Galatians: Ideas About God or Knowing God? (1:10-24)

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The second lesson is from the book of Galatians, chapter 1, verses 10 to 24.

Galatians 1:10–24

For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God?

Or am I trying to please man?

If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.

For what I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel, for I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it.

I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.

But when he who had set me apart before I was born and who called me by his grace was pleased to reveal his son to me in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me.

But I went away into Arabia and returned again to Damascus.

Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days.

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

In what I am writing to you before God, I do not lie.

Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, and I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea that are in Christ.

They only were hearing it said, He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.

And they glorified God because of me.

The word of the Lord.

For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

So let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we were nowhere to be found when you laid the foundation of the earth.

You are incomprehensible.

You are God Almighty and transcendent.

And yet we come to know you as you are, as you enter into our human experience in a little manger, in a little baby.

And Lord, when we look at you, we see the face of God.

So would you give us the eyes of faith to behold you once again, Lord Jesus, clothed in your gospel and your grace and your good news.

Jesus, in your name we pray, come and fill our hearts today.

Give us strength to live for you and glorify your name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, I was going to begin this morning with a tug-of-war between the two sides of the congregation, but I think we might uh have to forego that.

Actually, I've been uh I've been thinking about big promises.

Have you ever heard a big promise?

I had a professor who used to say, if you want to uh if you want a theology of salvation, you know, we talk about our theology of salvation all the time, don't we?

I mean, we should talk about it every Sunday.

Trust we're doing that.

If you want a theology of salvation, just turn on a commercial, is what a professor of mine used to say.

And I think it's true.

You know, I have uh seen commercials appeal to people like me who struggle with self-confidence, and they promise confidence on the condition that you eat a butterfinger.

Or who doesn't want a healthier lifestyle?

Who doesn't want to be fit, ready to go?

All you have to do is eat it subway, six grams of fat or less.

I think that's a big promise when the sub of my sub of choice is the meatball marinara.

Or do you want to be desirable?

Men, do you want to be desirable to all the women around you?

Just use axe body spray.

These are big promises.

Sometimes they're weird promises, but they're big promises.

And we've learned through habit to be very skeptical when big promises are made, don't we?

We want to know what the angle is.

We want to know what you're really after, right?

And I don't think this is just unique to our moment in time either.

I think the Galatians are struggling to apprehend, to wrap their heads around big promises being made through the gospel.

Big promises make us suspicious, and big promises make the Galatian churches suspicious as well.

Now, last week we began our journey through the book of Galatians, Paul's letter, I should say, to these churches in the Roman province of Galatia.

And Paul is writing this letter so that he can clearly distinguish what the real gospel is from any lackluster counterfeits, right?

And here's the appeal of lackluster counterfeits, because we might wonder why would the Galatian churches trade the real gospel for anything else?

And the answer would be something like this: because lackluster counterfeits don't make big promises like the gospel.

Not as big a promise, at least.

Sometimes that makes it seem more believable.

Do you see how that works?

So Paul is writing this letter, coming to the defense of the gospel, which means coming to the defense of his ministry, which is delivering the gospel to the churches.

He's coming to the defense of the real gospel, which we learned last week, we saw last week in verses 1 to 9.

The real gospel is God's grace and peace through the cross and resurrection of Jesus who rescues us from our sins.

That's the real deal, Paul wants the Galatian churches to know.

He wants our church to know that as well.

The gospel, the real gospel, is God's grace, his undeserved favor, his peace, his shalom, his reordering and transformation of our lives through the cross and resurrection of Jesus who rescues us from our state of sin, from the guilt and condemnation that we would otherwise deserve apart from grace.

That's the gospel.

And those are big promises, aren't they?

And we probably struggle, like the Galatians, with the question of, but is that really true?

Is that the real deal?

Because those are big promises.

That's bigger than eating a meatball sub, if you know what I mean.

So here's what Paul is saying in our text this morning, verses 10 to 24.

He's continuing that same thought.

We should bear in mind Paul did not have it in mind that when this letter was going to be read, they were going to read a couple of verses one week and then come back the next Sunday and read the next couple of verses, etc.

This is a letter, right?

So we need to we do need to track with our minds as we study this in detail from Sunday to Sunday that, you know, Paul's got a flow of thought here, so we should be tracking with the flow of thought.

Paul is coming to the defense of the real gospel, and he's coming to the defense of the real gospel against what his opponents are saying.

Paul's opponents are accusing Paul of having another innovative spin on the gospel.

Well, the gospel that Paul came and preached to you is really just a gospel that he downloaded from the other apostles.

