Paul’s Defense Of His Calling - Galatians 1:11-16

I really appreciate Jim and the other elders giving me the chance to once again speak to you folk. It's quite a privilege, it really is. So thank you very much, you guys. I appreciate that. And thank you also for having the patience to listen.

The Seriousness of Studying God's Word and Praying for the Congregation

I hope I'm not entertaining today. I hope that we are seriously looking at God's word because it is serious. Let's just pray before we start. Thank you so much, Lord, for the time that we can spend looking at your word.

Thank you for the privilege to have your word written down in our language that we can understand. Always give us the energy, Lord, to read it and study it and devour it and eat it like honey because it is honey.

And it does fill our souls. Thank you so much. Lord, we do pray again as well this morning for Larry's family, for his wife and their two boys as they're going through this time of pain. You, Lord, know what's going on and we just pray for them today.

Thank you for this time in your name, amen. I forgot to give, or I wasn't able to give the title to my message this morning or the word, so I'm glad that Dave did give it. The word is defense for the kids if they wanna mark it down and try to count them.

I don't know how many there are, I didn't count it, but anyway, the message this morning is on Paul's defense of his apostleship, Paul's defense of his apostleship. Before we look at that, I just wanted to share something with you.

When we first moved in to the tribal people, the Monhui people in Paraguay way back in 1976, we began our work there. We could not communicate hardly more than one or two words in their language yet. We didn't understand them, they didn't understand us.

It took us a number of years before we could really understand what they were saying, what they were questioning, what they were saying, especially when we first made that first initial contact with them.

We didn't have a clue what they were thinking or saying. And slowly, after we had learned the language, we began to gain and understand and insight into some of the things they had thought when we first arrived there in Paraguay, or first arrived in the Monhui tribe there in Paraguay.

And they had been really puzzled as to why white foreigners would wanna move in and live among a tribal people. And had we been able to understand some of those questions that they had, we would have given a real defense of the reason why.

And our defense of our reason why we were there among them would have gone something like this. And I'll just give our defense, not what their questions were, because you'll pick it up in a second. First of all, my friends, we would have said, we haven't really come to steal your wives.

And another one would have been, no, we didn't come because we wanted some of your children to take and turn around and go into town and sell their children. That wasn't the reason we came. And no, we haven't come to feed and to clothe you.

This is one of the biggest questions they had. We didn't come to feed or clothe you like the Catholic mission does down on the river. And no, the medicine that we're giving you is not, because it's not actually poison.

You can see some of the things that they thought. And no, we're not trappers, and we're not traveling vendors, and we're not soldiers like those that you have encountered before, because they were so isolated.

This is all they met, was trappers and soldiers. But instead, we're bringing you a message from the creator God, the one who made what you see, heavens and earth. So you see, we were gonna have to make quite a defense, a good defense of both ourselves and our message as we were living there among the people, because they had all kinds of interesting, though wrong, ideas, didn't they?

And these ideas were mostly due to those experiences they had with other people. They had had their wives stolen. They had had their children taken sometimes, one or two. And they had a lot of terrible experiences.

And so they expected us to be a part of that as well. We had no idea what some of those mistaken ideas were until years later. And we couldn't defend ourselves, of course. And not only that, but even when we did learn their language, their worldview was so contrary to God's word and our way of thinking, it would take us even longer because we couldn't get our message out.

We had to just live among them and learn and prove to them that we were not who they thought we were. Now in the book of Galatians, there's another man, a man who had to make quite a defense as well. And we'll know that as we look in Galatians chapter one today, Paul spent the first two chapters making a defense of both himself and his message.

He had to defend his character and he had to also defend the purity of the gospel message. And he had to prove to the Galatians that his message was the message that they needed to hear and that he was a true apostle of Jesus Christ.

Now thankfully, Paul didn't have the compounded problem that we had when we went in to live among the Montague people. He could speak their language. They all spoke the same language. So that was good, they all spoke Greek.

