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Through an introduction to the book of Galatians, to Paul's epistle to the churches, plural, of Galatia. We, at that time, discussed a little bit about which churches these were. We discussed the North and South Galatian theory and things such as this.
And we worked through the first five verses, the introduction to the book. We noted, when we looked at those verses, that, from the text, we could derive the fact that, in the churches in Galatia, there was some sort of attack upon the authority of the apostle Paul as an apostle.
We saw this in verse 1, when he immediately says, Paul an apostle, not from man, neither through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead. There is an immediate assertion that Paul's apostleship is not an apostleship that is based simply upon human ordination, simply based upon a connection with some human group.
But his is an apostleship that comes directly through Jesus Christ. And we mentioned, then, that this might refer to Paul's encounter with the Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus. We also noted that the opening to the book of Galatians is extremely short in comparison to all other books that Paul wrote.
Normally, in a Pauline epistle, you will have a fairly extensive greeting that will have everything we have here in the first five verses, plus much more. The concept of grace and peace is frequently expanded out.
And then, after this salutation, in all of Paul's letters except for this one, you will have some sort of commendation of the church to which he's writing. Your faith is being spoken of throughout the whole world.
Or even when he speaks to the Corinthians, when he writes 1 Corinthians, and the Corinthian church is in an uproar. It is full of sin, and strife, and division, and everything else. Even in that situation, Paul commends their faith.
He speaks about how the Spirit is operational amongst them, et cetera, et cetera. But only in this letter do you have the salutation, no commendation, no positive word whatsoever to them. And immediately moves into verses 6 through 9, which obviously is, when we get down into verses 10, 11, we're going to see even Paul recognizes are harsh, strong words.
Immediately after he salutes them, he greets them, he moves directly into this passage. And so we looked at these things. We saw some of the theology of Paul in the first five verses. And then we stopped there, because verses 6 through 9, I think, are extremely important for our understanding of the importance of the Gospel, how God views the Gospel, and how the church should view the Gospel today as well.
I think these verses are, for all practical intent and purpose, missing from the vast majority of Bibles in our land. It is like they are not there. If they are read, it is with blinders on that keeps a person from recognizing the incredible seriousness with which Paul addresses this issue.
And so I want to spend some time on these verses, not because I particularly enjoy spending time on verses that are extremely harsh, but because of the fact that these verses, what is said here about the Gospel, is almost a charter for my own ministry.
If these verses were not a part of Scripture, our ministry would probably have a different character. But they are there. And I personally, as I shared with you last time, have struggled with the concept of liberalism and the teaching of liberalism.
And this passage, this book, and especially this passage, has always been the guardrail that has kept me from moving out of a strong allegiance to the Gospel and kept me from moving into a position of compromise where one can simply say, well, we've got a lot of different views.
OK, the Mormons have this view, and the Witnesses have this view, and the Roman Catholics have this view, and then there's this view, and this view, and this view, and we don't have to worry about any of those things as long as we're all a bunch of nice folks and we're sincere in what we're saying, then everything's cool.
If a person can read these verses, these four verses, and say, that is what Paul taught, then I don't know what language they're reading. I don't know what kind of thinking process is theirs. Because these verses, I think, are very, very, very straightforward.
So with those things in mind, I want to look at verses six through nine. I've provided you with my own translation in the notes, which, as I mentioned before, should follow pretty closely to something like the New American Standard or something along those lines.
Let's look at verses six through nine, which I have subtitled Paul's Amazement at the Galatians. He begins by saying, I am amazed that you are so quickly being moved from the one who called you by the grace of Christ unto another gospel, which is really not another, except there are those who are troubling you and are wishing to change the gospel of Christ.
But even if we, or an angel from heaven, were to preach to you a gospel other than that which we preached to you, let him be anathema. As we said before, I say now again, if anyone is preaching a gospel other than that which you received, let him be anathema.
So Paul starts out by expressing his utter amazement with the Galatian believers. He is amazed. The Greek term thaumazo is to marvel, to wonder at something. Sometimes it's used of just being amazed about a miracle, for example.
People marveled at Jesus and the good works and the miracles that he did. That's a positive marveling. But here, Paul is marveling at the fact that the Galatian believers could be so quickly moved from the one who called them by the grace of Christ.
Now, the phrase to be quickly moved, the word quickly, can mean one of two things, as I point out to you in the commentary. It could refer, first of all, in the normal meaning, quickly, in a short period of time.
If that is the way that we should take it, then this would basically be saying that, well, Paul has evangelized the churches in Galatia, and it has been a short period of time since he was there that he is now writing this letter, and there has been a very quick defection from the gospel that he preached.
And if we take it that way, then that would bear somewhat on when we date this letter. It would date it much earlier. Another way to take it, however, is not quickly in the sense of an amount of time, but instead the ease with which they were being moved away from the gospel, that they were really putting no resistance up to these teachers who had come in.
And I think this is a little more consistent with Paul's usage. For example, over in Ephesians, he talks about, let us no longer be children who are tossed about by every wind of doctrine, the picture being someone who, one day, they listen to one person, wow, that really sounds good.
Yeah, I agree with you, brother, 100%. And then the next day, they come over here, and somebody is talking to them about something that's 180 degrees opposite of what they were hearing the day before.
That's great. That's wonderful. Oh, I think that's superb. I'm reminded of, again, it sounds like I'm just a terrible, nasty person when it comes to some of these individuals, but I've listened to certain Christian television hosts who will have one person on one day who's saying something fairly decent, and oh, amen, praise the Lord, that's wonderful.
And then the next day, you'll turn it on. There's somebody sitting there. I remember this one instance where this guy who's sitting there, and he's saying that the Mishnah, which is Jewish writings written about 200 years after Christ, should be a part of the King James Version of the Bible.
It should be a part of canon scripture for Christians. And the same host is sitting there going, oh, praise the Lord. That's wonderful. That's great. It just tosses back and forth to and fro, no foundation, seemingly not ever aware of the fact that what this person is saying is utterly contradictory to what that person is saying.
And that person isn't even in the ball field. But everybody, oh, praise the Lord, thank goodness. That's just wonderful. No resistance to any false teaching. And so I think this would be in line with what is causing Paul's amazement, is that these individuals are so easily being moved away from the one who called them by the grace of Christ.
