145. The Great Apostasy

The Great Apostasy and the Fall of Jerusalem

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 145, The Great Apostasy. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. And just in case that you've never joined us before, the podcast exists to defeat the loser mentality that has infected the church for far too long.

We exist to reinvigorate Jesus's bride, to take back the world that belongs to him from the squatters who have now inhabited it. This is not a show for bellyachers, professional squishes, nice guys, or navel gazers.

This is a show for those who wanna grab a shovel and get to work. This is a show for everybody who wants to stop complaining about the problems that we see in our society and help us rebuild it to the glory of God.

It's for those who wanna proclaim a triumphant, masculine, holy vision of what the Christian faith actually is, knowing that what we do in the present matters and directs us to the future that Christ has written for us.

This show is meant to prod all of God's people to victory in Christ and to beat back all of the wolves that are seeking to beat us down. If you've been looking for a show to coddle you, well, this ain't your cup of tea.

But if you're ready for a triple imperial stout of raw biblical truth and robust eschatology that'll shake you out of your fragilities and give you the kick in the pants that you need to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, well then to you, I say welcome.

Matthew 24, the Olivet Discourse, and the Destruction of Jerusalem

Now today, we're gonna be continuing along in a revelation series with the extended introduction of Matthew 24 that we've been doing, which is known as the Olivet Discourse. This is the section of scripture that is happening just days before Jesus is arrested and murdered where he pulls his disciples aside and he takes them up to the Mount of Olives and gives them a panoramic view of the city of Jerusalem and he begins telling them about all of the evidence that is going to lead to her destruction and her downfall.

He gives them one line of evidence after another after another that Jerusalem was gonna undergo imminent disaster at the hands of Rome that would climax and crescendo in AD 70, which, as we've noted here, is exactly what Revelation is talking about.

The book of Revelation is saying the exact same things as Matthew's Olivet Discourse because it's John's Olivet Discourse where he's talking about a near-term disaster that is coming upon Jerusalem. He begins that way in chapter one.

He ends that way in chapter 22. He is talking about Old Covenant Judaism that is passing away, making way for the new and better covenant of Christ. And because Christ would allow no rivals to stand in his presence, no counterfeit pathways to God, Jesus predicted in Matthew 24 and in the book of Revelation that apostate Judaism was going to die.

They were gonna die for their crimes against God and everything that they held dear was gonna be taken away from them and was gonna be given to the New Testament church. For that reason, Matthew 24 is the perfect introduction for a series on the book of Revelation because it's covering the exact same things, but in a much more accessible and easier to understand sort of way.

Now, with that, I wanna say thank you to all of your support. Thank you to everyone that has given to this channel, whether you've given your time to watch these episodes or you've actually given super thanks, that it's a thing that you can do.

You can click the thanks button and you can send a gift to the channel. Thank you for those who've done that. Thank you for anyone who's joined as a member of this channel. Thank you for everyone who smashes the like button and helps this show climb in the algorithm so that we can reach more people with this godly, robustly, exegetical eschatology that is coming straight out of scripture.

So thank you for that. Thank you for liking it, sharing it, and helping us to get this content out to anyone who wants to understand what's really going on in Matthew 24 and in the book of Revelation.

So with that, let us jump in to today's episode and examine all that the text is saying. Part one, an all of that recap. Now, Jesus entered Jerusalem with the echoes of prophecy swirling all around him.

He did not come on that day riding on a war horse, at least not yet, that would happen later. But in the waning moments of the Jewish peace, in the final sands of the Jews' national sovereignty, he came like Solomon, claiming his kingdom, riding into the city on a humble donkey.

And as he came, the people waved their palm branches and they cried out, Hosanna in the highest, Hosanna to the son of David. You see, they believed that their Messiah had come and that their Messiah, Jesus, was gonna overthrow Rome, but their cheers, however loud they were, were masking a tragic misunderstanding of what Jesus was there to do.

He was not coming to deliver them from Rome, but he was coming to deliver them to Rome. He was the king who was coming to his empire that had fallen into disrepute and disrepair, and he was condemning it.

And as he drew near to the city, his eyes fell upon the temple, the center of the Jewish life in the first century, the sanctuary that was supposed to be the house of prayer for all the nations, a place where the Gentiles were supposed to be able to come and to get to know the one and only true God.