So Paul's defense was of a slightly different nature. The problem he faced was that there had been some Jewish false teachers, they hated him with a passion. And so they came along behind Paul. Every time he planted a church, there were these same, if not same people, similar ones that were false teachers that wanted to get in and agitate the group and cause them to, they would follow him around on every missionary journey he went.

And they were there to confuse the people. And their assumption was that if they could get the Galatians to see that Paul was making up his own gospel and that Paul wasn't really a true apostle, then they could get the people to accept the Jewish traditions and the laws as part of their gospel.

So we're gonna look at this morning how Paul made a defense. But before we do that though, I'd like to review a little bit, because it's been quite a while since I spoke, and we were in the book of Galatians.

We've actually covered Galatians chapter one, verses one all the way through verse 10. And I'm just gonna go back just a little bit just to look at verses six through 10, just as a review. And in verses, the first part of this chapter, we saw how Paul's reaction was to the Galatians beginning to depart from the gospel grace.

So there in verse six, what does Paul say? He says, I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the gospel of Christ for a different gospel, a different gospel. That word, we kind of explained that last time, because Paul used this term gospel in kind of a sarcastic way.

And the reason for that was, we see his explanation there in verse seven. He says, it's not really another, not a gospel, only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel. So he noted there that what they were beginning to believe was not a gospel at all, because gospel means good news.

And so this was not good news that they were trying to get to understand, it was a distortion. Now, later on, if I get another chance to speak, we're gonna go quite a bit deeper into what this distortion was and what the real gospel is.

But for now, I just would like to mention that what Paul was fighting against was adding human effort to the gospel message, human effort. Now, we would never do that, would we? Now, the false teachers were saying that a person could bring their own goodness, their own merits to salvation.

They were saying that obedience to the Mosaic laws was just as important as faith and just as important as grace. So God's grace wasn't enough, is what they were saying. And faith in Jesus Christ wasn't quite enough.

So this was definitely a distortion that Paul had preached to them originally. And as I said, it wasn't good news at all. And then as we looked at verses eight and nine, we find that Paul got very, very bold with these people.

And he said, if we are an angel, he says in verse eight and nine, would I preach to you a gospel contrary to what you've already heard, in other words, what he had already shared with them, a simple gospel, he says he is to be accursed.

God should curse him. That is very strong language. And it gives us something of Paul's, his drive and his passion for the purity of the gospel, to keep the gospel message pure and simple. And I believe that Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, knew that he had to make a defense right up front.

He had to get that right out there for the purity of the gospel message. Because if the battle wasn't won right there, at that time with the Galatian Christians, and the Galatian churches, all the churches in Galatia, then a distortion of a works gospel would be carried out throughout the whole known Roman Empire and beyond in that day.

You know, though, sad to say, to this very day, we do have many forms of a works gospel. I don't know if you're aware of it, but many of the churches, we call them cults, some of them false religions, almost every one of them has to do something to make themselves right with either God or whoever they're worshiping.

So it's always a doing gospel, a gospel that says we must do something. And why is that? It's not that Paul failed in his approach to the Galatians, to the churches there. It's not that he failed in his defense of a pure gospel, but it's partly due to our very nature as humans.

We're always, always wanting to do something. And it kind of goes along with the American, most of you are the older generation, it was always like we were to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, so to speak.

That's what the phrase was, because we knew we could do something about ourselves, make ourselves better. And this permeates the whole idea, our whole culture and our whole nature as humans to make ourselves better, to take some credit for ourselves.

Another reason why there's many forms of works, a works gospel proclaimed today throughout the world is that there's a continual spiritual battle going on,.

Isn't there?

Paul spoke of that in Ephesians, in Ephesians 6, 12, where he said, we wrestle not against flesh and blood. It's not a battle against flesh and blood. He says, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

And that's the King James I'm actually quoting from. So you see, Satan knows, Satan knows human nature, doesn't he? And Satan knows us. He knows that if he can deceive people into thinking that they can do something to be saved, or if they can help God in some way, and you hear that, we're helping God, we're helping God.