They're not hardly putting up any resistance whatsoever. Notice he says that they are being moved from the one who called them. Now, we are going to see that what is said here is that they are being moved away from him, and they are being moved unto another gospel, which is not another.
And so what he's saying is, I've preached a message to you. I have preached the euangelium, the gospel to you. Now they are being moved away from that. But notice what he says. Yes, they're being moved away from the gospel, but that's not exactly what the text says.
The text says that you are being moved away from the one who called you by the grace of Christ. So a defection from the gospel, being moved from the gospel, is being moved away from God himself. In Paul's mind, it is not, well, you're being deceived by some false doctrine here, but I know you love God a lot, and so it really doesn't matter to him.
For Paul, being moved away from the gospel is being moved away from the one who called them by the grace of Christ. Now the term moved away from, some of your translations might have that you are moving away from, or that you are going away from, or something along these lines.
In other words, where the individuals themselves are doing the action. The verb itself can be taken in one of two ways. It is either a middle or a passive form. And if we translate as a middle, it would be that you are removing yourselves so quickly, that they were the ones doing that.
And many translations take that. I have rendered it as a passive, and the reason I am doing that, that I have done it in my translation, is because Paul is going to specifically identify the fact that there are those that are troubling the believers.
There are those that are teaching the false doctrine. And Paul is addressing believers in the book of Galatians. He never, ever addresses the false teachers. He speaks of them in the third person. He talks about them out there.
They do this. They do that. I wish they would emasculate themselves, he says in chapter five. But he never says, now you false teachers. He talks to the Galatians, and he says, you foolish Galatians. And here he says, I'm amazed that you are so quickly being moved.
But I think it is consistent to translate being moved. In other words, they are allowing themselves to be moved away by this false teaching, moved away from the one who called them by the grace of Christ.
So notice how he identifies God. He identifies God as the one who called you by the grace of Christ. God is identified as the source of their salvation. This is not unusual for Paul to simply use, almost as a name for God, ha kalesantas, the one who calls, the one who draws.
He is the one who has drawn them how? By the grace of Christ. By the grace of Christ. This is the only way in which God draws an individual. God has chosen, through Jesus Christ, to bring about salvation.
He does not draw a person through Buddha, or Muhammad, or Krishna, or anyone else. When God calls a person, he calls that person by the grace of Christ. Now, I note in the commentary that the term grace of Christ and the grace of God for Paul is interchangeable, utterly interchangeable.
The grace of Christ, the grace of God, there is no difference for him, just as there is no difference between spirit of Christ and spirit of God. For example, in Romans 8, 9, you have spirit of Christ, spirit of God used in the same verse, speaking of the same spirit.
In Acts, you have the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of Christ, the spirit of God. This concept that is Paul's of the union of the Godhead is all through his letters. And frequently, especially those of us that are involved in countercult ministry, and many of you are some of our volunteers that work with us in that way, we get so locked into a defensive mode in regards to the deity of Christ that we miss things like this.
I think I may have mentioned to you when we went through the beginning section here in verse 3, when it says, grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I hope I mentioned to you there that here is an evidence of the deity of Christ, that the Father and the Son together are a unified source of the grace of God.
And here, you have the same thing. Here, God called them by the grace of Christ. So Paul says, I am amazed, I am flabbergasted, that you are so easily, so quickly being moved away from not simply the gospel, but here he says you are being moved away from the one who called you by the grace of Christ.
To move away from the gospel is to move away from God's calling, God's grace. God only calls in one way. God only draws in one way. He has chosen to do so through Christ Jesus. And so the first thing that Paul says is he emphasizes his amazement with the Galatian churches.
You are defecting. You are becoming traitors to God himself. Now, I want you for a moment to consider the historical situation in which these words would have been spoken. So often, we have a Bible. We got it at the local Christian bookstore.
It was in a box wrapped in paper. It's got nice gold edges, or maybe brighter edges like my Greek New Testament does, or something like that. And it's got a nice index up front, reference footnotes, maps in the back.
And we sort of get the idea that it's always been that way. But it wasn't. These letters were written in living situations. And there was a time, about 2 ,000 years ago, about 1 ,950 years ago, that this letter, these six chapters, were written on a piece of rough papyri in Greek letters, large Greek letters, as Paul will say at the end of his letter.
And they were wrapped up. And they were delivered to a person who stuck them in probably a not-so-clean leather bag and may have gotten on an old, leaky ship or rode on the back of a camel or walked along dusty roads into Asia Minor, into the area of Galatia.
Put yourself in his position. Put yourself in the position of the one who had to read this letter to the churches in Galatia. You arrive on Friday. And everyone's happy to see you. Oh, good. You've got a letter from Paul.
But the false teachers. You have a letter from whom? Oh, from Paul. That one, huh? The one whose apostleship is only from men? Well, he is instructed that this is to be read in the Sunday morning service.
So it's Sunday morning. The church is gathered around. Most of the people in here are quite enamored with their teachers, quite enamored with this teaching that, well, you need to be circumcised and you need to keep the law of Moses.
And this sounds all wonderful and good. And so the man stands up. The first five verses were pretty good, even though you could tell that an eyebrow shot up on a couple of false teachers in verse one.
Not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, so on and so on. Then you get to verse six. And now you're the Galatian people. I am amazed that you are so quickly being moved from the one who called you by the grace of Christ unto another gospel.
Think of what it must have been like. The guy who read it knew what it said. Would you have liked to have been him? That would have been a rather tough job. But we normally never think of those folks.
These words would have cut every single one of them to the quick, and we haven't gotten to the hard stuff yet. As I mentioned last time that we were together, this book is choppy. It is unusual for Paul in the sense that it moves quickly.
It's strongly worded. And I can't help but think that the false teachers would have been very, very quick to pick up on exactly what this letter was going to be about. If many of them survived all the way through the reading of it without getting up and storming out, I would be surprised.
He says you're moving away from God, the one who called you by the grace of Christ, unto another gospel, which is not another. Now here, the poverty of the English language strikes at us. And I have noted for you in the commentary on page five the differences between the Greek words used for another.
I have translated them both by the English word another. But in verse 6, it says, by the grace of Christ, unto another gospel, heteron. Heteron. And lexical form is heteros, which I think is what I put in the commentary.
But then he says, which is not aros, another. Now, on a basic level, heteros, you've already heard of it. Heterogeneous. You've heard of homogenized milk. That was the big thing back when I was a kid.
