Paul’s fiery warnings to the Galatians should stop us in our tracks, for they expose the dire consequences of perverting the gospel. Today, R.C. Sproul urges Christians to proclaim without compromise the only true message of salvation. Get R.C. Sproul’s commentary on Galatians, plus lifetime digital access to his teaching series Galatians and Pleasing God, for your donation of any amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3609/pleasing-god Meet Today’s Teacher: R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was known for his ability to winsomely and clearly communicate deep, practical truths from God’s Word. He was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine. Meet the Host: Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children. Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
Somehow we have captured something of the New Testament call to love. But have we really captured the New Testament concern for truth and the importance of and a fidelity to the gospel?
Both Jesus and the Apostle Paul used strong language against those who would pervert and distort the gospel. Attacks upon the gospel have been present in every age of church history, so we must always be diligent, proclaiming the truth with clarity and without compromise. Welcome to the Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind, as R.C.
Sproul reminds us of this reality as he continues his examination of Paul's letter to the churches in Galatia. Galatians makes it clear that we cannot add to the saving work of Christ. You can study Galatians in more detail when you request Dr. Sproul's hardcover commentary along with digital access to this series and Pleasing God.
Simply give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org and we'll send you the commentary and unlock access to those series in the free Ligonier app. But be quick as this offer ends tomorrow. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on Paul's message to false prophets who add to the gospel.
We begin now with verse 6, where Paul moves into the body or the substance of the concern that he is dealing with here in the Galatian epistle. He moves into this almost abruptly in verse 6, where he says, "...I marvel that you are so soon removed from Him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel."
What Paul expresses here very clearly is a sense, a personal sense of what we might call apostolic astonishment. The word that he uses here is a word that is charged with emotional feeling. I'm astonished. I'm amazed. The King James says, I marvel.
It's interesting that the word that Paul uses here, the Greek verb, is the one that is most frequently used in the New Testament to describe people's reaction. to the power of Christ as He does His miracles.
If you recall throughout the gospel narratives when Jesus performs a miracle such as raising Lazarus from the dead or changing the water into wine or whatever He does, inevitably the crowd, the reaction of the observers, the spectators and the participants in this event is, we are told by the gospel writers, is that the people were astonished.
This is not just a mild description, not just a little bit puzzled, you see. They are overwhelmed in a sense of astonishment, and this is the kind of word that Paul is using here. I'm astonished that you are so quickly removed, see, from him who has called you. Paul says, I marvel that you are so soon removed. You know, the King James there, right? Removed.
The word that, again, is translated here is the word that is usually used to describe a traitor. One who totally turns around in his allegiance to his government. This is one of the ways it's used in the contemporary vocabulary. Or it may be a rapid shift in political allegiance. In other words, the basic meaning of the word is to change allegiance.
It involves a defection, a kind of treason that Paul has in mind here. And obviously, he's not happy about this. And marvel that you're so soon removed from him who called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel, which is not another, but there were some that would trouble you and would pervert the gospel of Christ.
Notice that when the false prophet comes, he doesn't announce his message of saying, here you, here you, I want you people to move away from the gospel and embrace my teaching, which is heresy. Now, he doesn't say that. He doesn't come along and say, you know, let's get rid of the gospel altogether. But rather, the subtleties comes along while Paul got you off to a nice little start.
But if we're really going to understand the truth of Christ, if we're going to have a real understanding of the gospel, then we need to go beyond this apostolic beginning. You see, no heretic in the history of the church has ever claimed to prefer the gospel. He might be saying that he's trying to bring it up to date. He may be talking about a new application or a supplement to it.
But no, no, no heretic has ever. boldly declared that he was purposefully changing the gospel. Now, Paul says, verse 7, which is not another. Okay? You see the irony here? What he's saying is that you think you're going to another gospel, another message of good news. There isn't any other gospel. There's only one gospel. There's no better gospel. There's no second gospel.
And the technicalities here, the Greek words here, is that Paul is talking about an other, that is, a different gospel. On the one hand, the one word he uses suggested that there's no other gospel, no different gospel, on the one hand. And the other word he uses there is the word that's translated another. In other words, in terms of a second gospel. There's no different gospel.