And he helps us and we help him, but that's not true. And all Satan has to do is get these false teachers in there to appeal to man's basic need in succeeding when he feels he has to do something for himself.

And we see the evidence in that battle all around us today. And there's false religions, and there's idol worship around the world that teach that works as part of the salvation process. And also, we also see another thing.

We see that God's word is not honored often, even in what are so-called evangelical churches. They give a couple verses and they talk about some topic or some idea that they have that kind of tickles our ears, but they don't get deep down into God's word and to see what it's really saying.

And so people go away, maybe feeling good, but they never heard from God's word. And so the churches are feeble, they're weak, because they haven't been fed against, and to be able to defend against Satan's attacks.

And this is one reason, one reason why we really need to spend time, isn't it, in God's word. And especially, I think, in Galatians and Romans, both of these are talking about a gospel that is not according to works.

It's easier, it's always easier to appeal to man's ability to help God, to do something in order to be saved or to keep oneself saved. We often hear that as well. But these ideas distort God's very nature by saying that he needs us.

God does not need us, does he? God doesn't need us at all. It's like saying that God isn't powerful enough on his own, and these ideas are heretical and they're blasphemy, because it elevates man, it elevates ourselves to being equal with God.

And this was one reason why Paul was so passionate about the gospel not being distorted. We also looked a little bit about verse 10, where Paul not only had to defend the purity of the gospel, but he had to defend himself.

He had to make a defense. He had to convince his audience that God had given him the authority as a true apostle. And I believe the question had been raised by his accusers. Possibly they said something like this, look, you know that the true apostles in Jerusalem.

Had been with Jesus.

They had been taught by Jesus, they'd been with him. They're the only real apostles. This Paul, you can't trust him because he's never been with Jesus. He's just a man pleaser. You see, he's taken out all the necessary, all the necessary, vital, good things that we do to be saved, and he's left you with an inadequate gospel that's just too easy.

He's just trying to get you to like him and to conform to this easy gospel he's preaching. So he's just a man pleaser. So Paul had to defend himself against these things to prove to the churches in Galatia that he was not a man pleaser, as it says in verse 10 there.

He was preaching something he hadn't invented it. He hadn't made it up on his own. It was the same message that Jesus had given the other apostles. So that's enough of a review. Let's go on now to verses 11 through 16.

We're gonna look at that this morning, and try to unpack it a little bit more. Paul's defense actually, as I said, continues all the way through chapter two as well, but we're not gonna have enough time this morning to go any further than right up through 16 a little bit.

But let's look at it here. An outline, possibly, if any of you are taking notes, would be verses 11 and 12 would be Paul's message, the defense of his message, and verses 13 and 14 would be a defense of his former life, or just his former life, and verses 15 and 16 would be his conversion.

Paul's Message Was Not According to Man

So let's look at verses 11 and 12. He says here, as Dave read earlier, for I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. I would have you know, brethren, that little phrase right there.

Another translation would kind of put it this way. Moreover, he said, let me make this very clear to you, brothers and sisters in Christ. Let me make this very clear. Or another way would say, listen very carefully, my Christian brothers and sisters.

I'm telling you this because I want you to understand this clearly. So he's beginning here a defense of his apostleship. And remember that he came along after the other apostles. So it is important that you get this point across.

He needed to make it clear and logical to them, to convince them that Jesus Christ had also spoken to him. So he says this, let me make this clear, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man.

It's not according to man. So in this second phrase here, he's been preaching. He says it was not based on human reasoning or human logic. And you see, human beings, we always want something based on our own logic so we can understand it better.

And Paul knew that. So it was not according to what man had conceived. What he's saying here is up to this point in time, he'd had no opportunity to be with other teachers. If he had been taught by men, it would have been probably according to some logic, some human reasoning.

