Entrusted with the Gospel
Entrusted with the Gospel
Galatians 1:18-2:10
by William Klock
I will never forget the first day I wore my letterman jacket to school. High school is full of tribes. There were the jocks and the nerds, there were the art kids and the shop kids, there were the cool girls and the stoners and the geeks. And it was obvious which tribe everyone belonged to. I was always carrying around a book by the likes of Tolkien or Asimov. And my friends and I avoided the cafeteria at all costs. Instead, we played Dungeons & Dragons in the library. I had both feet firmly planted in the nerd tribe. But I was also on the swim team. The swim team was one of those sports no one paid attention to. The only people who knew you were on the swim team were other people on the swim team. So I remember walking into school that day with my letterman jacket on and everybody stopped and looked, because there I was, one of the nerds dressed like a jock. But once the surprise wore off, everything fell into place. Suddenly people who had never been friendly to me were friendly. No questions asked. That jacket marked me out as part of a new tribe. I didn’t hang out with the jocks. I still wouldn’t go anywhere near the cafeteria. I still carried around my sci-fi novels and played D&D at lunch with the nerds, but to the other jocks it didn’t matter. I had a letterman jacket and that was all that mattered.
It was something like that for Jews, except the thing that marked you out wasn’t a letterman jacket; it was circumcision. There were other things a good Jew was supposed to do that would also mark them out, because there was more to the torah than circumcision. You kept the sabbath, you ate only clean foods, you avoided contact with gentiles. Those were the big ones. But circumcision was the marker. You could fail at all those other things. You could eat shrimp, you could do business on the sabbath, you could hang out with gentiles, but as long as you were circumcised you were still a Jew. Maybe a bad Jew. Maybe a people-pleasing Jew. But still a Jew, because you bore the mark of God’s covenant.
With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine how this would present a problem for the first Christians. Remember what I said last week. They didn’t see becoming a Christian as switching religions as we might think of it. They were still Jews. Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and he was the fulfilment of everything that Judaism stood for. When gentiles believed in Jesus, they were joining up with a movement that was very much Jewish. But what did that involve? The Lord had cleared this up for Peter in Acts 10, when he sent him to the home of a Roman centurion named Cornelius. Jews didn’t visit or eat with gentiles, but in a vision the Lord made it clear to Peter that through faith in Jesus, even gentiles were made clean. And this was absolutely earth-shaking. Gentiles were unclean because they were idolaters. They were sinners. In those few instances where gentiles were attracted to Judaism, converting meant being purified and then being circumcised so that they were no longer sinful, unclean gentiles. Only then could they associate with Jews and be accepted into the community. But Paul is stressing—against these agitators in the Galatian churches and their false gospel—Paul is stressing that this new Israel, this new ekklesia or assembly of God, is marked out solely by faith in Jesus and that since Jesus dealt with sin in his death and resurrection, those who believe in him are no longer sinners, no longer unclean, and in need of nothing else in order to be part of the community. In fact, going further, Paul stresses that the implication of this—and it goes against the grain of everything in Judaism of the day—the implication is that there is only one people of God. Jew and gentile together—it doesn’t matter, because the thing that always separated the two—sin—has been dealt with by Jesus. This is why any “gospel” that adds anything to Jesus is false. We saw in the first part of Chapter 1 that Paul actually calls down a curse on such teaching. The gospel is Jesus plus nothing.
So with this in mind, let’s finish our look at Chapter 1 and then carry on to the first part of Chapter 2. In the first part of Chapter 1 Paul has asserted first that his apostleship—his being called and sent—came directly from Jesus. He’s not the representative of any men. He wasn’t sent out by men—not even by other apostles. He’s been sent by Jesus. And having established that, he’s also stressed that his gospel came directly from Jesus, too. He wasn’t brought to faith in Jesus by Peter or James or anyone else. Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, risen from the dead, and that changed everything for Paul. Even then, he said, he didn’t go to Jerusalem to consult with the other apostles. Instead, like the prophet Elijah, he went to Mount Sinai to wrestle this through with the God of Israel. There he worked through the implications of Jesus risen from the dead. Only then did he go back to Antioch. Now we’ll pick up at 1:18. Paul writes:
Then, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [that’s Peter’s Greek name…Cephas and Peter both mean “rock”]. I stayed with him for fifteen days. I didn’t see any of the other apostles, except James the Lord’s brother. And then Paul adds to stress his point, Look, I’m not lying! The things I’m writing to you are written in God’s presence.
