Welcome back to my study/review of The Epistle to the Galatians. If you missed the previous parts of this study, you can find them HERE.
Galatians 1:1-5
1 Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— 2 and all the brothers who are with me,
To the churches of Galatia:
3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
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Paul begins the letter with an appeal to, and an emphasis upon, his personal authority. We’ll jump into the study by looking at the note on verse 1 from Ellicott’s Bible Commentary:
(1) An apostle.—This title is evidently to be taken here in its strictest sense, as St. Paul is insisting upon his equality in every respect with the Twelve. The word was also capable of a less exclusive use, in which the Apostle would seem to be distinguished from the Twelve (1 Corinthians 15:5; 1 Corinthians 15:7). In this sense Barnabas and James the Lord’s brother, possibly also Andronicus and Junias in Romans 16:7, were called “Apostles.”
Not of men, neither by man.—Two distinct prepositions are used:—“not of” (i.e., from) “men,” in the sense of the ultimate source from which authority is derived; “neither by” (or, through) “man,” with reference to the channel or agency by which it is conveyed. Thus we speak of the Queen as the “fount” of honour, though honour may be conferred by the ministry acting in her name. The kind of honour which St. Paul held (his Apostleship) was such as could be derived only from God; nor was any human instrumentality made use of in conferring it upon him. His appointment to the Apostolate is connected by St. Paul directly with the supernatural appearance which met him upon the way to Damascus. The part played by Ananias was too subordinate to introduce a human element into it; and the subsequent “separation” of Paul and Barnabas for the mission to the Gentiles, though the act of the Church at Antioch, was dictated by the Holy Ghost, and was rather the assignment of a special sphere than the conferring of a new office and new powers.
By Jesus Christ.—The preposition here, as in the last clause, is that which is usually taken to express the idea of mediate agency. It represents the channel down which the stream flows, not the fountain-head from which it springs. Hence it is applied appropriately to Christ as the Logos, or Word, through whom God the Father communicates with men as the divine agent in the work of creation, redemption, revelation. (See John 1:3; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Hebrews 1:2, et al.) It is also applied to men as the instruments for carrying out the divine purposes. The intervention of Jesus Christ took place in the vision through which, from a persecutor, St. Paul became a “chosen vessel” for the propagation of the gospel.
And God the Father—i.e., and by (or, through) God the Father; the same preposition governing the whole clause. We should naturally have expected the other preposition (“of,” or “from”), which signifies source, and not this, which signifies instrumentality; and it would have been more usual with the Apostle to say, “from God,” and “by, or through, Christ.” But God is at once the remote and the mediate, or efficient, cause of all that is done in carrying out His own designs. “Of him, and through him, and to him are all things” (Romans 11:36).
The Father.—This is to be taken in the sense in which our Lord Himself spoke of God as “My Father,” with reference to the peculiar and unique character of His own sonship—the Father, i.e., of Christ, not of all Christians, and still less, as the phrase is sometimes used, of all men. This appears from the context. The title is evidently given for the sake of contradistinction; and it is noticeable that at this very early date the same phrase is chosen as that which bore so prominent a place in the later creeds and the theology of which they were the expression.
Who raised him from the dead.—Comp. Romans 1:4 : “Declared to be the Son of God with power . . . by the resurrection from the dead.” The resurrection is the act which the Apostle regards as completing the divine exaltation of Christ. It is this exaltation, therefore, which seems to be in his mind. He had derived his own authority directly from God and Christ as sharers of the same divine majesty. It was not the man Jesus by whom it had been conferred upon him, but the risen and ascended Saviour, who, by the fact of his resurrection, was “declared to be the Son of God with power.” So that the commission of the Apostle was, in all respects, divine and not human.
(1-5) It is no self-constituted teacher by whom the Galatians are addressed, but an Apostle who, like the chosen Twelve, had received his commission, not from any human source or through any human agency, but directly from God and Christ. As such, he and his companions that are with him give Christian greeting to the Galatian churches, invoking upon them the highest of spiritual blessings from God, the common Father of all believers, and that Redeemer whose saving work they denied and, by their relapse into the ways of the world around them, practically frustrated.
St. Paul had a two-fold object in writing to the Galatians. They had disparaged his authority, and they had fallen back from the true spiritual view of Christianity—in which all was due to the divine grace and love manifested in the death of Christ—to a system of Jewish ceremonialism. And at the very outset of his Epistle, in the salutation itself, the Apostle meets them on both these points. On the one hand, he asserts the divine basis of the authority which he himself claimed; and on the other, he takes occasion to state emphatically the redeeming work of Christ, and its object to free mankind from those evil surroundings into the grasp of which the Galatians seemed again to be falling.