There's no second gospel, you know, that would even be the same. There's no other gospel except the gospel. the apostolic gospel, the gospel that finds its source in the mouth of Jesus himself. I'm laboring this point this morning because that is the issue of the 20th century. Is the church today committed to the gospel of Jesus, ergo the gospel of Paul? That's the issue, are we?
Committed to that. Or have we sought by every means imaginable to relativize and historicize that gospel to render it harmless to modern man? Paul is saying there isn't any other gospel. And here's where he comes on strong in his language. Listen to this. Verse 8. But though we, or an angel from heaven...
preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that you have received, let him be accursed. I don't think there's any place in the New Testament where more harsh and strong language comes from the pen of any apostle than we have right here.
This is not a slap in the wrist. This is very, very serious. Notice what Paul says. If anybody gives you any other gospel than the one you've received, I don't care who it is. I don't care what their credentials are. I don't care if it's me, you see. If I should give you a different gospel than the one you had already, then let me be accursed. I don't care if it's a professor in the seminary.
I don't care if it's a pastor in the pulpit. I don't care how much charisma he has. I don't care how many gifts of the Spirit he manifests. I don't care how many academic degrees come after his name, you see. I don't care if it's an angel from heaven. Let him be rebuked? No. Silenced? No. Accursed? The word that he uses here, notice this, is the word anathema.
from which we get the English anathema. That's the strongest possible judgment that a person can make. In the Old Testament, the Anathema was pronounced upon Jericho. In the conquest, you see, of Canaan, the cities were to be destroyed. The anathema of God was to come upon the pagan city in the destruction. Israel was not to preserve the walls of the city and incorporate it into their faith.
The idea of God's making a clean sweep and starting with this separated people in a new community, untouched, unblemished by the influence of the present paganism.
You see, this massive program that is carried out in the conquest of Canaan, so much to the fact that if Israel even saves the slightest bit of booty that would contaminate them, anyone who is caught doing that is to be executed, as was the case at Ai, who was responsible for the Battle of Ai. What's his name? Achan, who hid the booty under the tent.
And so God inaugurated the idea that when you go in there, I want you to destroy that city, and burn it to the ground so annihilated that it is impossible to ever rebuild it. Do away with any semblance of abiding value in that city. The word that is used there in the Septuagint is that God pronounces the anatema, the anathema on that city. It is to be reduced to rubble, total destruction.
And that's what Paul is saying, let that happen to the person who comes and teaches you another gospel. Let me just say that the severest punishment that we ever find in the Bible is that punishment directed not to the murderer or to the adulterer. That is not to suggest that those who are tolerated are allowed or anything, but the severest punishment is reserved for the false prophet.
They are the ones who come under the anathema. Teaching the people of God a gospel that is perverting the gospel of Christ is far more damaging to their well-being eternally than to rob them of their gold, or to rob them of their chastity, or to rob them even of their physical life. Do you understand that?
Somehow we have captured something of the New Testament called to love, but have we really captured it? the New Testament concern for truth and the importance of it and a fidelity to the gospel.
I can remember teaching at Gordon College, a class of 250 students, and in this particular class we were dealing with the business of Christology and the question of Jesus' preexistence and His eternal relationship with the Father.
And I mentioned the fact that there were movements in history, going back through the councils of Nicaea and that sort of thing, dealing with the question of those who would deny the eternal existence of Christ. Some would argue that Jesus is not eternal, but that he's created. And some have reached a compromise. He's not just a man, but he's sort of the highest of the angels.
He's the firstborn of creation, you see, where God creates Jesus first, and then Jesus creates everything else in the world. Now, this is what was going on back in the fourth century in those critical debates. But that issue, I pointed out, abides today in the sects of Jehovah Witnesses and of Mormons. And particularly the Mormons have this idea that Jesus preexists the world, but he's not eternal.
And they bring this doctrine as a corrective of classical Christian theology. And I was explaining to the class my reasons why this is not just supplementary to the Christian faith, but it's antithetical to the Christian faith and cannot be accepted as consistent with the gospel of Christ.
And at the end of this little dialogue with the students, I said, all right, now, I've given you the case for the orthodox view of the eternality of Christ and the biblical view of it. I've mentioned the Mormon view of it. And you recall, of course, that the authority by which Mormonism makes this change is their appeal to a new revelation that was received by Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni.
