Reading Galatians With John StottSample

Substance and Source

It seems that Paul’s detractors accused him of being a people pleaser who suited his message to his audience. But since Paul is first and foremost a servant of Jesus Christ, his ambition is to please Christ, not people. It is therefore as “a servant of Christ,” responsible to his divine Lord, that he has measured his words and has dared to utter his solemn anathema.

Paul insists that there is only one gospel and that this gospel does not change. There are certainly different gospels being preached, but that is what they are—different. The message of the false teachers was not an alternative gospel; it was a perverted gospel.

How can we recognize the true gospel? Paul gives us its marks. They concern its substance (what it is) and its source (where it comes from).

The true gospel is the gospel of grace, of God’s free and unmerited favor. Whenever teachers start exalting humankind, implying that we can contribute anything to our salvation by our own morality, religion, philosophy, or respectability, the gospel of grace is being corrupted. The true gospel magnifies the free grace of God.

The second test concerns the gospel’s origin. The true gospel is the gospel of the apostles of Jesus Christ—the New Testament gospel. But where did Paul get this wonderful gospel? Was it the product of his own fertile brain? Did he make it up? Or was it stale secondhand stuff with no original authority? Did he crib it from the other apostles in Jerusalem, which the Judaizers evidently maintained?

Paul’s answer to these questions is found in verses 11 and 12. “I preached this gospel,” Paul could say, “but I did not invent it. Nor did I receive it from others, as if it were already an accepted tradition handed down from a previous generation. Nor was I taught it, so that I had to learn it from human teachers.” Instead, “it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”

As in verse 1 Paul asserted the divine origin of his apostolic commission, so now he asserts the divine origin of his apostolic gospel. Neither his mission nor his message was derived from human beings; both came to him direct from God and Jesus Christ. He is affirming that his message is not his message but God’s message, that his gospel is not his gospel but God’s gospel, that his words are not his words but God’s words.

Adapted from Reading Galatians with John Stott. Copyright © 2017 John Stott's Literary Executors. Used by permission. For more information, please visit www.ivpress.com/reading-galatians-with-john-stott.