And they don't even put that on labels anymore. Homogenized milk, it was all mixed up. It was all homogeneous of one kind. But heterogeneous would be different kinds. So heteros means different, another of a different kind.
Whereas aros primarily means another of the same kind. But beyond this, aros also means another of a different identity. So these terms are used, for example, Paul will use them again in 2 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 4, when he says to the Corinthians, you know, if someone came to you and proclaimed another Jesus and uses the word Allah, and that would mean another of the same kind, but different in identity.
Or someone proclaims to you another gospel or another spirit, and there he uses heteron, another of a different kind. Paul says to them, you might well bear with them. In other words, Paul had a little confidence problem that the Corinthians would be able to recognize false teachings.
So he uses both terms there in a little different way. In John 14, 16, when Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit, the other comforter, the word he uses is alas. So another of the same kind, the spirit is the same kind of comforter as Jesus was, but a different identity.
The spirit is not the son. The son is not the spirit. They are not one person. They share the one being that is God, but they're not the same person. And so these terms are used, and I think the main emphasis here in Galatians chapter 1 is he says, you are being moved unto another gospel which is not another of the same kind.
You're being moved unto another of a different kind of gospel which is not really a gospel at all, which is not another. So he immediately says that the teaching of these teachers in Galatia is not the gospel.
Now put yourself in the same situation again historically, because I think this is important for us to recognize. Here you are. You may even be a new believer. And there are men who have come into the church, and they may even claim to have a closer relationship with Jesus in the sense of knowing more fully and truly his teachings than Paul.
That seems to be one of the things that they claim. And they're saying, now Paul was right in the sense that he said that Jesus is the Messiah. He was the Messiah. His death brings about forgiveness of sin.
All that is fine. And yes, you must believe that Jesus is Messiah, that Jesus is son of God. You must believe this. But you see, that's not enough. That isn't the whole thing. You see, Paul teaches some things that aren't exactly right, and he doesn't teach everything that he should.
You see, because Paul has this idea that you're justified, you're made righteous by faith. In fact, the guy is so crazy, he teaches faith as a gift of God. I mean, this is really weird stuff. But he says that the false teachers say, that's not totally true.
Because if you really want to be right with God, you've got to believe in Jesus. But you've also got to be circumcised, keep the law of Moses, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I doubt that they were teaching you had to go to Jerusalem every few months or offer up all the sacrifices and things like that.
But there were certain things you had to observe. You had to observe the Sabbath day. You had to be circumcised, et cetera, et cetera. You have to keep the law of Moses. Faith in Christ is good, but then there's this over here.
Now, Paul says, that is not the gospel. That is not a gospel at all. And yet, when we look at it, all these people were saying was, faith in Christ, yes. But you need to add to your faith in Christ just a couple things.
Circumcision, maybe the observance of some Sabbath days, a few things like that. Well, where does Paul get off? I mean, Paul doesn't say, this is a gospel plus. Or Paul doesn't say, well, you know, those teachers, they're adding some unnecessary things.
It wasn't a matter of that they were just adding a few unnecessary things. They didn't need to. Paul said, the addition of those unnecessary things destroyed the gospel. It made what they were preaching no longer the gospel at all.
Now, when we think about this, in our modern situation, how can we take what he says here and not recognize that a vast majority of what is presented in our nation today under the guise of the gospel is not the gospel?
How many different denominations and groups can you think of that say one of two things? Either they say, yes, you're saved by believing in Jesus only, but then after you're saved, you've got to do this, this, this, and this.
Or others that say, before you can accept Jesus, you've got to do this, this, this, and this. Myriads of them. Myriads of them. In comparison to these teachers, and as we go through the book, we will be able to pull out more and more from what Paul says of exactly what it was they were saying.
But in comparison to what's being taught here, much of what is presented in our nation today goes far beyond it, goes far beyond it in being wrong. And yet Paul says that just simply by those additions to the gospel, they not only destroyed the gospel itself, but they were drawing men away from God.
In fact, he's going to go on to say, except there are those who are troubling you and are wishing to change, distort, pervert the gospel of Christ. And so we are again, and we will be faced with over and over again as we go through this book, we will be faced with the decision, what is my authority?
If my authority is the New Testament, if I am to follow this New Testament in regards to how I think of the world around me, then we must recognize that the purity of the gospel is of an utmost importance.
Now remember, what Paul is saying here was undoubtedly offensive to those who are preaching this false gospel. There is no question that not only were the false teachers offended, but you know who else is probably offended?
The Christians who are being deceived by this false teaching. No question about it. Put yourself in their shoes. Oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? I'm amazed that you can't put up any fight against false teaching.
What if you walked in the church Sunday morning and your pastor plunked into the pulpit and said that to you? Wouldn't you be offended? Probably would be. That's why Paul is going to say in Galatians chapter 4, because I told you the truth, have I become your enemy?
Paul recognized that telling people the truth is far more important than whether you offend them or not. The truth can be offensive. It can be. It frequently is. When someone tells you something about yourself that you happen to know is true, you may still be offended by it.
Paul knows that the truth is more important than whether someone is offended or not, as we will see as he continues on. So he says the gospel to which they have been moved by this false teaching is not really another gospel.
Except, he says, there are certain ones who are troubling you. Like I said, he will never talk to them. He will never address them. There are certain ones, they know who they are. There are certain ones who are troubling you.
And the word troubling, that's not really a very strong translation of the Greek term that refers to, they're shaking you. They're violently shaking you. And I'm sure that the people in Galatia, they hadn't felt any shaking.
Things looked just great to them. But while they were half asleep, the foundations of the entire gospel were being destroyed beneath them. I mentioned in the commentary that very rarely, when Christians know what's coming, when Christians know what the threat is, can they be dissuaded from the truth?
There aren't too many Christians who are concerned that they're going to become a Satanist. I mean, they recognize that. That's directly opposite to what I believe. I'm not going to be persuaded by that.
But that's not what happened here. These people came under the guise of apostles. They came under the guise of Christian teachers. And they said, ha, well, we just want to give you a little more, a little bit beyond what Paul actually has already taught you.
There are certain ones who are troubling you and are wishing to distort the gospel of Christ. Notice what he says about them. They are wishing to distort the gospel. It was purposeful. It was the desire of their heart.
