JAMES, GALATIA, AND FAITH

Most modern scholars seem to agree that the book of James was written to Messianic Jews living in what is known as Galatia.  Of course, we wouldn't recognize Galatia today because it is almost completely woven into the modern nation of Turkey.  The Celtic genetic influence is clearly visible in the large number of Turks with red hair.  Which has nothing to do with the letter of James to the Messianic Jews in Galatia.  At the same time, the Gauls of Christ's day had a huge influence upon the Jewish people who lived there.  Even Paul himself was from the city of Tarsus which was situated in southern Galatia.  For James, (we won't try to discern which James) the message he brought to the Messianic Jews in Galatia was typically Jewish.  At the time of this letter, Paul hadn't written one letter to any church yet.  Paul was still going into the Jewish synagogues, and winning converts to "the Way," as Christianity was called in the beginning.  

It is said that Martin Luther despised the book of James with its emphasis upon works, and condemnation of those whose lives were empty of works. Yet, a more modern understanding of James' writing shows that his reasoning was in line with the words of Jesus.  Let me use an example to prove my point.

Every year my wife makes me plant a garden.  Some of the plants are already cultivated and grown from seed somewhere else, mostly tomatoes, peppers, and strawberries.  Still, whenever I put a seed in the ground, it is a seed.  I don't know what that seed will be until it begins to grow.  I water it, fertilize it, and remove weeds so that it will grow.  Within that seed is the genetic information that will tell it what it is, and what it must do.  As a seed, it doesn't have one piece of fruit on it.  The fruit is in it, written within its genetic framework.  Environmental conditions dictate whether the fruit will come.  I've planted gardens only to have them devoured by bugs, and disease.  I planted seeds when the spring rains came, and then watched severe drought, and heat burn the plant up.  Still, no matter what conditions were around the plant, it at least attempted to make fruit.  

James is arguing the same point, but in a view toward our own lives being fruitful.  Never once does James say that doing good works is the path to salvation.  He simply points out the obvious, that we should be producing fruit.  This is the same message Christ taught.  James questions the faith of a believer if they don't produce the expected fruit.  I like to look at faith as the DNA code of our being a new creation in Christ.  Our fruit reveals our DNA.  Works (fruit) are the proof of who we are.  Whether we are grapes, corn, wheat, figs, or any other number of other fruit bearing plants, we have to bear fruit.  

The Messianic Jews in Galatia would've understood this.  I think Martin Luther wrestled with the book of James because he'd seen the dark side of the early Catholic church.  Living in Grace, and living by faith is one of the hardest things for Christians to do.  It is human nature to establish dogma, and do 'things' to earn right standing with whatever god we worship. Thankfully, Jesus paid the price for our salvation, and all we have to do is believe that.  Once we believe, and are born again, we are free to live out what our spiritual DNA says we are.  Just as chlorophyll is the life blood of the plant kingdom, so to is love the life's blood of Christians.  Love, will feed our works, and produce the seed of future generations to come. Love is the message of James.  Look at your life, remove the weeds, kick out the bugs, and love.    

 

ETERNITY

 As we're about to wind up our look into Galatians, eternity is something I've been wrestling with since we began looking into the celtic peoples that became the Galatians.  The Gaelic Celts who left a trail of death and destruction as they moved into what would later become known as Galatia, were feared for their fearlessness in battle.  Their culture was based upon dying with honor upon a battlefield and securing a place of honor in the afterlife.  As we've read through Paul's letter to the Galatians it is apparent that he didn't need to convince them of life after death.  They understood Eternity.  Paul's persuasion was more focused on the path to enter eternity, which stands in stark contrast to our present day.  

Christianity is almost solely focused on and is concerned with our lives after this fleshly tent is laid to rest.  The promises of God, the work of the cross, and the entire reason for the resurrection was to procure our place in eternity. It seems to me that there isn't much belief in eternity in today's culture.  A matter of fact, most people I talk to who don't believe in Christianity, don't believe in God, and ultimately don't believe in eternity.  The moral beauty of Christianity is not its greatest drawing card, and even less so without a belief in eternity. Those who believe that this life is all there is are more prone to be atheistic, or agnostic at best.  Without eternity, Christianity is a fruitless experiment.  