It's just another human idea about who God is and what he's done.

That's the that's the and so the Paul's opponents, you know, who sort of advocate for a sort of like, if you do all the right things, then you're gonna make God happy.

That's a that's a a promise of a lesser kind than the gospel, right?

Like that's not as big of a promise.

The gospel says it's God's grace and peace through the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

Period.

What the Paul's opponents are saying is, look, if you do the right things, you'll make God happy.

Which one seems more believable intuitively?

If you ask me, I'm generally going to say, well, doing the right things makes more sense, right?

Paul wants this Galatian church, he wants our church to know the difference between the real deal and a lackluster counterfeit.

And the good news is this: if we can grasp the difference, then we can glory in the freedom of the gospel.

We can glory in the assurance of God's love for us, which is unshakable and unconditional.

That's the good news of the gospel.

So here's what Paul wants the Galatian churches to know.

What's the difference between the real deal, the real gospel, and fake counterfeits?

The real gospel pivots us away from religious ideas about God and towards God's own self-disclosure in Jesus.

Let me say that again.

What difference does the real gospel make?

The real gospel pivots us away from our religious ideas about God and towards God's own self-disclosure in Jesus.

That's the difference that the gospel makes.

And let's unpack this a little bit by zooming in particularly on verses 11 and 12.

And if you have your order of service, if you have your Bible, I want to encourage you, I want to encourage you to bring your Bible Sunday for Sunday, because it's really helpful to see maybe how the text we're studying on a given Sunday relates to what comes in front of it and what comes after it, etc.

We're going to zoom in particularly on verses 11 and 12, and I do want to sort of swing back to verse 10 towards the end here, but let's look at verses 11 and 12, because this is this is the thrust of Paul's argument.

This is his thesis statement.

I would have you know, brothers, brothers and sisters, you could translate that.

Maybe, yeah, I've got time.

Um so let me just let me just talk about that word brothers for a second, because that that comes up in our readings a lot, and sometimes we wonder, well, hey, what about what about sisters?

And maybe some of us have uh translations in front of us that translate brothers and sisters, so what's that about?

The word that Paul's using here is a word, uh, the Greek word anthropoi, which uh is a masculine term, um, but it's not an exclusively masculine term.

It's understood to be inclusive, right?

So when Paul says uh brothers, it's understood in the culture that he's talking about the whole congregation, not men, you know, privileging men over women, not addressing the men and not the women, so to speak.

It's understood within that culture that that is an inclusive term, right?

So I do think anthropoi being a singular masculine term, brothers is probably as close in English as we're going to approximate it.

But I also think brothers and sisters is a perfectly legitimate translation of that, and we should bear that in mind as responsible Bible interpreters, that that's what Paul's trying to say here.

So that'll come up a few times, and let's bear that in mind.

Uh French is a little like that too, isn't it, Suzanne?

It's, you know, so if you have a group I understand of a hundred women, it's and you want to say they are, you'll say el son, right?

But if you have a hundred women and one man, it's il son, masculine, isn't it?

Now I'm not saying that's fair, but I'm saying that that we have a similar kind of you know grammatical understanding, and that's that's true for for Greek as well.

Okay, just a note, just an aside there.

I would have you know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel, for I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

Here's Paul's argument.

The gospel that I preach doesn't have a human origin, it has a divine origin.

This is not human ideas about God, this is God's own self-discure of Himself to us in Jesus.

Do you see how that works?

Right?

One is uh is an upward momentum.

It's our ideas about God, towards God, getting us to God.

Paul is saying, that's not my gospel.

My gospel is God's own self-disclosure, his revelation of himself to us through Jesus.

That's top-down, not bottom-up.

We see that?

Okay.

The gospel illumines, it enlightens us because it's sourced in God and not our own ideas.

So here's kind of the flow of Paul's argument here.

Paul wants the Galatians to understand this is not, this is not just human ideas about God.

And Paul says this.

He says, verse 13 and 14, humanly speaking, I was rigorously practicing religion as hard as you could.

That's how I lived my life, that's how I spent my career.

I threw myself into everything I understood would earn God's approval.

And the thing is, I was really, really good at it.

And I was re and I was so good at it that I was zealously persecuting the church because I was so sure that that's what God wanted, right?

That that was going to be doing something that he approved of.

This is, I lived my life maxing out on religious practice.

That's what Paul is saying here.

And he wants his story to point out the difference.

He says, into this rigorous religious practice of mine, God broke into my practice to show me himself in Jesus.