When Paul, in the next couple of verses, is going to call down the very curse of God upon these teachers, he does not call that strong curse upon simply those who have been deceived. He calls it upon those who have volitionally desired to pervert the gospel of Christ.
It was their intention to do so. They desired to distort, to change the gospel of Christ. Now, I know that somewhere in here, I mentioned in the commentary, and I'm looking for it. Here it is. It's on page 7.
That the term change frequently is used to refer to changing something into its opposite, into something else. And so these individuals specifically wish to change the gospel of Christ. Now, I don't know how Paul knew all about these individuals.
Obviously, he had sources of information. He had encountered some of these individuals, we find out in Galatians chapter 2, in the Jerusalem council. And it's recorded in Acts 15. And he calls them pseudo-Adelphoi, false brethren.
False brethren. These individuals acted like brethren. Oh yes, we're believers, we're Christians. Bless you, brother, bless you. Shall we see you at the potluck this afternoon? Yes, brother, yes. And yet, they were pseudo-Adelphoi.
They were not true brethren. And Paul speaks elsewhere of the fact that he has faced dangers both from without the church, as well as from within the church. And frequently, those are the most dangerous places.
I'm going to hold off on getting into what Paul says here in regards to the gospel of Christ. I note on page 7 that I give you some information about the use of his term. But I want to just cover verse 8 and then come back to it.
Verse 8 says, but even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than what we have preached to you, let him be anathema. Verses 8 and 9 almost sound like they're repetitions of the same thing, but they're not.
In the Greek language, the situation you have in verse 8 is Paul presents what is called a third-class conditional. A third-class conditional sentence where the condition, a conditional sentence is if then.
If I had enough money, then I would buy a cue card. But the if clause in a third-class conditional is assumed to be unfulfilled, but it does have a prospect of being fulfilled. But it's doubtful, which would sort of fit in with what I just said.
So what he's saying here is he's basically putting up a hypothetical situation. Hypothetically, even if we were to come back to you and proclaim something different to you, to say, well, we blew it the first time.
We've changed our mind. There were a few other things needed to add. Or even if an angel from heaven were to come down and preach to them something other than that which they had preached to them the first time, let him be anathema.
Now what he's saying is it doesn't matter who the messenger is. The messenger is unimportant. It's the message. Even if we came back to you with another message, we'd be anathema under the curse of God.
And if an angel did it, not that's very likely, under the curse of God. The term anathema comes from the Hebrew, where there is a specific term that referred to something that was placed under the ban.
It was something that was devoted, basically, to the destruction of God. For example, when the Israelites took Jericho, everything was under the ban. Everything was kerim. Remember what happened? Achan took some of the things that were kerim.
And since something would basically be put under the ban and it would be devoted to destruction, which would make it hateful in God's sight, is basically how it worked out in the Old Testament. So Achan took some of it.
Achan paid. And his family paid for what he did, if you recall the incident. So the term means the curse of God experiencing the wrath of God. It is the strongest curse that one could place upon someone.
And Paul says, if anyone should preach to you, we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel other than what we preach to you, let him be anathema. Let him be under the most severe curse of God.
That is incredibly strong language. If you said to someone, let you be anathema, you couldn't say anything stronger to them. We, in our language, jokingly frequently say, go to hell. And most people don't believe hell exists, so it really doesn't mean much to them.
But it would be similar to the same thing, but meaning it. I hope that you spend eternity under the most horrendous punishment of almighty God that you could ever experience. That is the deep-seated desire of my heart that you experience that.
Pretty strong language. And Paul says, anyone who preaches another gospel is anathema. They are putting themselves in that position. Now, what is another gospel? Well, he's already said, well, whatever's being preached here is.
And there is some debate and discussion about the little preposition that is used when it says, other than what we have preached to you. Because that word can mean two different things. The term is para, it's used with the accusative here, and it can mean either other in the sense of beyond what we have preached to you, which would fit, or other in the sense of opposed to what we've preached to you, which would also fit.
Because anything beyond the finished work of Christ will necessarily have to be opposed to the sufficiency and completedness of the work of Christ. So it's not like we have to make some absolute final decision as to whether para means beyond or something like that.
Though, for your information, it may be interesting to you, that has been a point of debate between Catholic and Protestant for the past 400 years. Because if it's para as in beyond, it might be relevant to the concept of divine tradition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The Catholic position, of course, is contrary to, because their claim is that, well, what we teach is not contrary to the gospel. And the Protestant says, but it's beyond the gospel and contrary to. But anyway, that's just a little bit of information for you.
Here we have this statement on the part of Paul. He says, if anyone should preach a gospel other than the one that they had preached to the Galatians, that they are under the curse of God. What does that mean?
Why in the world would he say that? Why is it that you don't hear that anymore? I mean, if we're really brutally honest, in much of what is called Christendom today, there is a deep-seated concept that if you say, that teaching is wrong, wow, that's offensive.
You're being rather nasty there, brother, when you go on Christian television. They tell you before you get on. Don't offend anybody. Don't mention anybody by name. We don't want to offend anyone. We want to win them to Christ.
You think that's not what Paul wanted to do? And he recognized, win them to Christ, you've got to offend them if they've been deceived. Why is it? Why is it that today there is generally a fear to stand up and say, well, for example, someone this evening gave me a little card of Bible references.
The Bible references, I could tell by looking at the first one. The title was Apostasy, and it said, A Son of God Can Die, Romans 8, 11 and 12. So I knew immediately they were saying, there's no such thing as security of the believer or anything like that.
Turned over on the back, oh, guess what? Well, before I did that, I looked at baptism, Purpose of Baptism Acts 2 .38. You've already figured out who this was. The Church of Christ. Church of Christ groups.
Church of Christ believes in baptismal regeneration. That you must be baptized to be born again. By immersion. And a number of other things you need to do, too. But that's the primary thing. You must be baptized by immersion in the Church of Christ to be born again.
Now, there aren't too many people who will simply say, you see that teaching? Those who willfully teach that are placing themselves in danger of being under the anathema of God. The Judaizers were saying, you must be circumcised.
Church of Christ says, you must be baptized. It's doing something, adding to the finished work of Christ. Why don't we do that? Well, there are a number of reasons, of course. I think the Church has been deeply influenced, invaded by humanistic concepts of relativism.
