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.
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