And then the message would possibly have been very, very different, more like what the Judaizers themselves were preaching. So it would not have been, because human reasoning and human logic are not, or they're a far cry from the gospel of grace.

Now, the last time I shared with you, I also mentioned something else about the Montjuic Church, something that we had seen when we were first beginning to teach. We thought we had a small body of believers and we were gathered together and we were trying to teach them.

And some of those people thought that singing songs to God was a major part of the gospel. And now we do this a little bit, but is this the gospel? No, we might sing gospel songs, but this isn't the gospel.

It's just singing. Does it give you strength when you sing? I mean, you might feel good, but it doesn't do anything to make God accept us any better. But the Montjuic people fought that. They thought that they would gain acceptance from God and that they would gain spiritual strength by singing.

And what they had done was they carried a part of their own culture, because they believed that by singing songs to the spirit world, to the spirits, they would gain strength so they could heal sick people and do things that were abnormal miracles by gaining strength.

And that was their belief. So they had carried that right into the church setting. And what they had done was they had created a gospel of their own invention, a gospel according to their own human reasoning and logic, a gospel according to man.

And this is what Paul was trying to tell us. So we had to do a lot of teaching in order to correct that mistake. And we found out we had very few saved believers at the time as well, because all of them were depending on singing rather than on the grace of God.

Also, a few years later, we also had another issue in the church, another mistake, another thing about the purity of the gospel message. But this time, it was the missionaries' fault. What happened is that we were preaching that the gospel is God's grace by faith, but we were also, because of one little affix in the Monhui language, the word is actually, the affix is actually ta, ta.

So it's really simple. We were leaving it out of the verbs. And what was coming across to the people was that they had to be saved by the grace of God through faith, but they also had to work very hard at maintaining it and keeping themselves good just because of a mistake we had made.

They had to be good in order to be saved. And they'd accepted it because it was logical. It made sense to them in their human reasoning. So we were mistakenly teaching a gospel according to man's logic until we corrected our speech.

And I had to actually go back because I had just finished Romans. I had to go back and look if I had even put that in the translation. And lo and behold, there was a lot of times when I had actually mistakenly written this verb out with this affix missing.

When we put it in, it made all the sense in the world. So that was our mistake, but still, it caused it to be logical according to man's logic, not God's. You see, a man's natural tendency is always to think that he needs to do something, like I said before, to save himself or to please God.

And so this idea made sense to the young believers and those who were wanting to believe, but it was very confusing to them. Thankfully, we had this young teacher who understood grace, the grace of God, and he came to us actually shaking because they don't correct people in their own culture.

But he came and he says, look, this is causing confusion. I imagine that when the Galatians started listening to the Judaizers, possibly a similar thing happened. The message of grace and faith plus adherence to Jewish traditions, and specifically, it was circumcision was the main one that they were trying to push.

A convert to Christianity had to also be circumcised, and to this day, it might even be, in some churches, be baptism today. But they carry that whole idea of doing something in order to help God. And it felt good to these people, so that Paul had to remind them that it wasn't about doing something.

This is why he had to bring them up short here in verse 11, where he says it's not according to man, not according to man. Then as we go on and look a little bit further in this verse 11, he actually makes amplification here.

He says, for I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. And he repeats that idea that the gospel didn't come from man, no other man had taught him.

And I think that his accusers were probably saying something like this, oh, that Paul, that Paul. He's just teaching ideas passed on from somebody else. He's giving you man's ideas instead of what we have received from God through Moses.

So they're trying to amplify, they're putting Paul down. And we know that from Paul's own words on down in verses 16 and 17. He says he did not immediately consult with flesh and blood there in the bottom of the last part of verse 16, nor did he go up to Jerusalem to those who were the apostles before me.

So he didn't have a chance yet. But he says he went away to Arabia, and I believe that's where Jesus spoke to him. He says, I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. I received it as a revelation from Jesus Christ himself.

And the first time that I read this statement, where Paul says he received, he got a personal visitation or revelation from Jesus, I thought, man, that sounds kind of conceded, doesn't it? That Paul was claiming revelations from Jesus himself.

