, living away from Jerusalem.

I mean, it's it's impossible really to be a Jew in Galatia.

But there they were.

And then the news of the gospel comes to them and they believe with such eagerness, such eagerness, it seems like to me, such eagerness, they respond with having their sins forgiven, trusting in the coming of the Savior.

But then time goes by and they just who knows what happens in their heart.

They heard persuasive arguments from others.

Peter shows up, only eats with the Jews, and that starts seeding this in people.

People's minds and over time they lose the preciousness of the gospel.

It was so precious to them five minutes ago and they lost it.

I just I hope we don't become like that.

I mean if you think if you grew up apart from the gospel and you developed an awareness of your sin, your conscience convicted you, and you heard of a God who could save, and what would you do to hear the good news of Christ?

You would go anywhere, you would do anything to hear the gospel.

If you felt lost in darkness, if you were convicted by your sin and felt lost and felt alienated from God, but knew there was a way to be made right with God, you would go anywhere.

You would fly around the world, you'd go on a pilgrimage, you'd do anything asked of you by God to hear the good news of Christ.

And of course, the gospel comes into this world freely.

Well, you don't have to work to hear it.

It's handed to you.

The Holy Spirit implants it in your heart and opens your eyes to the truth.

And because of that, we can grow so cold to it over time.

You know, we can hear back in California at the Master's University.

I used to hear students grumble.

You know, they had to go to church in the morning and they went to their college group and they went to their evening service and they had three chapels a week, and that's six sermons a week.

That's almost one a day.

I mean, come on.

Oh, how quickly, how quickly you grow callous to something that's so precious.

Just rewind the tape earlier in your life and pretend you never heard the gospel.

Imagine going to somebody in Galatia in 46 AD, a year before Paul got there, and telling them, hey, there's there's a place you can go where you'll hear six sermons a week on how to be saved.

I mean, they would do anything to get that.

Anything.

And then they get it.

And then they grow cold to it.

I pray that's never us.

I pray we on this Reformation Day, I pray we never lose sight of the preciousness of the gospel.

There's nothing we could do to earn our salvation, but God just gives it to us through faith.

How sweet that is.

That God designed it that way to shed his love in our hearts.

He designed the world that way so that we could be saved and make much of Christ.

How precious that is.

Let's cling to that gospel and let's treat anything that distorts it as anathema, cut off from it as we cling to Christ.

Lord, we're thankful that you saved us not by deeds that we have done, by your own work through Christ.

We know this is the work of God to believe in the Son whom He sent, and yet even you accomplished that by instilling faith in our hearts.

It's a gift given by you.

I pray for anyone who's here tonight that has never trusted the gospel, or anyone who's listening to this message online, that has never confessed their sin to you and never trusted the death and resurrection of Christ alone for their salvation.

I pray that now they would do that.

They would cease to rely on their works or their sacrament through their church and instead would rely upon the gift of the gospel through Christ.

They would become a new creation through the work of Christ, not through their own work.

They would see their own work only produces sin.

But your work in our heart produces life.

We're thankful that you have chosen to do that work in the lives of many, many who are here tonight, many who are listening.

And we pray that that work would be multiplied even more.

We give you thanks in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thank you for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and church information are on our website at ibc.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.