And, but as he looked at it that day, he saw that it had become a den of thieves and liars. It had become a symbol of the Jewish hatred for the nations. It was a token, not to the real God, but to their God, which was a God of money and wealth and power and greed and corruption.

Corruption had infected every square inch of the temple and it needed to be disinfected with the strongest disinfectant that could be given. On that day, Jesus not only rode into the city, he marched into the courts.

His steps were deliberate, his actions were unmistakable, and he overturned the tables, coins scattered all over the floor. Merchants were scurrying like rats to get out of the courtyard. Jesus wasn't protesting.

He was cleaning, he was cleansing. And he wasn't just cleansing so that the temple would be put back into operation once more. He was cleansing it like a wound that a surgeon was getting ready to amputate.

The temple, symbolic of Jerusalem's rot, was about to be surgically cut out of the covenant. Jesus had come to prepare her for her surgery. Now, the next morning, still in Matthew 21, on his way back into the city, Jesus approached a fig tree, which is a known symbol of the Jewish people, Hosea 9 -10.

And it was full of leaves, which is the promise of fruit, but yet when God came looking upon it, there was no fruit. And it might not have been quite the season for figs at this time, but that wasn't the point.

The tree stood as a symbol of Jewish fruitlessness. In 24 hours, Jesus had visited the city, he had visited its temple, and neither of them offered him fruit onto repentance. He came to the city that was supposed to bear fruit for God, and they only gave him leaves.

He came to the temple that was supposed to bear fruit for God, they gave him nothing. And here, Jesus is standing in front of this fig tree, a symbol of Israel that was giving him no fruit, and he cursed it.

And by the time they passed by that tree again, it had withered to the roots. Now, this causes disciples to be astonished, but the message was very clear. Jesus was telling them that Israel was about to undergo a withering.

The mountaintop that she lived upon, and all of her pomp, and all of her wealth was about to be cast into the sea in Roman vessels that would take her wealth back to the Italian coastline. Judgment was certainly imminent.

Now, once inside the city, Jesus told her, he told parables to this fruitless people, and he exposed the disease that were upon her branches. One was about the son who said that he would not obey his father, but later he ended up obeying him.

And then the other was about the son who said, yes, I will obey you, father, but never followed through. And Jesus asked them, which one of these sons did the will of the father? And the answer that the Jews came up with was obvious.

It was the one who said he wasn't going to obey, but ended up obeying. Then Jesus applied this to the tax collectors and the sinners, those who were despised by the religious elite, but who were going to be entering into the kingdom of God ahead of them because they repented from their sin and they believed and followed Jesus.

But the leaders who claimed to be faithful, who said that they were the ones who obeyed God were the ones who were exposed as being nothing more than hypocrites who were going to be left outside of the kingdom.

Then he told another parable. He told a parable of wicked tenants, this landowner who sent his servants to collect fruit from his vineyard, but these tenants who were in charge of the vineyard killed them and they refused to give the landowner what he was finally own.

And then finally the landowner says, I'm going to send my son, thinking that they would respect him. Instead, they killed him too, hoping to seize his inheritance. And then Jesus asked the question, what do you think that the owner of the vineyard is going to do?

And the Jews answer honestly, that he will put those wretches to a wretched end. He was going to destroy them and give the vineyard over to others. And it was just about at this point that the Jewish leaders realized that he was talking about them, that the kingdom was going to be ripped out way from them, that it was going to be given to a people who would bear its fruit, which is an illusion back to the fig tree.

It's an illusion back to Jerusalem. Now, Jesus wasn't done here. He didn't just tell two parables, he told three. He elevated it to the infinite degree. He told a third parable of a king who was preparing a wedding feast for his son.

He invited the guests to come and they mocked the invitation. They even murdered his emissaries who were going out and inviting them to the wedding feast. And because of this, it enraged the king who sent his armies, who destroyed their city by fire.

And then because he had no one to show up to the wedding feast, because the people who it was prepared for did not come, he invited everyone, all the people in the highways and the byways to come in and enjoy his feast.

In these three successive parables, Jesus was telling the ethnocentric and racist first century Jews that their glorious mosaic world was going to be trampled upon by who they considered Gentile swine, that God was going to destroy his own people, that he was gonna send his armies and set their city on fire because they refused to come.