But I thought, who did this guy think he was to think that he could claim this, that Jesus revealed himself personally to him? But as I became more familiar with the text and with other passages as well, I began to realize from the context that all he was doing was giving proof of his claim of being a true apostle.

You see, an apostle had to spend time with Jesus, had to be personally taught. And we don't really know what Paul's revelation was in this particular passage, because he doesn't say what the revealing or the revelation was.

But we do find from other scriptures that Jesus did speak to Paul many times, and this was part of his defense of himself, his proof, his qualification that he was an apostle. And he was, he had been spoken to by Jesus, just as the other apostles had.

And we have to remember, too, that very little of the New Testament has been written. Galatians is like the second book, I believe, that was ever written in the New Testament. James was the first one, and I don't even know if the Galatians had a chance to read the book of James or if it was ever put out in more than one book yet.

But, and possibly, some say that Matthew may have been, too, but like I say, I don't think that these people had read either of these books. But we do know that Jesus had spoken to all the other apostles while he was there in his three years of ministry with them.

He personally taught them for three years. And many of them were eventually going to write out the gospels that we have today. And we do also know from the book of Acts, in Acts chapter nine, when we find the passage that when Paul was on, you don't have to turn to it, but I'll just give you a brief idea of when he was on the road to Damascus searching for those Christians that he could kill and haul back to Jerusalem and put in prison and kill.

It says here in verses three through six that the light from heaven shone down on Paul while he was there traveling. And he got down, he fell down to the ground, probably in astonishment and fear, and then he heard an audible voice saying, Saul, Saul, he said, why are you persecuting me?

And when he asked who was speaking, the voice said, Jesus, I am Jesus whom you're persecuting. So get up and go into the city, and it'll be told you what you must do. And we're told in Acts, actually, that Paul's traveling companions actually heard the sounds.

We don't know if they actually made out the words or not, but they heard something, and they didn't know what to make of it. And then we heard there, Dave read the passage in 2 Corinthians 12, one through 10, where he gives, Paul gives his testimony of this certain man he knew who had been taken up to the third level of heaven, and he witnessed things there, and he heard things that were impossible even for a man to repeat.

Well, I believe that this was Paul himself, and many commentators say this, and I think the text actually shows it, that this was Paul himself who had experienced this, and possibly Jesus even taught him some there.

But he was speaking in the third person in that particular passage, so as not to put himself up to exalt himself as being someone worthy of such experiences. He was using it as a testimony there, and then in chapters 11 and 12, because he was giving proof of his apostleship to the Corinthians, just as he was doing here to the Galatians.

He was proving that he was a true apostle, and he had these experiences. But then I got thinking about that. I thought, well, so, if Paul got these revelations, if Jesus spoke audibly to Paul, does this mean that I, too, could possibly hear Jesus speak to me today, possibly in a voice, or in a whisper, or in a vision, or in a dream?

Is that possible? That would be nice, wouldn't it? It really would. Well, I think that it would be possible, actually, that God could, because we know in the Scriptures that nothing is impossible for God.

But is it, would He, and is it necessary? I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so is because the Scriptures have been completed, what we have today. God no longer needed to speak new revelation.

One place He makes this clear is in Revelation 22. In Revelation 22, 18, He says this. John writes this, and he says, I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, and he may have been talking about just the book of Revelation, but I believe he was talking about all the Scriptures that God gave us.

If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book. That is a pretty solemn warning, isn't it?

That's a warning.

And God has given us all the Scriptures that we need. They're already written down in our Bibles today. So I would caution you to be very suspicious when someone might say that Jesus spoke to them or whispered some new instructions, or they had a dream, and they might have thought that Jesus was standing there.

And we've heard that. There's books written about it. But, folk, be careful, be cautious, because we have God's word right here. Question that we might have to ask ourselves is why would we ever need new revelation when most of us, or a lot of us, hardly take time to study this one, this revelation?