Someone asked me just this week if there was a book of the bible I would recommend to an atheist to convince them of Christ.  The answer is, NO.  Without a belief in Eternity, or should I say eternal life, there would be no reason I could give for someone to believe in Christ.  It'd be easy to blame a disregard for eternity on the worldly culture of our present day, but the worldly culture of today is a symptom of unbelief.  A belief in the afterlife is established in childhood.  I grew up in a home, and a church where life after death was used as cudgel to make me be good, and establish morals within me.  Fear of God, and His judgment were pounded into me, and became part of my emotional life in this present day.  It didn't represent Christ, and instead put me in the place of failure every day.  It took a long time for me to discover eternity outside of judgment.  It took a long time to understand that those who will be judged at the end of the age, didn't believe in eternity.  If any part of the letter to the Galatians identifies the fact that it was definitely written to them, it would be the absence of having to convince them of eternity.  

If we are to give our children the very best gift we can give them, I believe we need to convince them of eternity.  If we are to make that gift wondrous, and able to withstand the pressures of this present age, we need to make eternal love real to them.  Without love, who would want to live forever?  

GALATIANS 3 PART 2

We're going to take up where we left off in Galatians chapter three.  If you open your bible to verse 15, you will see more than Paul's intellectual understanding of grace. He makes his greatest argument for grace through the work of the Cross, versus works of the law.  The arguments are simple yet profound, and display Paul's deep understanding of Torah, and the principals of the promise.  Even more astounding is the fact that Paul is addressing gentiles who didn't have the cultural heritage of Judaism, or even a race identity as Hebrews.  Paul would eventually give his life to erase the divide between Jews and gentiles. Sadly, the divide still exists.  

It would be easy to think that with Christianity having spread to almost every nation on earth, that this divide wasn't an issue, but it continues because of erroneous teaching in the church.  It still continues because men simply can't give up control of their fate to their creator.   Just because someone calls themselves a Christian, doesn't mean they are.  Sadly, even well meaning Christians can become confused if they fail to listen to Holy Spirit, and ignore the cultural backdrop onto which Paul's message was put in front of.  

There are many awesome ideas that Paul puts forth in the 15 verses we're going to look at, but here are three that stand out to me.

The Promises to Abraham and His child.

The purpose of the law.

The Promises to all who believe. 

If we can't clearly express the promises of Abraham, and how they are important to others, we risk losing our ability to bring the nations to Christ.  We don't have to make the gospel relevant to the day and age we live in, we have to know what the gospel is and does for everyone we touch on a daily basis.  Just as Holy Spirit used Paul to make the gospel appealing to a bunch of rowdy Celts in Galatia, we can still make the gospel appealing to a dying generation.

Last week I was talking to a wonderful man of God who is also a landlord.  He was  about how his denomination was facing a crisis in reaching out to young people.  Among the denomination's leadership there was a sense that they could no longer reach young people for Christ.  As the leadership began to brainstorm the problem, they used old worn out ideas about relevancy, modernization, technology, and message. I asked him what the average age of the people in his church was, and he told me about 68 years old.  What he said next surprised me; Some of those need to die out in order for new blood to come in.  

I said NO, they need to pray like never before for a revival to sweep through their churches, and to preach Christ, and HIM crucified.  Everything else we do is 'pop culture' and generational reaction to the gospel.  If I want to praise God today, I'm not going to go find a harpsichord and play Bach.  Even as beautiful as it would be, it wouldn't 'appeal' to this generation.  However, if I tell what Christ has done on the cross for all mankind, it will have the same effect as it did 40 days later when Peter preached his Pentecost sermon.  We are the relevance to this generation, and the message of Christ is the appeal.  Holy Spirit knows who we are going to face everyday, and if we are listening to Him, He will fill our mouths with the relevance, and the message.  If you don't think you know what to say, just open your mouth and watch what spills out.  