And Jesus was telling them that all of this actually pleased the father. Now, when you hear that, we can kind of sort of begin to understand how this must have sounded to a first century Jew. Just to put it in a somewhat modern example, for instance, it would be like Jesus being born in the antebellum south and proclaiming to the slave owners how their plantations were gonna be taken away from them and who were gonna be given to their servants, to their slaves, and how he was gonna return and he was going to hang all of those godless slave owners by the neck in the middle of the town square.

You can imagine that that kind of message in that time period would have produced a visceral kind of fury that exposed the hellish evil that was igniting or that was living inside of their own souls. That is precisely what is going down in Jerusalem in this moment.

As the tensions mounted and with the crowds temporarily on the side of Jesus, the Pharisees were now gonna try to trap him with cleverly worded questions in order to sway the population back onto their side because let's face it, trying to pull off an illegal murder would have been difficult anyway because it was illegal for the Jews to kill Jesus at this time.

It was against Roman law but that would have been downright impossible if they didn't have the energy and the passion of the masses. These were people that the Jews could use as leverage against Rome if things went a little squirrely which is why when the Jews are ripping or whipping everybody up into a frenzy in front of Pilate, Pilate eventually caves and crucifies Jesus.

The Jews knew the game. You incite an insurrection and then you can kind of get what you want. This is how they worked in the first century. It was a common tactic that the Jews used to try to get what they wanted from the Romans.

So they're trying to do this now. They're trying to trick Jesus and trap Jesus to get the crowds on their side so that they can weaponize the crowds against him in order to kill him. One of the tricks that they used is a question about a coin.

They asked, is it unlawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not, tell us what you think. They were asking Jesus, hoping to catch him in a political snare because the people had no money because the Caesar was taxing them to death.

The people were starving. So what are they going to do? They're going to ask a question to turn the people from Jesus to them. They weren't starving. The Pharisees were lovers of money. They had all kinds of money.

They were greedy. But instead of Jesus answering their question and falling for their trap, he asked him to hand him a coin. And he said, whose image is on this coin? And they replied to him, Caesar. And then he said brilliantly, okay, well then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but render to God the things that are God's.

This seemed straightforward enough, but underneath his words was a deeper, more penetrating meaning that maybe, just maybe the Pharisees caught onto. You see the coin bore Caesar's image and the Jews were supposed to bear the image of God.

God's image was supposed to be stamped on them. And yet they were the people who had aligned themselves with Caesar at every turn. From their Caesarian high priestly appointments to the woke Sadducees who were in bed with the Romans, they were the kind of people who were looking for Rome to give them the kind of stability that can only be found in God.

And they were the ones who, instead of being imprinted with the image of Yahweh, were the ones who were bearing the image of Caesar. Remember, it was this people who uttered the maledictory line, we have no king but Caesar.

Indeed. It was to that people that Jesus promised that they would be rendered unto Caesar. They would be thrown into Caesar's coffers. They'd be melted down by the fires of Titus and brought back home to the treasuries of Rome.

Jesus was gonna render unto God the things that were God's, the church, and he was gonna render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, Jerusalem. Now, when no one else had any more questions to ask him because he was humiliating them and their plan wasn't working, the entire city was looking on at the spectacle.

Then Jesus breaks into seven covenantal woes that he levels upon the scribes and the Pharisees, denouncing their hypocrisy and their greed and their blindness, saying things like, woe to you, you blind gods, you whitewashed tombs.

He cried this woe again and again and again. He called them whitewashed tombs because they were beautiful on the outside, but they were full of death on the inside. They boasted of their heritage, saying if we had been alive in the days of the fathers, we would not have been the ones who killed the prophets.

And Jesus said, really? They were the very ones right in that very moment who were plotting to kill him, who was more than a prophet, but the son of God. Jesus, like a righteous judge, was pronouncing the verdict upon all of them, saying all of the righteous bloodshed from Abel to Zechariah will fall on this generation.

He left no room for misinterpretation. He wasn't inviting them to say, well, maybe he's talking about people 2 ,000 years into the future. He's saying God's wrath is gonna fall on this generation. Which one?

The one he was looking at. And as Jesus left the proverbial courtroom, which was the courtyard of the Jewish temple, and began to walk out of the city and up to the Mount of Olives, the disciples, who had been shaken by these words and incapable of speaking during this entire scene, were now ready to ask some questions.

They pointed out to him the temple, which was a marvelous feature of the ancient world. It was one of the seven great wonders of the ancient world. And they were marveling at its grandeur. And they were wondering, how could all of this be true?

