Having a day off
work is super helpful, especially when your cat has a vet appointment early in
the morning the same day, because it forces you to get up early and be
productive. As such, I decided to return to Galatians, and look specifically at
the following question: “Is Paul really living in love when he talks harshly
against the people leading the Galatians astray?”
And to be totally
honest, statements that could be taken harshly occur as early as 1:8. “Even if
we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than what we
have preached to you, a curse be on him”
(emphasis added). Then in 4:30, Paul says, “Throw out the slave and her son,
for the son of the slave will never inherit with the son of the free woman.”[1]
And then Paul goes off (for lack of a better phrase) in 5:2-12:
Take note! I, Paul, tell you that if
you get yourselves circumcised, Christ will not benefit you at all. Again
I testify to every man who gets himself circumcised that he is obligated to
keep the entire law. You who are
trying to be justified by the law are alienated from Christ; you have fallen
from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the
hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision accomplishes anything; what matters is faith working through
love. You were running well. Who
prevented you from obeying the truth? This persuasion did not come
from the One who called you. A little yeast leavens the whole lump of
dough. I have confidence in the Lord you will not accept any other view. But whoever it is that is confusing you will
pay the penalty. Now brothers, if I still preach circumcision, why am
I still persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished.
I wish those who are disturbing you
might also get themselves castrated! (emphases added).
I hold to this statement: “The
whole point of the Bible is love. Each of the 66 books in our canon emphasizes
a different aspect, but they all describe and promote love.”[2]
As such, I hold that the gospel of God’s love for sinful man can be expressed clearly
from each passage (rightly exegeted and exposited), and I hold that the
personal application of every passage should have something to do with love
(either for God or man) as well. So the question for today is: “how do we apply
love from the above passages that have Paul blasting dudes?”
The first thing to
say is that love is not defined as telling people that they’re great no matter
what they do or say. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Teach a youth about the way
he should go; even when he is old he will not depart
from it,” and it is better translated/interpreted, “the way you train a
child is the way he will turn out.” The point being: “love your child enough to
discipline them.” While discipline may seem harsh to some, it teaches valuable
lessons that will prove invaluable later in life. Proverbs pulls no punches
when it says, “The one who will not use the rod hates his son, but
the one who loves him disciplines him diligently” (13:24). Love is
therefore defined as thinking of others ahead of yourself. It would be much
easier to let someone go on in their destructive behavior, especially when
society says, “Physical discipline isn’t good for a child’s self-esteem.”[3]
If you truly love your child, you teach them that bad decisions cause pain (and
a spanking is a lot less pain then a gunshot wound to the head because lack of physical
discipline led a child to join a gang [cf. Proverbs 1:8-18]).
By way of
comparison, Paul is loving the Galatians enough to rebuke them and say, “You’re
wrong if you listen to these other people.” And, as will be made clear in the next few
posts through his letter, theology
matters because wrong thinking causes wrong living. Paul wanted the
Galatians to prove that their salvation was real, but they couldn’t do this if
they reverted back to the Law. Paul says, “You who are trying to be justified
by the law are alienated from Christ; you have fallen from grace,” (5:4).
MacArthur explains, “To attempt to be justified by law is to reject the way of
grace. . . . Law and grace cannot be mixed. As a means to salvation they are
totally incompatible and mutually exclusive. To mix law with grace is to
obliterate grace. . . . Legalism does not please God but offends Him.”[4]
Earlier, he explained, “Whether before or after conversion, trust in human
works of any kind is a barrier between a person and Christ and results in
unacceptable legalism.”[5]
Paul doesn’t want anyone
to be separated from Christ. He made this truth abundantly clear in Romans
9:1-3, “I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience is testifying
to me with the Holy Spirit— that I have
intense sorrow and continual anguish in my heart. For I could almost wish to be cursed and cut
off from the Messiah for the benefit of my brothers, my own flesh and blood.”
As such, he boldly rebukes people who are apostatizing from the faith (Galatians
1:6) and pleads with them to return to the truth (5:1). It takes real love to actually be willing to tell someone that they are
wrong, and to risk alienating yourself from them; false love tells people
exactly what they want to hear.
“But what about
the people Paul told should be accursed (1:8) or thrown out (4:30) or castrated
(5:12)?” you object. “How is that loving?” And I will admit that you bring up a
good point. But the first thing to note is that the recipients of this letter
were not those people. Those statements were written to the deceived, not the
deceivers, in order to show the deceived the gross error of their heeding the teaching
of the deceivers. Paul’s love is primarily reaching out to the deceived to set
them back on the right path so that they can end up at the right destination.
However, I firmly
believe that Paul expected the Judaizers (deceivers) to hear/see the content of
the letter. And I also firmly believe that while they probably were greatly offended
at what Paul wrote, he was no doubt hoping for conversion from them. I back up
this thought by quoting Titus 1:13 where Paul says rebuke is for the purpose of
being sound in faith: “[R]ebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the
faith.”
Considering that
the most literal translation of Galatians 5:10 says, “but the ones who are
troubling you will bear the judgment”
(emphasis added). Paul is warning them of the fact that judgment awaits false
teachers. This judgment was described in 1:8 when Paul said that the one who
teaches a different gospel is to be accursed. One scholar explains that the
word translated judgment “means the ‘decision’ of the judge . . . as the result
of the action, the sentence. . . . Usually the decision is unfavorable, and it
thus bears the sense of condemnation.”[6]
As such, Paul wants the Judaizers to know that they are standing over the pit
of hell, and unless they turn from that, they will be damned eternally.
