Boundage Sermon

No Longer Bound

Introduction

There are many forms of bondages. Addictions of any kind, such as to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, food, television, video games, promography, and unnatural sex acts. In short, anything which binds us so that we become involuntary slaves, falls under the category of a spirit of bondage.

FOUNDATIONAL SCRIPTURE:

Gal 5:1-2

5 Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage. 2 Indeed I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing.

The Galatian believers, under pressure from Jewish legalists, were considering rejecting the gospel of grace and reverting back to dependence on the Mosaic Law for salvation. Paul wrote this letter to outline the dramatic differences between the two approaches to God.

Who Were the Galatians?

It is difficult to decide who Paul was writing to in the Book of Galatians. In Paul’s time the word Galatians had both an ethnic and a political meaning.

The ethnic Galatians were Celts who migrated from central Europe to Asia Minor in the third century B.C. They settled in the area around Ankara, the capital of present-day Turkey.

In Paul’s day the native Galatian dialect was still spoken there, although Greek had been accepted as the language of business and diplomacy.

By New Testament times there was a Roman province called Galatia that was larger than the original ethnic area. Territory to the south which was not ethnically Galatian was included in the province. Pisidia as well as sections of Phrygia and Lycaonia were formally part of political Galatia.

Whether Galatia refers to the people or to the province would indicate who the original readers of the letter to Galatians were. The usual view until the last two centuries was that Paul addressed “North Galatia,” or congregations of ethnic Galatians located in the northern part of the province. Personal contact of the apostle with these churches may be alluded to in Acts 16:6 and 18:23. However, a “South Galatian” theory is more widely held today. According to this view Paul wrote to churches in the southern part of the province, that is, to the churches he founded on his first missionary journey (see Acts 13:14–14:24) and later revisited (see Acts 16:1–5).

An obvious strength of the North Galatian view is that the northern part of the province was Galatia in both senses: ethnic and political. Also, it has been asserted that Paul’s description of the fickleness of his readers was a well-known characteristic of the ethnic Galatians in the north.

On the other hand, a strong case can be made for the South Galatian view. Paul normally used Roman provincial names, as did Luke in the Book of Acts. Also, the most natural understanding of Acts 16:6 and 18:23 is that Paul retraced his steps from the first missionary journey (see Acts 13; 14) at the beginning of his second and third journeys.

With the biblical and historical evidence divided as it is, there have been notable scholars on both sides of the Galatian question. Neither theory is clearly superior, though it seems that the South Galatian view fits better with Acts. The question is important for assigning a date to the letter; for this see the Introduction to Galatians.

In either case, it is obvious that the book was addressed to a church which was struggling with the Judaizers, a group that insisted that the Gentile converts keep the requirements of the law. Paul’s letter was a stern rebuke of this faction in the church. By adding the law to the gospel message, this group was in effect rejecting Jesus’ free offer of salvation.