How could this house really be left desolate? And it was then that Jesus looked right at them and again left no room for confusion when he said, not one stone will be left upon another. The disciples were stunned.

The temple was the center of their world, their universe, their culture. It was everything. It was a symbol of God's presence. It was the sign that God had favored them among all the nations. Could it truly be that this temple was going to fall?

As they walked up the Mount of Olives that day, the anxious disciples were ready to find out more answers because their hearts were in a meat grinder in their chest. They came up to him and they asked him, when is this gonna happen?

What's gonna be the sign that this is gonna happen? Does this really mean that we're coming now to the end of the Jewish age? That's what they were asking. But you can imagine how frantic their words must have been that their whole world seemed like it was falling apart.

Then Jesus sat all of his disciples down in front of them as the city of Jerusalem is hanging in the background as their canvas. And he faithfully began answering their questions one by one, revealing to them all of the signs that were gonna be coming, that were gonna let them know that the events that he just prophesied, the destruction of the temple were going to happen.

He spoke of signs, signs like false messiahs were gonna come, wars and rumors of wars were gonna come, famines and earthquakes. And all of these were kind of the beginning of the birth pains. These were the signs that judgment was coming.

And he described an awful period that we talked about two weeks ago of tribulations where the earliest Christians were gonna be persecuted by the rabid first century Jews, just before the Jews were put down by a great tribulation by the covenantal shotgun of God.

What we've seen is that all these things are not in the future, but they're in the past. And 40 years after Jesus gave these tremendous signs, after the disciples had witnessed all of these things happening in their lifetime, Jerusalem was destroyed.

Jerusalem was left burning. This is a fact. One of the most well-attested facts in all of ancient history that Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70. The temple was torn apart brick by brick. Just as Jesus said, the city that killed its prophets and rejected its coming King that murdered the early Christians was left desolated in exact picture, perfect clarity and fulfillment of what Jesus said.

But amid the judgment that was happening, salvation also occurred. Out of the ashes of the old covenant meltdown, the church arose like a Phoenix, a new generation that would enter the promised land that would follow its new Joshua, who would carry the kingdom forward bearing fruit for their King.

And it is that very kingdom, brothers and sisters, that we find ourself in today. What we've seen is judgment was coming upon us upon the first century rebels and salvation has come for the people of God.

The countdown ended in AD 70. And now we're living in the new covenant of Jesus Christ. The apostasy that Jesus predicted in Matthew 24 is not an event that's gonna happen in the last days of human history.

It's an imminent apostasy in the first century. It's an apostasy of Jewish converts who converted to Jesus who were gonna be turning their back on Jesus to go back to the slums of Jerusalem. What we're gonna see today is that Jesus predicts that a lot of Jews who converted to Jesus, who embraced the gospel with joy, who tasted the goodness of the word of God were going to turn back to the picture instead of the person.

They were gonna turn back to the types and the shadows instead of the fullness of who Christ is. The lure of their old lives, the threat of persecution and the deceptive allure of false gospels was gonna prove too much for a lot of people who were going to turn away from Jesus and back to the temple and back to the sacrificial system and back to all of it.

This is not some footnote in history, but this is one of the central themes in the New Testament. This has been recorded by ancient witnesses. In today's episode, we are going to see how the great apostasy Jesus predicted has already come.

So with that, I'd like to read our verses that we're gonna be focused upon today and then I want us to jump right in. Matthew 24, 10 through 13 says this. At that time, many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another.

Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many. Because lawlessness has increased, most people's love will grow cold, but the one who endures to the end will be saved. Matthew 24, 10 through 13.

Signs of Imminent Judgment and the Jewish Defection in Galatians

And that leads us to part two, the biblical case for a Jewish apostasy. Now to begin, I wanna share an example just so that we can get our mind in the right place. I want you to imagine that there's a family that's driving to an amusement park and they've told their son that they're going to go there and have the entire day of all sorts of fun and laughter and everything else.

That's what they've told him. And from the moment that that little boy wakes up and his eyes are fluttering with excitement, he's bubbling over with this like a few Mentos that have been tossed into a bottle of Coke.

Well, as the car rolls down the interstate after their breakfast and everything else, his face is glued to the window. He's scanning the horizon. He's looking for signs that they're getting close to the amusement park that he loves.

And his heart leaps as soon as he sees the billboard. He's like, we must be getting closer. And then another sign appears 10 miles to the park. And then another sign, five miles on the right. And then another one, three miles, and then two miles, and then one.