A problem with
many who call themselves Christians today is that they are too comfortable with
the fact that millions of people are headed to hell because they don’t know
Jesus. Jesus taught, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”
(Matthew 5:44), and there’s nothing more loving than to tell someone that they
are in danger of hell. Even secular society would agree with me; check out the
following quote from atheist Penn Jillette, of the magician duo, Penn &
Teller:
I’ve always said
that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. I don’t respect that at all.
If you believe that there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to
hell or not getting eternal life, and you think that it’s not really worth
telling them this because it would make it socially awkward—and atheists who
think people shouldn’t proselytize and who say just leave me alone and keep
your religion to yourself—how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?
How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible
and not tell them that?
I mean, if I believed,
beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you, and you didn’t
believe that truck was bearing down on you, there is a certain point where I
tackle you. And this is more important than that.[7]
Paul does not hate the false
teachers. He hates the spiritual terrorism they are inflicting on the converts whom
he loves deeply. He hates the fact that they are undermining the work of his
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He hates the fact that they are blind to their
error. And he loves them enough to try to help them see their need for repentance.
He points out the coming judgment as the curse of God, and trusts God to awaken
those whom He will. Paul’s whole letter is a call to wake up, regardless of who
the reader is.
He tells the
Galatians to throw the deceivers out (4:30) because he wants his readers to
separate from false brothers. If the Judaizers were allowed to stay, then they
would think that there was no need for them to change, and they would continue
to harmfully influence the Galatians. By telling the Galatians to throw them
out, it forces everyone involved to ask themselves, “Do I trust Christ, or my
works?” Isolation gives people time to think, and Paul wanted everyone in
Galatia to think about the foundation of their faith. He risked sounding
hateful, because he loved them enough to counsel them for the best.
And then we come
to Galatians 5:12, which I did not do enough justice to in my original post on
5:2-12. Here Paul says, “I wish those who are disturbing you might also get
themselves castrated!” I do not believe that Paul is so angry that he is
telling them he hopes they accidentally neuter themselves. Rather, I think he
is challenging their assumed spirituality based on works. Cole explains,
If they are so enthusiastic about
circumcision, one ‘mutilation’ of the flesh, why not go the whole way and
castrate themselves, as did the indigenous eunuch priests of Asia Minor in
honour of their strange, barbarous gods? That is the only possible meaning of apokopsontai,
mutilate themselves. The language is bitter, but it is not merely a
‘coarse jest’, as is sometimes said. It is designed to set circumcision in its
true light as but one of the many ritual cuttings and markings practised in the
ancient world. True, God had once used circumcision as the ‘sign of the
covenant’ in Israel; but, since he was not now using it in the Christian
church, it had no more relevance to the Gentile Christians than any other of
these strange customs. Indeed, the eunuch priests of paganism undoubtedly
thought that they were acquiring great ‘merit’ by their action. In this sense
at least, therefore, there is a real comparison.[8]
If they were to heed this advice by
Paul, which no one in their right mind would, it would still accomplish nothing
for them. This is yet a final attempt by Paul to say, “To add any human effort or act to God’s
gracious provision through the death of His Son is to exchange the saving
gospel of Jesus Christ for the damning falsehood of paganism.”[9]
Trust Christ! Don’t trust works.
So, with that, I argue
that Paul’s whole underlying motivation throughout the letter of Galatians is love.
He wants people reconciled to God in the only way possible: the blood of
Christ!
Now when I go to
pick up my cat from the vet, I’ll ask him if the Judaizers really should get
themselves castrated, because he’ll know firsthand what it’s like. I guarantee
that he’ll say, “Meow,” which I’ll translate as “No!” And I would argue that
Paul would say the same, because his point was only to show the Judaizers the
foolishness of trusting the work of circumcision when other pagans were “much
more devoted.”
Soli Deo Gloria.
Solus Christus.
[2]
Josh Wingerd, “Living to Love (3 of 3),” http://lilfytr.blogspot.com/2016/05/living-to-love-lil-fytr-explanation-3.html.
[3]
Guelph Mercury, “Spanked Children more likely to have low self-esteem,” Guelph
Mercury Tribune, January 7, 2011, http://www.guelphmercury.com/living-story/2685238-spanked-children-more-likely-to-have-low-self-esteem/,
accessed January 27, 2017. Excerpt from
article:
“Spanking a child is not a quick
fix for bad behaviour. Spanking teaches children not to trust their parents. It
hurts the parent-child relationship as fear, anger and resentment builds up.
Fear of being spanked along with a weak parental bond can damage a child’s
self-esteem. Children who are spanked are more likely to have screaming
tantrums, get into fights, hurt animals and refuse to share. Using spanking to
correct behaviour distracts the child from learning to resolve conflict
effectively. What he or she is learning is that when adults get mad, they use
hitting as a way to express anger and solve problems.”
[4]
John MacArthur, Galatians, 135.
[5]
Ibid., 134.
[6]
Friedrich Büchsel, “krivnw, krivsi",
krivma . . .” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 942.
[7]
Penn Jillette, quoted, complete with video link, on https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/justintaylor/2009/11/17/how-much-do-you-have-to-hate-somebody-to-not-proselytize/.
Emphasis in original.
[8]
R. Alan Cole, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries – Galatians, (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 2008), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, 203.
[9]
John MacArthur, Galatians, 142.
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