Galatians 1:1-4

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Jean—prayers for nephew is getting married, safe travels;

Laura—prayers of thanksgiving for Suzanne’s health

Judy—daughter, Sarah, lupus;

Ann—Arnie Kesmodel on

Patti—prayers for Char Booth and family

Bing—Keith went home

Jim—Anne, having surgery, cracked vertebrae

Laurel—ultrasound, awaiting test results

Cora—facilitator for divorce care, seven people

Galatians 1:1–5 “1 Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— 2 and all the brothers who are with me, To the churches of Galatia: 3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Paul’s greeting to the Galatians. It is easy to read right over these opening five verses and say, ok, cool, Paul’s writing a letter, grace and peace. Let’s get to the important stuff. But I don’t want us to gloss over the richness of Paul’s introduction and first greeting. There is great theological depth here that will, in fact, answer the primary question of the entire letter. It’s here in these opening sentences. It’s like Paul giving them an answer to the test as he’s passing out the exam.

We start with Paul’s statement about himself, how does he identify himself? As an apostle. An apostle is one who is sent out, you can think of it as an ambassador, a messenger in some way. But, Paul is no mere messenger, he goes on and says an apostle—NOT from men nor through men, but through Jesus. What does that mean, “not from men nor through men?”

What’s the difference between from men and through men.

Paul is asserting something about himself, his apostolic authority. His authority comes because His ambassadorship, if you will, doesn’t come from any person, but comes straight from the source, from Jesus Christ. What he is denying when he says “not from or through men” is this—

His calling and mission in ministry first of all, did not originate with people, with any person or any church. It was not because the church in Jerusalem hired a search committee and felt like Paul was the best candidate.

His calling did not originate with man.

When a pastor is called in our denomination that call is made by God and affirmed by the church and within the individual, it’s from and through people. Which is fine, and we celebrate the way God gives us discernment to that end. But Paul was different.

Nor, he says, did it come through man. He’s saying there was no human intermediary giving him orders from God, giving his commission. Again, the image of a council at the church in Jerusalem, it wasn’t that Peter and John heard from the Spirit and then told Paul he should go.

Paul’s apostleship, his call to ministry came directly from Jesus Christ, which makes him unique. So unique that the Lord saw it fit to speak so clearly through Paul that his very letters to the churches would become holy scripture, God’s very word.

It gives him unique authority to speak to the church of his day and to keep speaking to the church even today.

The other thing I think worth observing about this, about the origination of Paul’s call and his authority is this: even though Galatians is the very inspired word of God that is infallible, it was still written by Paul and retains Paul’s particular personality within it.

I had a professor said there are Paul people and there are John people (and no, not the Beatles). That there are plenty of us who bristle at Paul’s directness, or struggle and encounter friction with some of the assertions Paul makes. It is this amazing thing that he retains his personality even as God makes it His holy word.

Now, my caution for us all as we read Paul—and we’ll see it in the very next passage, his directness and, seemingly, his sharpness—is to be willing to dig into the context and look beyond the style. The initial impression may be misleading, we’ll dig into this throughout our study of Galatians. But we start with this premise because Paul started here: His authority was not his own but comes from Jesus Christ Himself, because Paul had a direct encounter with the risen Lord, His apostleship has unique, divine authority standing behind it.

And I love what he says there, “through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead,” who raised him from the dead, he can’t contain himself when he talks about God, he just wants to add to it, theological depth and richness. We’ll come back to that statement in a bit.

v. 2: Paul is writing to the church in Galatia, a church he helped found and we don’t have to wait long in this letter to find out why he’s writing to them, we’ll get there shortly.

v. 3 And then he gets into what is a typical greeting for Paul’s letters: grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus. This introduction is much shorter than what is typical for Paul, but he makes sure to include this customary greeting, grace and peace.

What is the nature of the grace and peace greeting? It is not merely a nice salutation. He’s not saying, good morning! But it’s a reminder of two things: he’s reminding them of the grace they’ve received from God in Christ Jesus, a free gift of grace. And then peace, the peace they have with God and one another because of the grace of God.

You have received grace, your sins are forgiven, now you have peace with God.