Well, you know, they've got their truth. And they've got their right to believe that. And we sort of take our good old American way, which says everybody has a right to worship any way you want to. And somehow, instead of just keeping that in the political realm of saying, that's right.
If the Mormons want to build a church over there, that's their business. If the Witnesses want to do it over there, that's their business. And the Church of Christ over there, fine, that's great. No prejudice against them or anything like that.
And we carry that over into our theology, for some strange and silly reason. That's probably a lot of it. But you know, I think there is a more subtle and I think much more dangerous reason. One that I think ends up absolutely sucking the power out of the Church.
Here's what it is. Well, you know, Paul claims, as we saw last time, and actually as we'll see even further, maybe tonight, probably not, but in this study. Paul claims to have received the Gospel by a direct revelation of Jesus Christ.
But we are dependent upon the written record. And so, Paul may have had, Paul may have been able to define the Gospel in such a way as to be able to say, this is the Gospel and this is not. But we can't.
We can't really be sure. I mean, we might be wrong. I mean, we could be off about this business about God being the one who calls by the grace of Christ. We might be off about justification a little bit.
Maybe you do need to be baptized. You know, there's this passage here, there's that passage there, you know. And so, Paul maybe, that's why he was so strong about it. He had a sure word about it. But we need to be a little more careful because, you know, you might make a mistake and then you defend folks.
So let's not be quite as strong about this. And it's true in the sense that we can make mistakes. We can be wrong about things. We can be very deeply influenced by our traditions, how we've been raised.
All those things are true. But there is a very, very subtle concept at the foundation of everything I just said. The subtle concept is this. Paul knew what the Gospel was. All we've got is this. And you know, this book, it's awful hard to understand.
And we can't really be sure about what it says. And so since we really can't, and then there are some who go as far to say, well, you know, we're really not sure who wrote each of these books. And there does seem to be a number of contradictions in here.
And so, really, Paul was probably just sort of flexing his muscles as an apostle here. We shouldn't do that. Maybe, hopefully, we've matured past doing that. Fundamentally, what the church has bought into is that the Word is not sufficient to allow us to say that is the Gospel and that is not.
There are a lot of things that have fed into that. Of course, the Bible has been the object of relentless attacks, especially over the past 150 years, in science, humanism, things like that. It is rare any longer to find a seminary that still believes the Bible is God-breathed, inspired in that sense.
The origin of the Scriptures themselves is God. Very few that believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. The vast majority of your seminaries will teach that the Bible is the Word of God as we experience it.
It becomes the Word of God when it becomes alive in your heart. I remember that in seminary, the systematic theology that I had to read, basically in about two sentences said, now, of course, there are many contradictions in Scripture, but that's irrelevant, because Scripture becomes the Word of God as you experience it anyway.
And that's considered a very conservative seminary in the stream of things today. And so you've got that kind of teaching, and you can understand, certainly, that if you are in a church, in a denomination, that does not believe in the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture and the resultant authority that is derived from those concepts, that obviously you'd have no basis upon which to say the things that Paul says here.
I mean, you'd be a fool to say that someone who preaches other than what we preach is anathema. But where do you get your authority to say that? You don't believe that what it says here in Scripture is necessarily a revelation from God, and so, normally, those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God any longer or do not mean those terms in any logical way no longer say anything about false teaching.
So they have no basis upon which to say anything anyway. Okay? In fact, many of them just wander off into the various and sundry sorts of false teaching themselves, and then why would they say anything about it anyway?
But another way in which this has come into the church, especially amongst good Christians in the sense of those who do believe in the authority of the Word of God, is due to the fact that I'm afraid that if we are really brutally honest with ourselves, we could in no way be called the generation of Bible students.
Most of us have half a dozen Bibles, but if we spend half a dozen minutes reading them in a day, we'll be lucky. And so it's easy for us to be confused about what the Bible says, because we don't know much about what the Bible says.
The Old Testament's a closed book to the vast majority of Christians today. Josiah who? We laugh about it, but you could walk up to many Christians today and say, what do you think about Habakkuk 4 .12?
And they'd go, gosh, I know I've read it, but I'm not sure. And you go, there is no Habakkuk. Well, there is a Habakkuk, but 4 .12, I don't know what that is. How about Hezekiah 4 .12? You like that one better?
Sure, yeah, I like that one better than Habakkuk. Where's Habakkuk? Habakkuk, let's see, Habakkuk, New Testament, Old Testament? I read a little tract once. I think I've told some of you. It sort of encouraged me to Bible reading.
And it said, what happens someday if you go to heaven and you meet Habakkuk? He says, what did you think about my book? And you go, what book? Never read it. And so I read Habakkuk. I had no idea what in the world I read at that time, but I did read Habakkuk, so if I ran into Habakkuk, I died that night, went to heaven, met Habakkuk, I could talk to him about his book.
But we could say, what do you think about Habakkuk 4 .12? Well, I don't know much about it. How about Hezekiah 4 .12? There's no Hezekiah in the Bible, but the point is, the Old Testament, Amos? Amos?
Where is Amos? What did Amos say? Does it matter? Does anyone care? Yes, it's important. Because everyone who wrote in the New Testament, and this isn't the only reason it's important, but it's very important in the fact that everybody who wrote anything in the New Testament was thoroughly founded in and driven by what they knew of the Old Testament.
And there are some foundational concepts that are laid down there about God that if you don't have them, you're going to come up with some pretty interesting things when you read the New Testament. The Old Testament?
Isaiah? Yeah, remember those passages in Isaiah 40 -48 where God talks about how He is eternal and He does not exist in the realm of time and how He knows the future from the end and His hand does whatever?
Yeah, that stuff in there. Isaiah, one of the most frequently quoted books in the New Testament, that one. Or Deuteronomy. There's another big one. Yes. Jesus quoted it more than anything else. I read Deuteronomy every morning.
The point is, we're not Bible students. By and large, most of us, if I asked you right now to outline the book of Ephesians, I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but how many could? And then I ask the question, how many should be able to do so?
And hopefully we'd all be agreed that, yeah, if I really believe that this is God's book, this is God's revelation, I don't care if I'm a housewife or an executive or an engineer or an accountant or anything else, it should be important for me to know that book to that level.
And so we can be very easily convinced by the argument, well, you know, there are so many different passages in Scripture and it seems so confusing that we really shouldn't be too dogmatic about the Gospel.