Okay? Now, I dispute that. And I'm telling all of you people here in this room that what Joseph Smith says is wrong. And it's not only wrong, it's seriously wrong.
Now, I said to this student, I said, what would happen if as I was standing up here talking to you right now, an angel, and you knew to be an angel, no doubt in your mind that it was an angel, that angel came in the door, the back room, and came up here and stood next to the platform, you see, glowing with this magnificent whiteness and heavenly glory all about him.
And that angel spoke and said to you, please do not listen to your professor, for he is not telling you the truth. But really, what Joseph Smith has said is right. And I urge you people to believe it. I said, how many of you then would believe in Mormonism?
If an angel came right in this room right now, and you knew to be an angel, and he told you that Mormonism was the truth, and what I'm saying to you is false, how many of you would believe the angel? Every single hand in that room. I said, well, I'll tell you how obstinate I am. An angel came in here and walked, floating through the air, performed miracle after miracle.
I said, and came up here and told me that Mormonism was right. I would pick up that angel by the seat of his ethereal pants and boot him right through the window and tell him to go to hell where he came from. He said, because of the fact that even I can recognize that that message is not the same message that we get in the New Testament.
Paul is saying that his authority, not my authority, but his authority as an apostle, as an agent of revelation, cannot be gainsaid even by the angels from heaven. Christ has not commissioned the angels to be his messengers of the truth. Christ did not say of the angels, he who hears them hears me, and he who refuses to listen to them refuses to hear me. He did say that of his apostles.
That's what's at stake right here. If you grab that, Paul says, if we or an angel from heaven gave you any other gospel, which I give you, let him be anathema. Now, there's a different movement here now. And beginning in verse 10, Paul now moves into a defense of that authority that he's claiming, even over the angels at this point. For do I now persuade men or God? Or do I seek to please men?
For if I yet please men, I should not be the servant of Christ. As a pastor and as a teacher, there's no verse probably in the New Testament that scares me more than this one. There's no rhetorical question before which I must tremble as much as I must tremble before this one. How do we answer that question?
I hate to think of standing before the judgment seat of Christ and having the first question being raised to me from Jesus is, did you seek to please me or did you seek to please me? That's the struggle of the flesh every Christian pastor has to go through. You'd have to be a masochist to not want to please people. We are human beings. I do not enjoy to be an enemy with my people.
No matter how much filled with the Holy Spirit I may ever become, I still have a great sense, an abiding sense of camaraderie with mankind. I am a man. I still belong more to the side of man than I do to God. Those are my peers, not the angels. And I sure don't want to have to isolate myself from the human community. Humanly speaking, do you understand that?
Even Luther, who was able to stand so much, confessed in his epistles how he struggled for the applause of men. Athanasius, who championed orthodoxy in the 4th century when he died, was buried with this epithet, Athanasius Contramundum. Athanasius against the world. Can you imagine what it costs a man? That man spent more time in exile than he did at home in the later years of his life.
That's what it means to stand for the gospel of Christ. I can remember, again, a personal illustration. I can remember at one point in my development, I had a zealous desire, the desire of the young Christian moving up. I said, God, I want you to make me not an able and competent scholar. What I want to be more than anything else is a great saint.
I'll settle for nothing less than to be like Augustine, to be like Luther, to be like Calvin, to be like Edwards, to be like, make me like one of those guys. That's what I want to be. Dr. Gerstner, you know, in my formative years, made the statements once in a time of weeping at the contemporary situation of the church.
He looked out at the church and what he saw, he said, Bob, we stand between Migdol and the sea. And we need a Moses that God will raise up to see who will lead us. from that impasse of the threatening sea in front of us and the armies of Pharaohs behind us. That rang in my ears, and I said, Oh, God, make me that man. Now my prayer is, God, we stand between Migdal and the sea.
Please find somebody out there who will be that man. Amen. I don't make prayers like that for myself anymore. And the reason is I read the biographies of those guys, like Augustine and like Luther and Calvin. And then my prayer became more like Augustine's earlier prayer, oh God, make me a saint, but not now. I don't want to have to go through with those guys one.
Either in the rigorous discipline that's necessary to be a saint in the first place, and said in the second place, to take. the obvious participation and baptism into the death of Christ that that would necessarily involve. I don't want to pay that price. I don't want to offend people. I don't want to be in enmity with my brother man.