One scholar put it this way: the greeting is both a blessing (grace and peace upon you!) and a reminder of what is true and what they have access to in Christ. In Christ, that’s really the center too and do you see, how even in the simplicity of his greeting, Paul is managing to communicate core ideas and doctrines of the gospel. It’s no accident, he wants them to hear about this grace and peace.

And of course he can’t merely say, grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, he goes on to then give explanation about Christ, reminders of who He is.

Vv4-5, Galatians 1:4–5 “4 who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age.

He can’t help himself, again, but to explain the gospel. What do we learn about ourselves and about Christ Jesus from v. 4?

He gave Himself for us! Yes, His sacrifice was in our place, the Greek word there that is translated “for” is also understood as “on behalf of,” Christ gave Himself up on behalf of our sins, in place of our sins. Where we and our sins should have been—the punishment of the cross—there was Christ for us and on our behalf.

What purpose drove Him?

To deliver us from the present evil age. To deliver us. The Greek here—ἐξαιρέω, exareo—means “to rescue.” He is deliver or rescuing us, that is why he’s done what he’s done.

Why is it that someone might need to be rescued?

Because they can’t help themselves! A firefighter rushes into a burning building to rescue someone because why? Because they can’t save themselves, they can’t get themselves out of the building, they need someone to come in and get them out.

That’s Jesus. It isn’t enough for Jesus from his place in heaven to look down at humanity and say: get yourselves out of this mess! C’mon, figure it out! Because we need to be saved, we need to be rescued, there is nothing we can do in this evil age and fallen world to save ourselves and Jesus comes in our place and on behalf to rescue us!

You see: this is Jesus’ vocation, his calling, his purpose, it is for our rescue. And Paul makes this very clear because he doesn’t want us to be confused about Jesus. He is not merely a good teacher which is what many in the world believe about him, and what many of the world’s religions believe about their spiritual leaders and progenitors—Buddha was a good teacher, Muhammed the prophet, Confucius full of wisdom. But that wouldn’t be enough.

Tim Keller used this analogy—switch from a burning building to a person drowning. A good teacher might walk up to the side of the pool and start trying to teach the drowning person how to swim. How helpful would that be?

Not very.

If you’re drowning in a pool you want someone to get in there with you and pull you out! That’s what you need! And that’s what Jesus Christ has done for us—we needed rescue, we need to be delivered and we couldn’t save ourselves so he gave Himself for us for our sins.

And why did Christ do this? Because it was the good will God our Father. Because the Father wanted him to, because God wanted us to be saved. This is the Father’s heart for His people that we could be rescued and he threw Himself in—through Christ—to save us.

This goes back to the first word of this paragraph: grace. Why did Jesus save us? Because of God’s grace for us, it wasn’t because we were so good, because we earned it. It wasn’t because we followed all the rules or kept the right rituals, it was because of God’s grace for us.

Again, I’ll refer to Keller, he used summarize the gospel very simply in this way: the gospel is the message that we are more wicked than we dared believe, but that we are more loved and accepted in Christ than we ever dared hope.

And final question that someone might be wondering about the gospel in these first few verses: how do we know it worked? how do we know that Jesus’ giving himself for our sins actually did the trick?

Well, Paul’s given us the answer, in the very first verse: “but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.” Who raised him from the dead, the resurrection is the vindication of Christ, it is the evidence that God had accepted Jesus’s sacrifice. That it worked! This is how we can understand the resurrection, the Father (not Christ himself) raised the Son from the dead as a public affirmation of the Son and His sacrifice. It signals Christ’s perfection and a sign of God’s judgment of forgiveness for sins.

But do you see how Paul, again, can’t help himself! He keeps coming back to the facts of the gospel. And here’s the question for us: WHY does he so thoroughly insert explanation of the details of the gospel into his introduction to the letter?

Because Paul knows what the primary question of the Galatian church is and he knows what the rest of his letter is going to be about!

Remember from our overview and we’ll see this thoroughly over the coming weeks: what is the problem the Galatians are facing: another gospel! They were adding to it, saying Jesus is great, but also circumcision! They were saying that Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t sufficient, they had to do more, adding to the gospel, and as Paul will say: this is no gospel at all!

But one could read the first five verses, merely the introduction, Paul’s initial greeting