And what we're basically saying is we are excusing our ignorance by accusing the Bible of being unclear about what the Gospel is. That's really what we're doing. The Bible isn't unclear about what the Gospel is.
If you take all of Scripture and you read all of Scripture and you interpret Scripture consistently with itself, it's very clear what it says. Oh, certainly, if you want to ignore all this or ignore all of that, then you can take this, take that, take that, put it all together, whammo, here's some new and neat teaching.
But that would be contradictory with this and this and this over here. You've got to take the whole thing. And so I think one of the main reasons that even amongst those who have not fallen for all the liberal garbage about the Bible being a bunch of myths and legends and everything else slapped together to attempt to teach us some higher truth as we experience the Word or something like this, even those Christians who haven't fallen for that hesitate.
They hesitate because they've basically been taught well, it's not good to offend anyone. And secondly, because we're not students of the Word so we don't have a clear definition of what the Gospel is in the first place.
So frequently we, A, don't recognize perversions of the Gospel and B, even when we do, seemingly lack the intestinal fortitude to say something about it. But I want to point something out to you. God is obviously very concerned about the Gospel.
You notice that? Anathema means cursed of God. God's the one who does the cursing. God is the one who is highly offended by the preaching of a false Gospel. If we want to be like God, don't we want to have His priorities?
One of His highest priorities is the Gospel. He will place under the anathema, under His wrath, those who would preach a false Gospel. And so as I point out in the commentary, it will be a slim excuse someday to stand before God.
And God says, there are many times when you encountered false teaching and you knew it was false teaching, but you kept your mouth closed. You let people preach falsehood about my son, about what he did on the cross, about how people are to be brought to me by a personal relationship with Him.
You let people, you let it go unchallenged. You kept your mouth closed. Why? The Lord! I didn't want to offend anyone. God's response is, you offended me? I was offended by what they did. And by your being quiet, you're offending me.
So can you tell me why it was more important that you don't want to offend them, but you're willing to offend me? Am I so unreal to you that offending me is unimportant? I know that when I stand before the judgment seat of Christ someday, and I'm not talking about, we've talked in the past in other studies about the fact that, I'm not talking about the great white throne judgment.
That's a judgment of unbelievers. We're not there. We've been judged for our sins in Christ Jesus. When I stand before Christ, I want to be able to answer for what I have done. And when His Word has revealed that the priority in His eyes is the purity of the Gospel, I don't want Him to be able to say to me, look, you let everybody and their uncle go right on by preaching anything they wanted to preach.
And you never opened your mouth. You never sinned. Paul wrote an entire book. You say, well, he was an apostle. That's his job. Well, it might have been. It might have been. Do you think it was easy for him?
It wasn't. It wasn't. There may have been people, and that's this church to which he's writing this letter. He stayed at their home when he was ministering in a certain town. And they developed a close relationship.
He had the opportunity of leading them to Christ. And they may have provided him with things. They may have helped him in his ministry. They may have financially contributed to his well-being. There may be a little lady there who had made clothes for Paul and sent them to him later.
There are people there he loved. But in writing this letter, he knew he may sever relationships that were important to him beyond any question. But he did it anyway. Yeah, because he was a hothead. Didn't think first.
No. No, that's not why. He knew that if you really love someone, you'll tell them the truth. See what I've titled the beginning of this outline? The truth of the Gospel. The truth of the Gospel. And that comes from Galatians 2 .5.
In Galatians 2 .5, it talks about these people who went into the council of Jerusalem, the pseudo-adulterers, the false brethren. He says, we didn't put up with them for a minute, for an hour, for any time at all, in order that the truth of the Gospel might remain with you.
Paul will say to Timothy, I suffer all things for the sake of the elect. The beatings, the shipwrecks, the continuous pressure of the churches, the hatred of individuals and false teachers, all of this he put up with so that the truth of the Gospel might remain with him.
That was his priority. Paul knew that the false Gospel could never save anyone. The Gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation. You change the Gospel, and you have condemned someone to eternal hell.
You've committed eternal murder. And Paul didn't want that in his conscience. And so he did whatever he had to do. Modern man looks at Paul and says, man, what an ego trip. Same thing happens to us today.
You go out in the world, and you even begin to hint that what you're saying is right, and what someone else is saying is wrong. What a fundamentalist! When did you leave the Ozarks? No offense to any of you who may have come from that area.
They look at you like you're insane. Every six months, a bunch of you in this room get inside rental vehicles. Well, not all the time. Sometimes we go in style, at least once. But normally go in to get inside rental vehicles.
And we drive for approximately 11 hours to somewhere around there, Salt Lake City. And we stand outside a temple. And I was staying here talking to a Mormon man that I know real well this last time we were up there.
And this lady comes up to me and she says, I want all the address of your church. And I said, well, ma 'am, it's on 12th Street between Indian School and Osborne in Phoenix. Does that help you any? You know, she's from Salt Lake, as if she knew where that was.
Well, I want to come and I want to protest outside your church. See how you like it. And I said, ma 'am, we're not protesting. We're here to show the gospel to people. No, you're not. Why do you do this?
I said, well, ma 'am, because we care about you. We love you. You do not. Yes, ma 'am, we do. You do not. You're lying. And this other Mormon person sitting here going, hmm. In fact, she turned to him and says, where's your church?
Oh, I go down to the ward down the street. Oh, oh, you know. She thought that this guy was with us. How many times we've had conversations with people that say, how dare you stand out here and tell me I'm not a Christian?
That Christ would never do that. That's not loving. Well, it's one thing for the Mormons to do that. But you know something? A lot of Christians tell us the same thing. Well, you shouldn't go up there to Salt Lake.
I mean, come on. I mean, that's not the way to do it. I mean, you know, they've got the right to believe what they want to believe. And I say, sure, they do. They've got the right to believe what they want to believe.
I'm not trying to get all Mormon ward chapels closed down. I would like to see all Mormon ward chapels closed for lack of attendance. Because everybody got AIDS. That would be nice. I'd like that. But as long as there's people who want to go in there and they want to do that, that's fine.
That's what our Constitution says. That's cool. That's great. But the Constitution also says, I write outside their Mormon temple and say, excuse me, false gospel. And the reason I do that is because, first of all, we know what the gospel is.
We know what the gospel is with sufficient clarity to be able to say, the Mormon gospel is not the gospel. And therefore, if I am going to care about Mormon people, then I am going to go there and I'm going to share with them.