The basic characteristic of the false prophet, remember, is that he's a pleaser in name. He tells the people what they want to hear. Paul is not suggesting that one who is faithful to the truth, one who is faithful to Christ, and who exercises duties as a pastor, as an evangelist, as a teacher, with all fidelity, is called upon to consciously, purposely, you see, indeterminately offend people.
Now, there are people like that who feel that it's their Christian duty to offend people, that they're not really being faithful to Christ unless they're jumping all over the feet of other people. Do you understand? I think you know the kind of personality I'm talking about. That's not what Paul's saying.
Paul's talking about the kind of offense to people that will come if you are faithful to the truth. I want to say something that the contemporary minister and those of you who have ministers who are trying to be godly men, they need your prayers and they need your love and they need your encouragement, even when they're speaking on your talks.
But the point that I think many people don't recognize is that in the Old Testament, there was kind of a division of labor between the prophet and the priest. The priest's function was to be the one who speaks to God in behalf of the people. He was the one who was basically the minister of compassion, the minister of the anointing graces of God. You see, he's giving that to the people.
He's ministering constantly to the people and then interceding for the people, directing his attention to God, representing the people. The prophet's task, you see, becomes the spokesman of God to the people, and he primarily calls the people to repentance. But these two offices were not tied up in the same person, were they? The priest was the one who abided with the congregation.
He had to live with these people day in and day out. The prophet, in a sense, he could run in and out of time and go out and live in the mountains for a few weeks and the next week come out of the desert. You know, people say that the desert is the traditional location of the prophet in the Old Testament because it was there. That God spoke to the prophet.
Well, sure, that's true, but I think there's another dimension to that. I think there's another reason why the prophets spent a lot of time in the desert. It's the only place they were saved. And these guys had to continually get out of the community or they'd get killed. And they ended up being killed anyway.
where they didn't have the problem of having to live daily with the people that they were speaking to prophetically. But the minister today, you see, in the new covenant is called to be a combination of both priest and prophet. Makes his task even more difficult than the Old Testament prophet at this human level. Can you really be a prophet and a priest at the same time?
That's the question that goes through my mind or went through my mind constantly as a pastor. However, there's a little irony here. I discovered that if the people know that you are their priest, they are more likely to accept your prophetic message. And this you find in Paul. Paul was a priest to his people, and they knew it. And so they could hear the prophetic criticism that he brought.
Understand that? So what I'm saying is that there's a certain sense in which being a prophet and a priest at the same time makes the prophetic ministry more difficult because of you having to keep living with people. On the second face, there is a sense in which it makes it more easy. because you can show the other side. You have that opportunity.
But I'm afraid that so many times what we get caught up into in the ministry is spending so much of our time building up the image of the priest that we never get to the work of prophecy. That's the danger. And God knows our church needs the voice of the prophet today. Do I now persuade men or gods? Do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.
Paul is not despising men. He's not despising the relationship. Again, when he characterizes his own M.O. as an apostle earlier, he said, I didn't come to you with great rhetoric and eloquent speech and all that, but I came to you in the power and the demonstration of the Spirit. And then he goes on to say, and I was with you in your suffering. He entered into their suffering.
There was a sense in which Paul identified with his people, and they knew that. He wasn't one to disparage the people. He loved the people. But when it came down to the moment of conflict, you could depend on the fact that Paul, if there was a division between the people and of God, they knew where Paul was going to stand.
He was going to stand with the side of Christ because he was first a servant of Christ and secondly, a servant of his people.
And don't we each want to be known as servants of Christ too, not pleases of men? You're listening to the Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. You can hear R.C. Sproul's passion for the gospel in today's message. And this passion to proclaim and defend the gospel that is by faith alone was evident throughout his entire ministry.
I count it such a blessing that my family was able to call him Al Pastor and sit under his preaching for almost six years. And each week he faithfully proclaimed the word of God and the gospel. His preaching and teaching ministry formed the foundation of his expositional commentaries.
And until tomorrow, you can request his commentary on Galatians when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. When you do, we'll also give you lifetime digital access to his series on Galatians and his series titled Pleasing God. So visit renewingyourmind.org or click the link in the podcast show notes before this offer ends.
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