One Pure Message

DEVOTION

THE LETTER TO THE GALATIANS

ONE PURE MESSAGE

Gal 1:6-9

6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! 9 As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!

NIV

Paul gets right to the point right after his salutation. From what is known both from the rest of this letter and historically, after Paul had visited Galatia and preached the gospel message of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, there were others who followed him with something different. Those who followed him were Jews who believed that Jesus came for the Jews and in order for a gentile to be saved, he had to first become a Jew. This meant he had to be circumcised as Jews were. So then in this gospel, they were preaching it was Jesus plus circumcision. Paul was extremely upset over these men perverting the simply message of the gospel, in fact, he says their gospel is no gospel at all. Anything other than faith in Jesus Christ and faith alone is not the truth, but a false gospel. It would seem even today we have some who would add to faith in Jesus. Some would preach that in order to complete the salvation experience one must be baptized, which is adding to faith in Jesus for salvation. Although many say they believe salvation is through faith they add their own ideas as to what that means. Some will make more out of what James says about faith without works is dead. That could imply that faith plus works bring salvation, that faith alone is not enough, it is dead faith, meaningless faith unless it is accompanied by good deeds. How does that interpretation mesh or agree with what Paul wrote to the Romans when he says that if a person believes in their heart and confesses with their mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord, they will be saved. How do any works at all fit with that? It is the same message he preached to the Galatians. The gospel message is pure. We only have to go to the gospels to see how pure it is. Although some would consider John 3:16 so overused, they dismiss its purity of truth. The central theme is God loves us so much he sent Jesus to die for our sins, and whosoever of us people believe in Jesus will not perish, but have eternal life, that is being saved, have salvation simply because we believe, nothing else, just believe, just have faith and faith alone, without any other stipulations. Now, once we are saved, does that mean we can go about living in the same manner we did before we were saved? Of course not! There should be a change that occurs because we now are following Jesus rather than the devil. It would be much like if we were to move from, changed our citizenship from, Iran or China or Cuba to America. Life would be much different, we would experience far more freedom and in some sense have far more blessings. When we change our citizenship from this world to the kingdom of God we are completely free from the penalty of sin, guilt, and shame. We are free from death. This is the gospel Paul preached to the Galatians and anyone else who preaches anything else is condemned. We cannot pervert this pure message of faith and faith alone in order to be saved. Paul will get into more details later in his letter, but he had to set the record straight from the start. There is only one pure message.