Paul uses this neat word here to describe his visit to Peter. This is the only place we ever see it in the New Testament: historesai. It’s related to the word historia, which means “an account” or “a personal story”. By Paul’s day it usually just had the sense of visiting someone, but it could still carry the meaning of “to hear another person’s story” and I think it’s clear that’s what Paul wants to stress here. He could have said that he went to Peter to be taught, but hewants it to be clear that he didn’t go to Peter for lessons on the gospel or on theology. He’d wrestled that out with God after his encounter with the risen Messiah. Paul’s gospel was Jesus plus nothing. Gentiles didn’t need to be circumcised or to live by torah. Paul had worked this out as the natural and inevitable implication of Jesus’ death and resurrection. So this visit was about getting to know his fellow apostle, Peter, to hear his story and to bring him up to date on Paul’s own story and apostolic ministry—and hopefully they’d be in agreement about it all. Again, Paul was sent by Jesus himself and his gospel came directly from Jesus, not from men. Paul goes on in verses 21-24:
Then I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia. I remained unknown by sight to the messianic assemblies in Judaea. They simply heard that the one who had been persecuting them was now announcing the good news of the faith he once tried to destroy. And they glorified God because of me.
So Paul and Peter met, they brought each other up to speed on their ministries and they got to know each other—lining this up with the book of Acts, this would have been Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem, about A.D. 36—and then Paul went back to Syria to continue preaching the good news of faith in Jesus the Messiah. The Jesus followers in Judaea knew who he was and they rejoiced that the man who had once tried to stamp them out was now one of them, but Paul’s point here is that if they’d seen him on the street, they wouldn’t have known who he was. Again, apart from being a fellow apostle of Jesus, he had no connection with the apostles in Jerusalem. He worked for Jesus, not for Peter or James. And, he stresses, no one had a problem with this. In fact, the people down in Judaea glorified God to hear of Paul’s gospel ministry. There’s an echo of Isaiah there, where the Lord says, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”
There is one thing that I think needs attention here before we move on and that’s Paul’s way of describing his ministry. He describes himself as “announcing the good news of the faith”. To put it literally, he’s “gospelling the faith”. It’s an unusual way of putting things, but I think Paul does this here to stress what’s going to be his main point in the rest of the letter: This faith—faith in Jesus the crucified and risen Messiah—is the thing that binds Jesus’ people together. It’s the one thing that marks them out as his—not circumcision or anything else. Faith in Jesus makes you part of the family.
So there’s about a decade of Paul’s life that passes that we know nothing about other than that he was apparently ministering in Antioch and the surrounding area. He picks up his story in 2:1, saying:
After fourteen years [this would be from the time he met Jesus], I went up again to Jerusalem. I took Barnabas with me, and Titus. I went up because of a revelation.
Not everyone agrees on the timeline, but this seems to align with what we read in Acts 11, where a prophet named Agabus, told the churches that there would be a great famine. This was in the middle of the 40s. The church in Antioch—and that included Paul—responded by sending help to their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. This is why Paul says he went to Jerusalem because of a revelation.
Now, Paul taking money from his church to help other churches might seem incidental, but it really isn’t. In fact, it’s very much part of the theme of Galatians. I think there’s a tendency in conservative circles to ignore the way these early churches cared for each other in response to people on the left making claims that the early church was Socialist. There’s no reason for conservatives to avoid this. Karl Marx was two millennia away. There was no “socialism” in the First Century. What there was, was Christians doing their best to live out who they knew themselves to be in Jesus. They were a family. That’s why we call each other “Brother” and “Sister”. And families take care of each other. When the brothers and sisters in Damascus heard that their cousins in Jerusalem were struggling, they sent help. This was a very Jewish way of life. This was how Jewish communities worked and I think what’s really remarkable here—and something we probably miss in our reading of passages like this—it’s remarkable that the early church was living this way. The Jews were literally a family, but these new churches, they were different, especially once you got out of Judaea. There were people of different races and nationalities, there were freemen and slaves, there were men and women and they quickly realised that just like the old Israel, they were a family. So what’s going on here is them trying to live that out in their communities. I think this is something modern Christians in the West need to be thinking about, especially as the world around us becomes more hostile towards us. Our culture is all about “me” and it’s materialistic and commercialistic and we bring that thinking into the church. We make it all about what the church can offer me. When we don’t get what we want or when we have a dispute with someone, we leave and go somewhere else. We go “church shopping”, looking for the right experience or the right combination of “features”. That’s the polar opposite of what a family is.
For Paul, this unity across all these differences of language, ethnicity, class, and sex, it wasn’t some secondary thing. It was central to the gospel. Jesus has one people. Gentiles who believed were no longer to be seen as “sinners” or as “unclean”, because Jesus dealt with sin on the cross. Anyone who believes becomes a full member of the one family.
So Paul went up to Jerusalem carrying the money raised in Antioch. While he was there—because he was already there anyway—he met with some of the other apostles to talk about his ministry. Continuing with verse 2:
I laid before them the gospel which I announce among the gentiles (I did this privately, in the presence of key people), in case somehow I might be running, or might have run, to no good effect.