The gospel is what happens when God breaks into our lives, not when we, by the outcome of our own religious or moral practice or whatever, decide that we've earned God's approval.

So in Acts chapter 9, Paul, uh, well, we just had our Acts series, didn't we?

Acts 9 · chapter mention

So y'all are experts on an Acts at this point, right?

We know Paul's powerful conversion happens in Acts 9.

He's literally knocked off his feet by the risen Lord Jesus and falling to the ground.

Paul, now at this point called Saul, heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

And Saul said, Who are you, Lord?

And he said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.

It's this encounter with the risen Jesus that changes everything for Paul.

And he spends the next few years reflecting, praying, considering exactly what this means.

It's God's self-disclosure to him.

It breaks into his life from without.

Do you see that?

It's not Paul spending all this time generating his ideas about Jesus.

He says, Jesus came from without and broke into my ideas of who God is.

Paul wants us to know that he has got an impeccable, an impeccable religious CV.

He writes to another church in Philippi, he says, of his, you know, credentials, I was circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

In other words, this, I was cream of the crop when it came to religious practice.

I was killing it.

Literally.

Now, sorry, that just came to me.

But, and this is a big, big word here, but whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

Why?

Because the goodness of Christ, the grace of Christ, broke into his life from without and changed everything.

That's what Paul wants the Galatians to understand here.

God broke into my religious practice and showed himself to me in the person of Jesus.

So to be clear, verses 16 and 19, Paul says, I didn't get the gospel from anyone else.

I didn't download it from any other apostle.

It's true I spent 15 days with Cephas, with Peter, but I was getting to know Peter.

And I was getting to know James.

But I didn't just replicate the gospel that they downloaded to me.

The gospel we both proclaim, we get from the a common source, which is God Himself.

The gospel that the apostles proclaim is not a gospel they've invented, it's a gospel that we have received.

And that's a really important difference because we confess that ours is the one holy Catholic and apostolic church.

You know, apostle means sent ones, but the apostles are sent with what they've received from God, right?

We haven't made up this story, and so we should go and tell people about it.

We've received this revelation of God in Jesus, and now we need to tell people about it.

It's important that this we understand this gospel is sourced not in our ideas about God, but God's own disclosure to us.

And that's what Paul wants to be so clear.

And the result of this it shows the fruit of the difference here.

Verses 20 to 24, Paul says, My life was completely changed from persecutor in chapter 9, Acts chapter 9, to preacher.

Acts 9 · chapter mention

At the end of chapter 9, Peter is proclaiming Jesus boldly in the synagogue, and he spends the rest of his life, and he goes, he goes to his death proclaiming the good news of God in Jesus.

So the gospel has one direction.

It has one direction.

It comes from God to us.

Do we see that?

That's such a key difference.

For Paul, that is just the key difference here.

The key difference is that it is a gift from God.

It is his own self-disclosure, personal knowledge of who God is through Jesus.

It'd be the difference between, you know, I feel like I know Rachel better than anyone else, and I think Rachel knows me better than anyone else.

And in one sense, you could say, well, how well do you know Rachel?

And I could say, well, I know Rachel was born in Maryland, and I know that her favorite flavor of ice cream is all the flavors, and you know, et cetera, et cetera.

And um, you know, I could tell you all these things about Rachel, and if you didn't know Rachel, you might have a sense of, oh, sure, yeah, I know a bit.

But really what you know is you know about Rachel, right?

And that's a wonderful thing to know about, but it's another thing to know Rachel, right?

To know her warmth, to know her compassion, right?

To know her, to you can hear that she's a musician or you can hear her play the music, right?

Now we know this is true in some of the most important relationships we have in our life, right?

There is a key, there's not a divorce between the propositional knowledge of a person, right?

Knowing the facts about them, but there is a a union between what's propositional and what's personal, right?

To look someone in the eyes and know them.

That's what I'm talking about here.

And this is the kind of knowledge of God in Christ that that Paul is talking about here.

God's self-disclosure is not just dropping some truth bombs from on high, so to speak.

This is knowing God in Christ.

This is beholding God in the face of Jesus.

That's what Paul is saying.

That's what's happened to me, and I didn't expect it.

And it blew away all my categories.

And it did the same thing for all the apostles.

We didn't expect the resurrection, and then Jesus was raised from the dead, and we go, what is that about?

That's good news.

See, it's personal knowledge of God.

This is God's gift to us of himself.

It's not our project to work our way to God.

Do you see that?

This work belongs to God.

It's accomplished by God.

It's accomplished on the cross as Jesus does away with our sins, bearing them on himself.