They may not like it. But I can guarantee you that the people in Galatia did not appreciate everything Paul had to say. I know the false teachers didn't. I'm sure they didn't appreciate it for a second.
But he did it anyway. And if this is our authority, if this is what we believe, we must do the same thing. We must. No matter who is involved. So, verse 8. It doesn't matter who the messenger is. Even if we came back and preached to you a false gospel under the anathema of God.
And then in verse 9, he changes it. It's no longer a conditional sentence as in a hypothetical situation. This is a straightforward statement. As we've said before, so say I now again. And scholars are divided on whether he's talking about what he just said or whether he's referring to what he had said when he was with the churches earlier when he originally evangelized them.
I don't think it's really important which one of the two it is. This is what he says. If anyone is preaching to you a gospel other than what you have received, let him be anathema. Now remember what I said about verse 8?
Third class conditional sentence. Hypothetical. Verse 9. First class conditional sentence. Those of you in my Greek class, we covered this last night. But I'm not going to embarrass you by asking you to tell me what a first class conditional sentence means because that wouldn't be nice.
But what it means is that the condition is assumed to be fulfilled. That is, there are people preaching to them right now a false gospel. And he says, that's what's happening. This is the result. They're anathema.
That would be, if I was one of the false teachers, when I got up and left. Don't you think? Think about it again. Here's the man standing there. He's got the papyrus. And he says, actually you could translate this, Since someone is preaching to you a gospel other than the one you received, he is anathema.
Think about what it must have been like. There have been instances in churches I've been in. I remember one instance a number of years ago where in Sunday school one morning, I was in high school. My Sunday school teacher started directly teaching against the eternal security of the believer.
Just straight out. Man, we locked horns like that. Yeah, I was like this even in high school. It was really weird. Asked my wife about it. We locked horns immediately, and I got up and left the class.
I had never done anything like that in my life. And what we found out later is that both he and his wife had come to this conclusion. They decided that both of them the same day were going to tell their little high school students about how they could lose this.
Well, not that night, but the next Sunday night, the pastor of the church preached a whole sermon on eternal security because of what had happened. But can you imagine if it was the other way around? The pastor of a church had started teaching a certain thing.
And the former pastor sends somebody in to read a letter. They stand up at the pulpit, and the new pastor who's teaching his new doctrine is sitting right over there. He stands in the pulpit and says, this guy's preaching a false gospel to you.
He's under the curse of God. It's pretty quiet in there, wouldn't it? It'd be pretty quiet when everybody left too. All the potlucks would be called off. All the afterglows would be a bummer. Peter Piper Pizza would get no money that night at all.
That's what happened here. That's what happened here. So he says, someone is preaching to you a gospel other than what you have received. Notice the difference between 8 and 9? One of them was other than what we preached to you.
But here in 9, he makes a direct statement. You received the true gospel. It was in your hands. It was in your possession. And those that are preaching to you are preaching against what you actually received.
They are cursed of God. They are cursed of God. Strong words. So strong that he goes on in verse 10. And the translation of this section is found on page 9 in your commentary. So am I now persuading men or God?
Or am I seeking to please men? If I were yet pleasing men, I would not be a servant of Christ. For I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was proclaimed by me is not according to man, for neither did I receive it from men, nor was I taught it, but I received it by revelation of Jesus Christ.
I only want to cover the first section of these verses. It's almost like Paul writes this, and he says there. Now, you tell me. What am I up to? Seemingly there's been a charge leveled against Paul that says, ah, Paul.
That Paul. That silly fellow. You know, in one situation he says this, and in another situation he says that. He's a man pleaser. He tells people what they want to hear. And you know, Paul does say to the Corinthians, and he says in a couple of other letters, you know, to the Jews I become as a Jew, and to the Gentiles I become as a Gentile.
And maybe they saw this as vacillating on his part. You know, well, I'm amongst the Jews, and I do it this way. And I'm amongst the Gentiles, and I do it this way. Well, it just depends on who he's around, as to what he's going to say, how he's going to say it.
He's a man pleaser. He's a man pleaser. So Paul says, oh, really? You're saying I'm just one of the... I'm an apostle only by men, and so since my authority is derived from men, I've got to please these men.
I've got to please these apostles, and so I only do whatever they tell me to do, and I'm just sort of this little underling. Is that really the case, huh? Well, it's just like he just took one of them big guns, and he fired off this huge salvo at them.
And he says, now, about that man pleasing business. You really think so? I've just offended almost everybody in the church because I told you the truth, and you really want to say I'm a man pleaser? Who am I attempting to persuade?
Men or God? Who am I attempting to please here? Am I attempting to be a man pleaser? No. And he says, you'll notice in the translation, if I were yet pleasing men, I would not be a servant of Christ. Probably means in the sense of, not that he once has been a man pleaser, but in the sense of, if after all this, if after what I've just said, or maybe if after all that I've experienced, the persecution against me and everything else, if I were still seeking to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.
A servant of Christ, a doulos of Christ, a slave of Christ cannot be a man pleaser. Cannot be one who is seeking to please other masters. If you are a doulos, if you are a slave, if you are a servant, then you seek to please whom?
Your master. And if you are a doulos of Christ, then what you seek to do is you seek to please Christ. And obviously Paul felt that what he had just said in verses 6 -9 was pleasing to Christ. And I would submit to you that he's right.
I would submit to you that Christ is pleased when men so understand the importance of the Gospel that they are willing to put their reputation, friendships, and even relationships on the line and put the purity of the Gospel first.
I submit to you that that is pleasing to Christ. And what should be the greatest desire of the Christian's heart? But to please his Lord. But to please his Lord. And so he says, you hear what I just said?
You hear what I just said to those false teachers? You think I'm being a man pleaser? No, my friend. I am seeking to be the servant of Christ. If I was simply seeking to serve men, I would not be a servant of Christ.
And so we are faced with the exact same situation. Do we wish to be servants of Christ? If we do, if it is the desire of our heart to be servants of Christ, then we're going to have to live that way. You say, but you're talking about slitting one's Christian throat in many circles.
Being an outcast. Yeah, if that's what it takes. Paul was risking being an outcast in all the churches of Galatia. He said what he had to say anyway. Because his priority was not whether he was an outcast or not.