So did Paul do this because he thought he might have got things wrong and wanted Peter and the others to weigh in one way or the other? I don’t think that’s it at all. For ten years Paul had been proclaiming the gospel and he’d seen its power. He had no doubts that he had the gospel right. He’d got it straight from Jesus, after all. His purpose, I think, seems to have been a desire to make sure that he and the others in Jerusalem were really on the same page. Things had come up. Maybe things lost in translation between Jerusalem and Antioch, and I think Paul trusted Peter and the others and that the problems were elsewhere, but he wanted to make sure. If nothing else, we get the sense that Paul really loved Isaiah 49 and that he saw himself in the figure of Isaiah’s “servant”. He quoted from Isaiah 49:3 back in 1:24 and now he alludes to Isaiah 49:4, “I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward is with God.” Paul was worried that he might be wasting his time. If the apostles in Jerusalem were preaching something different, especially something that added torah to Jesus, well then, Paul was kind of doing all this for nothing, because that kind of teaching was going to tear the church apart. Paul saw this united messianic community representing, unveiling God’s new creation in the midst of the present evil age. The fact that this new people existed as one despite all their differences, meant that Jesus had defeated the evil powers of this age on the cross. And if the folks in Jerusalem were going to undermine that…well…why was Paul wasting his time?
So Paul says:
But even the Greek, Titus, who was with me, was not forced to get circumcised.
Not so much because Peter and the others were on the same page with Paul, but because Paul stood firmly on the gospel he’d received from Jesus himself and refused to move from it. It turns out that not everyone at that meeting was well-meaning. He goes on:
But because of some pseudo-family members who had been secretly smuggled in, who came in on the side to spy on the freedom which we have in the Messiah, Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery… I didn’t yield authority to them, not for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be maintained for you.
Someone—Paul doesn’t seem to be clear who—but someone smuggled some folks into that meeting who shouldn’t have been there. He says literally “pseudo-brothers”. They pretended—even claimed—to be members of the church family, but in reality they weren’t. This highlights just how serious Paul thinks it is to mess with the content of the gospel. No doubt these pseudo-family members claimed to believe in Jesus, but when they realised that Titus, a Greek, was with Paul and uncircumcised, they insisted he be circumcised. He was unclean—or so they thought. This was no small thing. To turn the gospel into a message of Jesus plus circumcision meant that they didn’t really understand the gospel. They were gutting Jesus’ death and resurrection of their significance. They were fake family members. Paul knew that the gospel stands or falls on this. Either the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit defeated the evil powers of the present age, delivered people from their power, and made them new…or it didn’t. This was the same thing that was happening in Galatia and Paul took a stand even if Peter and the others wouldn’t. And, he says, he took his stand “so that the truth of the gospel might be maintained for” them—for his brothers and sisters in Galatia.
We’ll finish with verses 6-10. Paul summarises the end result of his meeting with the other apostles:
And those who seemed to be something—what sort of “thing” they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality—those of reputation added nothing extra to me. On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcision, just as Peter had been with the gospel for the circumcision (for the one who gave Peter the power to be an apostle to the circumcision gave me the power of the gospel to the gentiles). They knew, moreover, the grace that had been given to me. So James, Cephas, and John, who were reputed to be “pillars”, gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the gentiles, and they to the circumcision. The only extra thing they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor—the very thing I was eager to do.
Paul went into this meeting knowing what people in Judaea thought of Peter, James, and the other original apostles. The Christians there accorded them a lot of respect. They were “something” Paul says. But what Paul didn’t know was how Peter and the others thought of themselves. Were they basking in that respect and acclaim? Or were they humble ministers of the gospel? You see, what Paul stresses here is something that every gospel minister needs to take to heart—all of us, but especially, I think, pastors. Paul talks about the “power to be an apostle”. Energeo he calls it—where we get our word “energy”. But he’s not talking about some kind of tangible energy for the task, but the divine power behind the gospel call. Paul knew that the gospel wasn’t something that belonged to him. It was a message he was entrusted with and the power in it lay not with him, but with God himself. This is why Paul was fearless in his proclamation, this is why he could stand up in a synagogue and preach to hostile Jews and this is why he could stand in the agora in Athens and preach to hostile gentiles. Because he knew that the power in gospel proclamation lies with God. If it were just him, his ministry would never have gone anywhere. But since the power was God’s, Paul could confidently proclaim the good news of the Messiah anywhere and to anyone. And to Paul’s relief, even though there were some mixed up people in the church in Jerusalem, Peter and the other apostles believed the same thing—they were, after all, all on the same page. Peter had been given the same calling as Paul. The only difference was that Peter had been sent to the Jews and Paul to the gentiles—or as he puts it in verse 7, the circumcision and the uncircumcision. Paul makes sure we don’t forget the matter in Galatia.
