Beware of pride and self-reliance. Beware of filtering the Gospel in order to dodge criticism or mockery. Beware of idolatrous revisions to the person and work of Christ. Beware of neglecting the Gospel, of going to your death without it.

John Shelby Spong was a boring liberal who swallowed and regurgitated every possible progressivist perversion of Christianity.

He rejected the inspiration of the Bible, the historicity of the Gospels, and the resurrection and deity of Christ. He celebrated sexual libertinism. He lived by his father’s motto: “Did God really say?”

But he was happy to dress up as a Christian bishop and to receive the respect and salary of a bishop of the American Episcopal Church for twenty-four years.

In his 1998 book Why Christianity Must Change or Die he scorned biblical atonement: “The idea that God required the death of Jesus as the price of forgiveness is nothing short of divine child abuse.” A bishop should know better.

Spongs have always been among us and until Christ returns always will. Their existence and the followings they amass testify to our relentless tendency to stray from the Bible in general, and the Gospel in particular:

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love.”

Which is why Galatians is so critical. And uncomfortable. But ultimately liberating.

This is the first of my ten expositions of Paul’s powerful letter.

Paul Establishes Divine Authority

Galatians 1:1–2a

Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—²and all the brothers and sisters with me.

Galatians begins with the writer’s name and office.

An apostolos (ἀποστολος) is a person commissioned and sent by another, to do something on their behalf. Paul has been commissioned and sent by Jesus Christ, whom God the Father resurrected to life.

Paul recounted his commission in his trial before Herod Agrippa. Jesus had appeared to him as he marched to Damascus to punish Christians:

Acts 26:14–18

Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?…I am sending you to [the Gentiles] to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.

Paul was not just an apostle in the sense that all Christians are sent by Christ into the world to make disciples (Mat. 28:19). He was one of the first-generation-only capital-A Apostles, immediately commissioned by the Risen Jesus from glory and authenticated by him by supernatural acts of power done through them:

Acts 19:11–12

God worked extraordinarily powerful things through the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to those who were ill, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.

Thus Paul describes his own “marks of a true apostle, including signs, wonders and acts of power” (2 Cor. 12:12; cf. 1 Thess. 1:5).

The Apostles and their writings form, along with those of the Prophets, the foundation upon which Christ built his church (Eph 2:19–21). As Herman Ridderbos explained, the Apostles “do not come forth from the church, instead the church owes its genesis to them.”

So Paul was sent “not from men or by a man” and was responsible to no human intermediaries. Paul speaks Christ’s words with Christ’s sole authority and he will forcefully exclude human authority or input into his ministry as he recounts his post-conversion movements in Galatians 1:11 to 2:10.

Christ does not mean for us to read Galatians or any of Paul’s letters as mere human documents, but as the words of the LORD. Indeed Peter defined Paul’s letters as “Scripture” (2 Pet. 3:16).

Galatia

Galatians 1:2b

To the churches in Galatia.

Paul writes to churches that he had planted in his first missionary journey in AD 48–49 to (what would be later recognised as) the Roman province of Galatia: the churches of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe in the southern part of Asia Minor.

The region was named for the Gauls, a Celtic people who settled there centuries before, as well as in France and the British Isles, and whose descendants today speak the Celtic languages of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, and Breton.

In Galatians 2:11–12 Paul describes misguided teachers from Jerusalem, he calls them “the circumcision group”, urging Christians in Antioch to return to Jewish ceremonial law. Luke describes the same damaging visit in Acts 15:1, which precipitated the Jerusalem Council of 49–50, just before Paul’s second missionary journey. This dates Galatians to just prior to the Council and puts it among the earliest New Testament documents.

Paul will sharply refute the poisonous teaching of the Jerusalem teachers: that Christians are saved by faith in Jesus and by keeping the Jewish ceremonial laws, of which circumcision was primary. The Galatian Christians were abandoning the Gospel the Apostle had proclaimed to them and their salvation was threatened.

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