With every marker, his anticipation is growing because he realizes these signs are for him. He doesn't dismiss them and say that, you know, they're irrelevant to my circumstances. He sees them, and then he rightly intuits that these signs are for him.

The signs confirm the reality of what has been promised to him by his parents. The theme park is getting closer. It's not for someone else's children, it's for him. Now, I hope that this is not relevatory to anyone.

I hope that we simply understand that this is how signs work and that the boy is being quite rational. But supposing that we do get this, this is also the way signs work in the Bible, in the New Testament.

But instead of a fun-filled theme park as a joyful destination, the signs that Jesus was giving are pointing to an unavoidable destruction. When Jesus told his disciples that Jerusalem was on a collision course with calamity, he gave them signs that they were supposed to be on the lookout for, road markers along the way that were gonna help them gauge how much time that they had left before they needed to abandon the sinking ship.

I want you to remember something here. The first century Christians did not leave Jerusalem immediately. They bowed the knee to Jesus, but they stayed. They sold their homes because they knew that there was no sense keeping them if the city was gonna be obliterated, Acts chapter two, but they spent the next 40 years trying to convert their comrades, trying to convert their people, the Jewish people.

If God was going to allow them, they were gonna pull every single Jew out of the fire before the city careened completely over the cliff's edge. But as they watched these signs happening, these things would have been very helpful for them because it would have told them how much time that they have left.

It would have told them that as they were witnessing to other Jews, as they were preaching sermons in the street, as they were trying their best to convince people about what the Old Testament said of the Christ, they were looking, they were waiting for the final exit ramp that they could take before they would be consumed along with the city.

And that's exactly what happened in history. Josephus tells us that as the Roman army surrounded the city of Jerusalem, that the Christians escaped. No Christian actually died in the siege of Jerusalem.

Why?

Because they stayed there on mission to convert their people, the Jews, to Christ. And everyone who was left in the city was left there because they rejected the message and the Christians left. There was no need participating in a suicide mission.

They did their part. They spent 40 years witnessing and evangelizing, and then they left. Why did they leave? Because Jesus told them to. They didn't leave thinking, well, you know, this really doesn't apply to, as it applies to someone 2000 years from now.

But it might be a good idea to leave.

That's not why they left.

That's not why they sold their houses. They did all those things because Jesus told them beforehand that it was gonna happen. Now, as we're gonna see in this section, there was a rising Jewish apostasy that was happening in the early church.

And that's one of the signs that Jesus gave to be on the lookout for that the calamity was approaching. Jesus explicitly predicted that the final days of the Jewish age would be marked by a great apostasy, a great defection of people who were gonna be going back to the old covenant system and leaving Christ.

Now, this wasn't a general falling away, like Gentiles falling away from Jesus. That's not what Jesus predicted, which would be really weird if that's what he predicted. Jesus didn't say that there's gonna be a group of Gentiles who leave Jesus to go back to worship Jupiter.

That is not at all what Jesus is saying. He's not gonna punish the Jews. Remember, all these things are gonna happen to this generation. He's not gonna punish the Jews for a Gentile apostasy. What Jesus is saying is that the Jews who converted to Jesus in the first century and left Christ were gonna be a sign of a Jewish destruction.

They tasted the goodness and the beauty of the new covenant, and they spat on it and turned their back on it and walked away. That is a sign that Jesus was giving a flashing neon sign that Jerusalem's judgment was imminent.

And maybe you would ask yourself, why would Jewish converts defect from him? Why, after tasting the beauty and the sweetness of the gospel, would they return to the sacrament of the old covenant order?

Well, the answer I think is pretty straightforward. They were enduring persecutions that were merciless in nature. To confess Jesus as Messiah at that time was to draw the wrath and the ire of your Jewish neighbors, of your family members.

Whole families at this point were being divided, livelihoods were being destroyed, and safety was being threatened. Returning back to Judaism and the temple and the sacrifices and the feasts and all of that offered you a way out of the hell that you were experiencing there on earth.

It was a way to get back to what you thought was familiar and safe. And of course, this was utterly sinful. This was a denial of Christ. This was cowardice on the scale of damnation. But the point I'm actually making is that we can actually have sympathy.

We can understand how and why a goat who would make a confession when times are good and then abandon their confession the moment things get difficult, we can understand why that would happen. I mean, literally, we just walked through this a few years ago during the pandemic.