In the middle of this, Paul’s description of Peter, James, and John as “pillars” jumps out at me, especially in light of why Paul was there. Remember, he didn’t go there to hash things out with Peter. He went to Jerusalem to take the relief money that had been raised in Antioch to help the poor in Judaea. To talk about “pillars” in this context calls up images of the temple and I think that’s exactly why Paul calls Peter and the others “pillars”. Because God was building a new temple, as Peter would later write in one of his own epistles. This time not a temple of bricks and mortar, but a temple made of people—men and women with faith in the Messiah and filled with God’s Spirit. Peter and the others had been the start of it and, as eyewitnesses to Jesus himself and having been entrusted with the powerful message of Jesus, crucified and risen, they were its pillars—holding up the roof and inviting in the world. But that temple imagery explains Paul’s concern for the relief money he’d brought from Antioch. That relief money from Antioch was a real, a tangible manifestation of this idea of new creation. The temple didn’t just stand by itself. It stood—and it stand here today right now—as a symbol of God’s intention to make the whole world new and to fill it with his glory. We see this, on the one hand, as these believers—this new family brought together in Jesus—cared for each other. But the nature of this family, it’s unity across language, ethnicity, class, and status was underscored for Paul in that these Jewish believers in Jerusalem were willing to receive a gift from the believers in Antioch. Unbelieving Jews probably would have turned it down. At least they would have asked questions about its origin. Did this money pass through the hands of unclean gentiles? Unbelieving Jews would have looked at this motley group of people in Antioch as an abomination and the Jews there as people-pleasers. But Peter and his people in Jerusalem saw the gospel, they saw Jesus and the Spirit at work in Antioch and knew the church there to be family, to be their brothers and sisters, even though many of them were gentiles. Again, all because and only because of Jesus.
So that’s our text for today. We’ll pick up next week with 2:11, one of the most significant passages in the New Testament. But what’s the takeaway here? I’ve touched on a few things already, but I want to close with two points that are closely tied together. First, notice that when Paul was confronted with this problem of a mixed church of Jews and gentiles, he knew that there was one thing and nothing else that resolved this old problem. That one thing was Jesus, specifically his death and resurrection. He knew that Jesus’ death dealt with sin and that those who have faith in him have been set free from their—from our—bondage to sin. We are no longer sinners. In other places Paul will say things like “once you were” and then he’ll go into a list of a bunch of sins, but then he’ll say, “but now you are in Jesus the Messiah”. You’ve been freed from sin. It no longer defines you. What defines you now, through faith, is Jesus and this new family in which he’s given you a place. This means that there’s one family. The cross deals with the Jew-gentile divide, just as it deals with all the things that divide us today. There is one family and our life as the church should reflect that reality. It’s one of the key ways we inhabit the gospel and lift the veil on God’s new creation.
Now, finally, closely tied to that is Paul’s insistence on the power and authority of the gospel. People were dismissing Paul, saying that he was working for other people or that he got his gospel from other people. In response, Paul has insisted over and over that his calling and his authority lay with Jesus himself. Neither the power that was revealed in his ministry nor the authority he had came from him—that is, from Paul. It was all from Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, we’re too often afraid to proclaim the good news because we forget that the power of the gospel lies not with us, but with God. We too often get discouraged when our proclamation of the good news doesn’t produce the results we hoped for, because we forget that the power lies not with us, but with God. Paul will write in 2 Corinthians that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that continues to work through our proclamation to change hearts, to change lives, to change whole communities, and to tear down the fortresses of the powers that once governed this evil age. Just as the gospel is about Jesus plus nothing, its power lies in Jesus himself. He sends us out to proclaim it, but when things happen, it’s not us—it’s all him. We must never forget that.
So Brothers and Sisters, come to the Lord’s Table this morning and be reminded of what Jesus has done for us. Eat the bread and drink the wine together and remember that by faith in Jesus, we are one family no matter our past. The things that once separated us fade to nothing in light of our union with Jesus the Messiah. But come, too, this morning and remember that Jesus not only died, he also rose from the grave. Remember that in him God’s new creation has begun and that we are part of it. Remember that his resurrection has changed everything and that it’s now both the lens through which we, his people, see ourselves, see each other, and see the world, but it’s also the authoritative root of our gospel proclamation. Brothers and Sisters, the same God who raised Jesus from the dead now sends us out, just like Paul, to proclaim the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Never forget that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is present in our gospel proclamation and gospel witness.
Let’s pray: Almighty God, who on third day raised your Son from the grave, keep us ever mindful, we pray, that you have invested your gospel with the same power. Remind us that you send us out, not to proclaim ourselves or our own message, but to proclaim with your authority the life-giving power of your gospel. Make us faithful to live out that gospel in our life together as your church and make us fearless to proclaim it to the world around us, knowing again that it’s authority and power lie not with us, but with you. Through our Lord Jesus we pray. Amen.