Let God’s curse fall on anyone, including us or even an angel from heaven, who preaches a different kind of Good News than the one we preached to you. I say again what we have said before: If anyone preaches any other Good News than the one you welcomed, let that person be cursed. [Galatians 1:8-9 (NLT)]
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul refutes the message of those who preached that adherence to Jewish laws was required of all believers. His are harsh judgmental words from a man who never even walked with Jesus on earth. Why was Paul’s Gospel the definitive one rather than the one the Galatians heard preached by the Judaizers? For the first two chapters of his letter, Paul explains the source of his apostolic authority.
Paul clearly states the divine origin of his message in verse 12: “I received my message from no human source, and no one taught me. Instead, I received it by direct revelation from Jesus Christ.” Saying that he came to the Gospel neither by his own understanding nor by another person’s teaching, Paul claimed his message came from a divine source—the Lord Himself! Indeed, nothing but divine intervention can explain Paul’s incredible conversion from a fanatical persecutor of Christians into an equally fanatical evangelist for Christ’s church! No one with Paul’s background and personality could have been convinced and converted by anyone other than the Lord! He is the poster boy for the Holy Spirit’s transforming power!
To emphasize that he didn’t get the gospel from any man, Paul explained that he spent three years in Arabia after his conversion before returning to Damascus and finally going to Jerusalem to meet Peter. Strict chronology seemed unimportant to Scripture’s writers and, without any punctuation or breaks between words, sentences, paragraphs, or chapters in the original writing, it often is unclear. As best as scholars can figure, Paul’s time in Arabia probably began in Acts 9 between verses 19 and 20. Since any part of a year was considered a year, Paul spent anywhere from as little as 14 months to as much as 36 months in Arabia.
In Paul’s day, Arabia referred to Nabatea, a large and prosperous kingdom east of Galilee extending as far north as Damascus and beyond Petra to the south. When considering those three years, I used to picture a confused Saul retreating into the Nabatean desert to study Scripture and try to reconcile the Christian-hating, Gentile-detesting Pharisee he’d been with the Christ-loving, Gentile-welcoming evangelist he became! I was wrong!
Although it resulted in temporary blindness, Saul’s conversion didn’t result in confusion; meeting Jesus brought clarity to the man. From the moment of his conception, God had been preparing Saul to meet Jesus on that road to Damascus! When that happened, everything he’d learned in the Hebrew Scriptures finally made complete sense! The Apostle has been described as a man who wouldn’t learn to swim by reading about it. He’d jump in the deep end and start paddling and that’s exactly what Saul did following his conversion. Acts tells us he “immediately began preaching about Jesus in the synagogues.” [9:20]
To further emphasize that his message did not come from men, Paul told the Galatians that, when he finally went to Jerusalem (after his time in Arabia), he stayed only two weeks and met just Peter and James. It was some fourteen years after his conversion that Paul went to Jerusalem and finally met with the leaders of the church. At that time, he shared with them the message he was preaching to the Gentiles “to make sure that we were in agreement…and the leaders of the church had nothing to add to what I was preaching.” [Galatians 2:2,6] Independent of the other Apostles, Paul preached the very same gospel they did because, like them, he learned it from Jesus! Paul’s apostolic authority came from God Himself!
Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, thirteen are attributed to the Apostle Paul. We know he wrote another letter to the Corinthians and the prolific letter writer probably wrote letters to believers in places like Damascus, Caesarea, and Jerusalem, but these thirteen are all that remain. Considering Nero’s persecution of Christians, the violence during the Jewish revolt, and Domitian’s persecution of Jews and Christians, all of which happened before the end of the 1st century, it’s a wonder that any of Paul’s letters survived! God, however, saw to it that these thirteen ”God-breathed” epistles were preserved and became part of the Christian canon.
Since we both attended liturgical churches as girls, my friend and I were trying to recall the terms for the various parts of a traditional church building. We knew the foyer is called the narthex and the congregation sits the church’s nave. We also knew the altar rail usually separated the nave from the chancel in the front. It’s from the chancel that the service is conducted and where the altar, pulpit, and lectern are located. We even recalled that the sacristy was the room holding Communion supplies and linens. Since we were worshipping in a park that morning, my friend asked the location of our sanctuary. In historic usage, sanctuary and chancel were synonymous but, in modern usage, a sanctuary consists of the entire worship space of a church. With no building, we had no narthex, nave, or chancel but we did have a worship space; our sanctuary was a gazebo in a county park.
The Israelites had just crossed the Jordan River and were preparing to conquer Canaan when Joshua came upon an armed man. Joshua was a stranger in a foreign land and, as Israel’s general, he may have been scrutinizing Jericho’s defenses to determine his plan of attack. I wonder if Joshua brandished his sword (while shaking in his sandals) as he queried, “Friend or foe?” The man, however, was neither ally nor adversary. Identifying himself as the commander-in-chief of the Lord’s army, his loyalty was to neither side. His allegiance was to God and the only side he was on was God’s! God wasn’t on Israel’s side any more than He was on Canaan’s. Israel, however, was on God’s side because their conquest of Jericho was part of His master plan of redemption. It was because they were on God’s side that the fortified city’s walls collapsed.
Our sons recently visited to celebrate their father’s birthday. As I watched them work their culinary magic in the kitchen, I marveled at how the boys who once thought Kraft mac n’ cheese to be haute cuisine became gourmet cooks. For that matter, when did they get so tall or those wrinkles appear around their eyes? At what point did the tow-headed boy’s hair darken and start receding or his brother’s turn grey? The changes I observed weren’t just physical. As we talked, I wondered when my once irresponsible boys became so sensible and wise. None of it happened overnight and yet each little change was so subtle it barely was noticed. But, when I thought back to the children and young adults they once were, the change was enormous.
Devotions of the Heart 