Those who ignored the signs barreled into the destruction that Jesus foretold. Now, I want to look at a few very specific examples in the New Testament. We're going to begin with the earliest book in the New Testament, which is the book of Galatians.

And I want to look and see how this Jewish apostasy actually played out. Section one, the Jewish defection in Galatians. Now, the book of Galatians was written early in the ministry of Paul. Probably in the late 40s.

And it is a firing letter that transports us right back into the time when the church was clashing with Judaism in raw and fierce and violent ways. As one of the first New Testament books that were penned, Galatians reveals how early Jewish persecution was happening in the church.

And it gives us a front row seat to the battleground that Paul is actually dealing with. You remember, Paul was once a zealous persecutor of Christians. Now, as a believer, he was an apostle who was proclaiming the risen Christ, who was ferociously defending the faith.

And he was calling Jewish defectors to not leave Jesus, but to come back to Jesus because there is salvation in no one but Jesus. The Roman providence of Galatia was a place that teamed with life and commerce and religious activity.

Among its bustling cities were scattered communities of little churches and Christians, many of whom were Jews by birth, but who had converted to Jesus and now were followers of the way. These men and women had embraced Christ.

They embraced him as the promised Messiah. They abandoned the traditions of their ancestors in order to follow Jesus. They abandoned circumcision for their children, dietary laws, temple rituals, all markers of Jewish identity.

They set those aside in favor of the old rugged cross. For these converts, the shift to Jesus was seismic. It was a transformation of everything that they knew, all of their background, all of their history, and that shift did not come without consequences.

Within their synagogues and their families, they were branded as traitors. They were branded as people who abandoned the Torah, which in the eyes of the Jewish neighbors was like abandoning covenant with God.

And for that supposed betrayal, the opposition against them was violent. First, they were ostracized from their family. Then families rejected them and kicked them out of the family so that they no longer spoke to them, no longer talked to them.

They were dead to their fathers and their mothers. Even physical persecutions became part and parcel of the daily life of these Jewish believers in Christ. Some were beaten. Others were expelled from the synagogues and all of them were facing the smoldering, white hot anger of a community that refused to acknowledge Christ as Lord.

But in the midst of all of that, a new kind of turmoil arose. A new kind of persecution ensued. You see, in addition to the merciless beatings and the floggings and the stones that were being hurled at their faces, a new kind of attack began in the late 40s coming against the Christian church.

Because when the Jews realized that they could not stop the church with violence, they reverted to rhetoric. Just 10 years after Jesus ascended into heaven, a novel virus began attacking the Christian church, which you can call the Judaizers, who wormed their way down into the meat of the church like trichinosis, laying their heretical larva right in the muscular system of God's newly minted people.

And this horde of false teachers claimed allegiance to Christ, which is why they were insiders. They were part of the church. But instead of the salvation, the justification by faith alone and Christ alone, instead of that, they required that believers would go back to the Mosaic law.

They infiltrated the Galatian church. They sowed confusion and division among the converts. And many Christians began to waver in their theology under the attacks of the Judaizing Christians. The allure of returning to Judaism with all of its familiar trappings and smells and bells and all of that was strong.

It was a compromise that the Judaizers were offering that would give those who were being persecuted a way to privately honor Jesus with their hearts, but with their bodies to behave like Jews. The hope was that if they would do this compromise, if they would do this action of covenant disloyalty, then they could appease both God and man.

They could appease both God and the Jews. That the blows that were being leveled against them would stop coming. And to that storm, the apostle Paul stepped, armed with the gospel, burning with righteous indignation.

And this is what he said. He begins with a sort of thundering phrase. I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, Galatians 1 .6. This is not a man who's disappointed.

This is a man who's shocked. He's shocked as a shepherd who is watching his flock return back to the wolves who are sweet-talking them into leaving Jesus. The Galatians weren't drifting into doctrinal era.

They didn't have a baptism theology issue. It wasn't like charismania where we say, ah, they're Christians, but they have a doctrinal issue. No, they were defecting from Christ. The Judaizers were teaching a damning doctrine, demanding circumcision, dietary restrictions, and other ceremonial laws, participation in the temple.

All of that was required for your salvation. It was a denial in the sufficiency of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was a perversion of grace. It was a return to the covenant types and shadows that had been replaced by Jesus.