So why would He go on and give us more? By the way, speaking about Revelation, and there's something sad I wanna just warn you about as well. I heard recently, I've been actually investigating it myself, because I am a Bible translator.

I heard about a new version that's come out on the Christian book market. I don't know if any of you have heard of it, but it's called the Passion Translation. And it is a passionate translation. It's called the TPT, when it's on a Bible app.

And it's actually available. You can actually get it and download it on your tablet or on your phone. It's called a new version. It's packed, it's actually called a translation. And it's packed full of new definitions of some of the old words.

And many added phrases. I mean, we're talking about some long phrases that are added to the original phrases in the original Greek and Hebrew. And the sad thing is that very often it skews the meaning to something completely different than what the actual original authors did.

And when it does that, folk, it's not a translation. It could be called maybe a paraphrase or something else, but not a translation. But this one is being pushed as a new dynamic translation. So we have to be careful.

However, what concerns me just as much as that is that the author of this translation claims to have been visited by Jesus himself and given these new words and meanings. Let me just read to you something off of a video that I watched online that he says himself that Jesus Christ came into my room, he breathed on me, he commissioned me.

It felt like a kiss from heaven. It felt like heaven's wind, a wind of God. And he spoke and he said, I'm commissioning you to translate the Bible into this new translation. And he promised that he would help me and give me new words and give me the secrets of the Hebrew language.

Now, if you have a commentary, believe it or not, but you've got all the secrets already there. A commentary or not a commentary, but a concordance, excuse me, not a concordance, gives us all those secrets.

So if you study, you'll see them. Or if you compare scripture with scripture, you'll get all the secrets. But this is claiming some new ones. Anyway, I don't wanna read him more of his quote because it's just scary when someone can claim this.

Because I don't believe that the translator, Bible translators are inspired. I certainly wasn't inspired to translate. And I don't believe that we can receive new revelation because if I had, why didn't I get any so that I could do it?

I would have done a lot faster. Instead of 20 years, it might have only taken five years. But folk, these things are a warning. It is scary. I firmly believe that inspiration and revelation were only given to the original writers of scripture.

And they completed it with the book of Revelation that John wrote. We have already been given all that we need. You're looking at it, studying it. So let's move on down here. The next verse in Paul's defense.

Why could he say he qualified as an apostle? So we've looked at the fact that Jesus himself gave him this in his teaching and revelations. It was from Jesus. So he's taken down that argument. So the next one, his former life.

Paul's Former Life in Judaism and His Persecution of the Church

His former life. Galatians 1, 13, and 14. Okay, so let's just read these real quickly. For you have heard of my former life, manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it.

I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries of my countrymen. In other words, other Pharisees. Being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions. So we get this autobiography of Paul.

We learn a bit more about his past. And a couple of questions I had was why did he include this about himself? I believe Paul was giving these details as another proof. And these are the details. He says, you have heard of my former life in Judaism.

And Paul is reminding his readers that something that he was certain that they already knew something about. That he had been a legalist, a zealot. Who was passionate in his obedience to the legalistic system of the Jews.

But he was directly in opposition to Jesus Christ. And this is why he states there, he says, I was persecuting the church beyond measure. He was going way beyond anybody had ever done. Way beyond. We're also given some of that amplification in Acts 9.

Acts 9, 1. Luke tells us that Paul was breathing out threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord. He wanted to kill them. That's how passionate he was. He'd been doing everything he could to destroy them.

So he's saying, and kind of an amplification of that, in my own words would be, he was saying, look, people, at my former life that you already have heard about. There's no way I could have suddenly changed directions.

I was deep into the laws of the Jews, the traditions. My circle of friends, they wouldn't have all of a sudden given me the gospel.

To turn me around.

No, he says, I was a legalistic Pharisee, a zealot and a fanatic. I couldn't have changed myself if I'd have wanted to because of my hatred. I was continually doing everything in my power to destroy those people.