Galatians Chapter 3

The gospel of Christ is exclusionary on purpose, yet the invitation for salvation is to everyone who will believe. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul not only has to deal with the quirks, and culture of the Galatian people, but with the interference of legalistic Messianic Jews who are insisting that the gentiles adhere to Jewish observances as a prerequisite for Messianic life.  We’re never told exactly who these “Judaizers” are, but we know that they came from a group of Jewish Christians who seemed intent on continuing to observe the law as well as believing that Christ was the Messiah.  

Chapter 3 is the heart of the matter for Paul. His arguments against religious observance of the traditions of men became the foundation of Christianity.  This was never Paul’s intent.  I am sure that Paul would be astounded to learn that his intimate letters to the churches of Galatia had shaped the church.  

What we can glean from the letter is that Paul had a deeply intimate relationship with the people of Galatia, and he was defensive of them.  

In chapter three, we see him use language that he doesn’t use in letters to any of the other churches he’d written to.

First, he plays to their cultural fear of curses, and belief in the afterlife.  As we learned in our study of the peoples of Galatia, the only thing Gauls feared was heaven itself.  War and death had been their lifestyle for centuries prior to settling in Anatolia, so it is safe to assume these were fearless men and women in battle, without a fear of death.   So Paul’s question as to who had bewitched them was designed to appeal to their fear of being placed under a curse.  Paul even uses ‘cursed’ numerous times in chapter 3 to emphasize the danger of depending on works for salvation.  

Secondly, Paul uses the inverse of a curse, which he refers to as a ‘blessing’, as a means to give more import to the power of the gospel over the curse of the law.  You had to be a Galatian to grasp the power of what Paul was telling them.  For a people who would rather die than be cursed, the power of the blessing was just as meaningful.  Even today, most superstitious people fear being cursed, while diminishing the power of being blessed.  We especially see it in the knee jerk reactions to the fear of being ‘cancelled’.  This was especially true of the people of Galatia at the time Paul wrote his letter to them.  The Jewish Christians who were demanding that the gentiles be circumcised were appealing to their fear that they’d missed a step in their walk with Christ.  Doubt is a powerful tool, and it is one that the enemy of our soul uses all the time.  Doubt is a twisting of reason.  What makes it so powerful of a tool is that our adversary knows that once doubt has been sown, it is almost impossible to repair the damage done by it.  I’ve known men who once were rock solid in their faith become misled by a question or incident that challenges their belief.  The question or doubt gnaws at their thoughts until they have no faith left.  Not everything in the gospel is rational to the human mind.  

Finally, chapter 3 begins Paul’s discussion of liberty through our faith, and how Christ has set us free from the slavery to the law of sin, and death.  The term “grace” is used only once in Chapter 3, but you can feel its work in the constant references to “promises” and “blessings”.  This is again a direct result of Paul’s intimate knowledge of Galatian culture.  The promises, and covenants made with the Gauls by ancient kings were the entire reason that Galatia became their home. The celtic quality of being a people of honor, and being ‘men of their word’ was cooked into them from generations past.  As a warrior people, the military ethic of being bound by your word was critical to who they were.  Paul uses this to remind them that God’s promises to Abraham were being realized in them.  It was a continuing promise of blessings that formed the basis of the gospel.  It wasn’t what the Gauls had done, or what they could do that brought the blessings or promises, it was their faith in Christ. By being circumcised, they were saying that more could be done, and that the blood of Christ wasn’t enough. This is always the slippery slope that comes from adding to or taking away from the work of the cross.  This was especially true in the early days of the Pentecostal movement when many denominations implied or stated outright that you had to be ‘baptized’ in the Holy Spirit.  As a pentecostal, I believe in the sheer joy of being ‘baptized’ in the Spirit, as well as His being a vibrant and powerful part of our work on earth.  On the other hand, it can be like circumcision was to the Galatian people, just another box to check off in your walk to heaven.  

It is fun to see how the Galatian culture affected Paul’s letter to them.  It is wonderful to know that God is so intimate with us, that he reaches out to us through our cultural background, as well as making the Jewish culture alive to us.