And it's accomplished through his resurrection, being raised to new life so that we can share in his new and eternal life.

It's his work, not ours.

It comes to us like a gift.

And so it breaks into any religious or moral or whatever kind of practice we think is moving us towards God, it breaks into that, and God says, I'm gonna move into your neighborhood.

I don't expect you to meet my bar.

I'm gonna break into your life.

I'm gonna break into your neighborhood, your circumstance.

That is the gospel.

It means that the gospel belongs to God and comes to us like a gift.

It's not ours to make up, it's not ours to modify, it's not ours to revise.

It is good news to be received.

And that is good news.

It's good news that our knowledge of God, our knowledge of the good news of God in Christ, comes to us from God through the gospel of Jesus.

But the question is, is this how we think about it?

Do we give a litmus test for knowledge of God?

Because often I wonder if we assume that knowledge of God is a very, very intuitive thing.

And we're gonna just be able to intuitively smell it when we encounter it.

And sometimes I wonder if we don't get led down some dead ends because we're because we don't put the litmus test of where is this knowledge coming from?

Is it from God's Own self-disclosure, or is it my best idea of who God is?

So let me give you one example here.

This was uh I was listening to a podcast uh earlier this week, and it uh in this podcast was quoted a passage from a 1985 book called Habits of the Heart.

And in Habits of the Heart, the authors are discussing how religion in America, I think much the same in Canada, religion in America has moved from being highly public and unified, right?

It's very denominational, it's very institutional, being very public and unified to extremely private and diverse.

And so to illustrate, they quote a nurse named Sheila Larson.

And Sheila has this to say.

She says, I believe in God.

I'm not a religious fanatic, I can't remember the last time I went to church.

My faith has carried me a long way.

It's Sheilaism.

Just my own little voice.

It's just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.

You know, I guess take care of each other.

I think he would want us to take care of each other.

Okay, so how does that hit ya?

That's a really interesting quote, isn't it?

Because here's what I want to say.

I want to say, Sheila, you got some good ideas in there.

I think it's a good idea that we're gentle with ourselves.

I think it's a good idea that we love our neighbors.

But where are these ideas coming from, Sheila?

My mom's name is Sheila, so I also just, I don't know.

That's a fun factoid, I guess.

Not the same, Sheila.

Where are you getting your facts from, Sheila?

It's just my own little voice, Sheila says.

In other words, what I'm working off of is my best ideas about God.

But here's what I want to at, would want to ask Sheila.

I'd want to say, Sheila, I think you've got some good ideas here.

They're really from a human source, so what guarantee is that that they get us anywhere closer to God?

We might hope that they do, but what guarantee is there that that promise is going to deliver, really?

Or could it just be another dead end?

See, so I wonder if so much of our so-called knowledge of God or or our attempts to know God are really just human initiative to comprehend God through which, through, through that which isn't God.

Yeah, it's human attempts to apprehend, to comprehend God through a means which is not God.

Right?

I'm trying to, I'm trying to get to know God on my terms and not on his.

But what guarantee is there that that's the real thing?

Are you tracking with me?

I know it's a little bit heady here, but hang in there.

We just had uh a psychic fair in Port Perry, didn't we, this last weekend.

Did you see that sign on Queen Street?

It's a very interesting thing to me that this has uh become such a popular and and um and kind of mainstream uh practice, you know.

Uh I feel like as as a kid in the heyday of like, I don't know, new atheism or something like that, that was kind of seen as the like fringy, but now it's very mainstream.

And here's, I guess here's the question here Is this an attempt to understand God as He reveals himself to us, or is it a human attempt to apprehend God through that which isn't God?

Right?

I'll let you decide for yourself on that one.

Let's compare that with the real deal.

Let's compare that with what we know to be true of the gospel in Scripture.

Here's what the author of uh the book of Hebrews says.

This is how he opens his letter.

He says, in these last days, in other words, in you know, in recent history, God has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.

The Son, he is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.

After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

Paul echoes much the same in Colossians chapter one.

This beloved Son Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn, who's preeminent over all creation, for in Jesus all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things to himself, whether on heaven, pardon me, on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Here's what Paul is trying to say.

Here's what the author of Hebrews is trying to say, here's what we see in Galatians.

When we look at the face of Jesus, we see the face of God.

If we want to know who God is, we go to Jesus.

Jesus will shatter our human attempts to apprehend God on our terms, he will break into our lives from without, but we will encounter the living God in Jesus.

Lord Byron says, if God is not like Jesus Christ, then God ought to be like Jesus Christ.