If that's what God wanted to happen, if God's will, would I be an outcast? Fine, great, dandy. I have one priority. That is to be a slave, a servant of Jesus Christ. I want to please him, and please him only.
And if he is pleased, I don't care if everybody else in the world hates my guts. If Christ is pleased, then that is all that is important to me. Radical! Radical! Yeah, radical. That's what Christianity is.
Radical. These Christians turned the world upside down. What did they tell us? Acts. Early believers turned the world upside down. A bunch of radicals. Absolutely committed to this Jesus guy. Sold out.
Called themselves slaves. Oh, man. Weird people. Weird people. Whenever Christianity ceases to be radical, no longer a commitment to Christ. Questions? Anyone left out there? Ever heard of the Lucy Linus effect?
I can't do it because I got my hair cut today, but it's where the hair goes straight back. Well, there are a lot of things that would be easy to just avoid saying that makes the gospel a little more palatable to people.
Unfortunately, it changes the gospel. And yes, what you have today in many situations is a situation where we look at our audience, and I'm sure the Galatian teachers did this. They looked at their audience and they said, what does this audience want to hear?
What would these people respond strongly to? And so they'd look through maybe the writings of Matthew or Mark, or if those were even in existence yet, or the stories of Jesus, and they'd pick and choose what would fit what they felt would make them popular with people.
And in the process, come up with some new teaching. Legalism has always been a popular way of doing things. Legalism has always been... There's something in the mind of man that makes us want to think that by doing certain things we can get God's favor.
We want to have a part in our salvation. That's universal. We want to have a part in making God do something for us. And so it's easy to scratch the itch of men who want to be religious. There's no problem with a lot of lost men wanting to be religious, because it helps to assuage your conscience.
Oh, I've done my religious duty. I've done this, I've done that, and so I feel a whole lot better. But the concept is what is offensive about the gospel, especially what's offensive about the gospel that Paul preaches here, is that from Paul's perspective, there's absolutely nothing that man can do to save himself.
Or even, in fact, to keep himself saved, which is the amazing thing he says in chapter 3. Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh? And his point is, man, if you've begun by the Spirit, you're going to be perfected by the Spirit.
It's God's work. It's not your work. Beginning, middle, and end. You're saved by grace, you are kept by grace. And that's extremely offensive to man. What are you telling me? You mean I'm just totally dependent upon you?
I've got to admit that I'm out of it? I can't save myself? Ha! Ha! I'm not too appreciative of that. I mean, that really, my ego is bruised. And that's exactly why most individuals who hold to some sort of work salvation look at the gospel of grace and go, man, give me a break.
You're saying that there's nothing we can do to save ourselves. And Paul says, yeah, you're right. God's work. Well, it certainly bruises my concept of myself. And Paul would say, that's because you've got the wrong concept of yourself.
You don't understand sin, you don't understand the effect of sin. And so it's a whole lot easier if we eventually decide that we can't trust the Spirit of God to bring people to salvation, and we've got to somehow convince them through various and other means, it's easier to just leave off the offensive stuff.
Let's not worry about the offensive stuff. That'll sort of drive people away. We don't want to talk about God's wrath. We don't want to talk about repentance and things like that. Let's not worry about that.
Let's just tell them all the good things. And unfortunately, when you do that, you don't end up preaching the gospel. Anything else? Yeah, in our situation, that is very common. I don't think that was a specific situation in Galatia, but that does come up in Corinth.
In Corinth, the discussion of money comes up. And Paul was very sensitive to the allegation that he was doing what he was doing for money. But what you say in regards to watering down the gospel, that being a reason for it, I'm afraid that's another factor.
Yes, sir? Worshiping angels? Well, I think really what he's doing, especially in the construction in the Greek, is he's creating a hypothetical situation. And the emphasis is on it doesn't matter who the messenger is.
It doesn't matter whether it's us. It doesn't matter even if it was an angel from heaven. If they preach a gospel other than what we preach, they are under the curse of God. And so I hear what you're saying.
In the book of Colossians, the mention of angels is primarily due to the Gnosticism that was coming along. And in 2 Corinthians, he's talking about ministers of Satan masquerading as angels of light. I think here he's just using this to emphasize it wouldn't matter if Gabriel himself came down.
If he preaches a message other than what we've preached to you, he's anathema. So I don't really think that there's any evidence that there was some sort of Gnostic worship of angels or something like that or a demonic type thing going on there in Galatia.
I don't see that necessarily in the passage. Yeah, it's a possibility. My gut feeling is that he's just presenting a hypothetical situation there. Anything else? Yes? That's what he claimed. Yeah, that's what he claimed.
Well, actually, first he claimed it was an angel, and then it became Jesus, and then eventually it was God the Father and Jesus Christ as separate and distinct personages. But yeah, there have been many who have claimed that angels have led them into this side or the other thing.
For example, a common thing right now is that New Agers are into communication with their own personal angels and things like that. But I think the primary thing that Paul is emphasizing is that even if an angel were to do that, it's the message that is important.
It's the message that's different. No, I do not believe that it is. I can look real quick. It's actually not even the conditional in 6 .6. Yeah, I've heard that, but it's not the same construction. Okay, any other questions?
Anything more at all? Yes? Oh, yeah, it's not as literal as... Well, it ain't as literal as this anyway. Anathema, they translate it accursed? Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah, that is a good meaning for the term.
I think like the New American Standard uses accursed, right? Yes, accursed. Yeah, it's used at the end of verse 8 and the end of verse 9. So the NIV is translating the Greek term anathema as eternally condemned, which is a good translation.
I am astonished. I am amazed. I am dumbfounded that you are so quickly being moved from... How does the NIV translate it? You're turning... That's not a bad translation either. The NIV attempts to bring out nuances of the language.
Yes, it is. The NIV did, yeah. Like I said, I brought up both are a possibility. One could be quickly in the sense of a period of time that they hear the gospel and then Paul is amazed that within a couple months they're going off into something else.
Or the term can also refer to that they are so easily being moved. Not that it was only last year that I was amongst your churches. It could have been five years. But still, you are so easily being moved about by whatever these people are teaching you.
You're sort of being led around and you're just going, well, gosh, that sounds great to me. It could refer to either thing, either a quick movement. There's been a short period of time since you heard the gospel and now it's off into something else.
Or an ease of movement without really saying much about how long it's been since they originally heard the gospel.