And I say, hear, here.

The wonderful thing about the gospel is not that we're left guessing who this God is behind Jesus.

It's that God presents himself in all his grace and goodness in the very person of Jesus.

When we look at the cross, we see God dying for our sins because he loves us.

When we behold the resurrection, we see God who is raised from life from death because he loves us.

And when he promises that he will come again in glory, then he does so to redeem those he loves.

We see God in Jesus.

Have I told you the um my Thomas Torrents story?

I might have told you this already, but it's worth repeating if I have.

Thomas Torrance is quickly becoming one of my favorite Christian thinkers in the last century.

Uh, he's a Scottish fellow, and he served as a chaplain in the Second World War in a campaign in Italy.

Now, when he was in Italy, he was ministering to a dying soldier with who, with desperation in his eyes, looks up to the chaplain, Tom Torrents, and asks him, Here's what, let me uh, here's what Tom Torrents writes.

He says, As I knelt down and bent over this dying man, he said, Padre, is God really like Jesus?

And I assured him that he was the only God that there is.

The God who had come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us is our Savior.

And I prayed and commended him to the Lord Jesus, and he passed away.

Do you see the difference that the real gospel makes?

If we are trying our best human ideas to get to God, we will only ever be left in distress and uncertainty.

But if we come to Jesus to behold who God is, then we are left with full assurance, because there is no God hiding behind Jesus' back.

We have a God who loves us in and through Jesus, who reveals himself in Jesus.

And when Jesus brings the good news to us, we know that that good news is from God Himself.

So I might want to say, boy, Creighton, how do I really know that that's true?

Especially when Paul says this is great, verse 20.

Um, in what I am writing to you before God, I do not lie.

There's something about that that just, man, my postmodern uncertainty, it's like, bam, it's just red flags go off.

It's like, I swear to God, that's literally what Paul's saying, I swear to God.

And you want to say, really, Paul, do I really know that that's true?

How do I know that knowledge of God in Christ is the real deal?

I want to suggest a few things.

Knowledge always involves trust, doesn't it?

Knowledge always involves trust, whether you're a child learning to tie your shoes for the first time, or whether you are in a history lecture, you know, listening to a professor.

Knowledge always involves trust in the one who brings that knowledge to you.

You can't get around that.

Trust requires a trustworthy source, doesn't it?

We need to know that this person has expertise that I lack, or we need to know that this person has experience that we lack, or we need to know that this person is willing to put themselves on the line for what it is that they're telling us.

Maybe they're even willing to suffer for it.

These are things that generate trust, make us think that's trustworthy, isn't it?

Now, somehow we think when it comes to knowledge of God, we need to bypass any sense of trust.

We need trustless knowledge, absolutely objective.

And I want to say that's not how knowledge works.

Let's apply to knowledge of God the same litmus test that we would apply to knowledge, period.

Can I trust this source?

Can I trust Paul when he tells me that he is not lying and he points me towards God and Jesus?

And here's what I would want to say.

Paul does not point to his expertise, though he could.

Paul points to Christ's suffering and he points to his suffering.

Paul is willing to suffer as a preacher for the gospel he once persecuted.

And each and every apostle, well, tradition says save one, went to their grave, went to their martyrdom, proclaiming the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Friends, we have good reason to trust the apostle's witness to Jesus in Scripture.

And there are so many more avenues we could explore that trustworthiness, but I'll leave that there to say here we have the testimony of those who knew Jesus and were willing to suffer for Jesus because Jesus suffered for them.

So when we hear the gospel proclaimed, when we open up scripture together, when we gather to hear a sermon, it's not because of any gifts matter I have in the pulpit, it's because God wants to show us good news of his love and grace in the person of Jesus.

So we come to his word to meet Jesus, clothed in his promises and in his gospel, so that we can have the same assurance as that dying British soldier, that the God we meet in Jesus is the only God there is, and he pours out his love for us through the cross and through the resurrection.

And any lackluster counterfeit that builds on our best knowledge of God is not adequate.

But God has given us much greater news than we could ever have otherwise hoped for.

Today you can know this God who loves you in Jesus Christ.

Put your trust in him, come to his word, revel in his promises for you, and you will find that as you're transformed, much like Paul was transformed, God will be given the glory.

Just as folks have glorified God for Paul's own transformation.

The gospel pivots us from our religious ideas about God towards his own self-disclosure to us in Jesus.

I would have you know, brothers and sisters, the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel, for I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

Thanks be to God.

Hallelujah.

Thank you for listening today.

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