We’ll look next at the other commentary we will lean on most in this study – the free online version of “The Pulpit Commentaries” and its note at verse 2:
and all the brethren which are with me (καὶ οἱ αὺν ἐμοὶ πάντες ἀδελφοί); and the brethren which are with me, one and all. The ordinary unaccentuated collocation of πάντες would be, πάντες οἱ σὺν ἐμοὶ ἀδελφοί. Its position here, where, perhaps, it was thrust in by a kind of after-thought, marks it as emphatic; there is not one of those about him who does not feel the like grief and indignation as himself in reference to the news just now received. We have a similar collocation in Romans 16:15. Πάντες would be marked as emphatic also if placed last, as in 1 Corinthians 7:17; 1 Corinthians 13:2; 1 Corinthians 15:7; Titus 3:15. Our attention is arrested by the absence of any name. A number of persons are named by St. Luke in the Acts (Acts 18:18-5), and by the apostle himself in his Epistles to the Corinthians and to the Romans, as about his person at different times during the latter part of his third journey; and it does not seem very likely that not one was now with him of those who had accompanied him, either in the first or in the second of his two visits in Galatia. The most probable way of explaining the entire suppression of names is by reference to the present mood of the writer; he is too indignant at the behaviour of the Galatian Churchmen to weave into his greeting any such thread of mutual personal interest. It is enough to intimate that all about him felt as he did. Unto the Churches of Galatia (ταῖς ἐκκλησίας τῆς Γαλατίας). The dry coldness of tone with which this is written will be best understood by the reader upon his comparing the apostle’s manner in his other letters, in all of which he is found adding some words marking the high dignity which attached to the communities he is addressing. He is too much displeased to do this now. The plurality of the Galatian Churches, each of them apparently forming a distinct organization, is expressed again in 1 Corinthians 16:1, “As I gave order to the Churches of Galatia;” and agrees very well with what we read in Acts 18:23, “Went through tile region of Galatia and Phrygia in order (καθεξῆς), stablishing all the disciples.” The leaven of Judaizing, whether imported by visitants from other regions or originating within these Churches themselves, appears to have been working very extensively among these communities, and not in one or two of them only. If the latter had been the case, the apostle would not have involved the collective Churches in the like censure, but, as in the case of Colossae, compared with the “Ephesians,” have singled out for warning those actually peccant. This fact, of the general diffusion among them of one particular taint, warrants the belief that certain persons had been at the pains of going about among these Churches to propagate it. Who these persons were, or where they came from, there is nothing to show. It has, indeed, been assumed by many that, like those disturbers of the Antiochian Church mentioned in Acts 15:1 and Galatians 2:12, they had come from Judaea, or rather Jerusalem. But the Epistle gives no hint of this in respect to the Galatian Churches. What the apostle writes in Galatians 6:12, Galatians 6:13 points rather to the surmise that this particular distraction was caused by some Churchmen of their own, who had given themselves to this heretical proselytizing in order to truckle to non-Christian Jews living in their neighbourhood. Compare tile apostle’s foreboding respecting the future of the Ephesian Church, in Acts 20:30. (See note on Galatians 6:12, Galatians 6:13.)
The note points out something you might not pick up on, if you aren’t reading closely. In a lot of letters, the first several verses include greetings to individual people as well. Here though, Paul jumps in with comparatively little preamble. This has led to speculation that Paul is conveying a certain degree of “indignation” through the lack of these niceties. That is speculative, though. We’ll see if it seems as though the letter that follows matches that interpretation. Continuing on, back again in Ellicott at verse 3:
(3) Grace . . . and peace.—See Note on Romans 1:7.
God the Father.—We may see by this verse how the title “Father,” originally used in the present formula to distinguish between the Divine Persons, came gradually to contract a wider signification. God is, through Christ, the Father of all who by their relation to Christ are admitted into the position of “sons” (Romans 8:14-17; Galatians 4:5-7). Hence, where no special limitation is imposed by the context, this secondary sense may be taken as included.
And from our Lord Jesus Christ.—Strictly, it would be more in accordance with the theology of St. Paul to say that grace and peace were given from the Father, by, or through, the Son. Here the one preposition from is used to cover both cases, just as by had been used in Galatians 1:1. It is equally correct to use the word “from” with reference to a mediate and to the ultimate stage in the act of procession. Water may be drawn not only from the fountain-head, but also from the running stream.
For your benefit, I will include the “grace and peace” note from Romans 1:7 below:
Grace . . . and peace.—May God and Christ look favourably upon you, and may you enjoy, as the result of that favour, the peace and composure of mind which is the proper attribute of the Christian.
The terms “grace” and “peace” nearly correspond to two ordinary forms of Jewish salutation, the first of which has also something of a counterpart among the Greeks and Romans. But here, as elsewhere, the Apostle has given to them a heightened and deepened Christian signification. Grace is the peculiar state of favour with God and Christ, into which the sincere Christian is admitted. Peace is the state of mind resulting from the sense of that favour.
“The joy Thy favour gives,
Let me again obtain.”
This verse might seem pretty innocuous to a Protestant, but Catholics and Orthodox might see the outline of a thousand-year old divide. The note points us toward the debate concerning “the filioque.” What is that? I’ll provide two videos – the first arguing *for* the filioque and the second against it. This is an *intense* debate so I do not approach it lightly and I encourage you not to do so either. Instead let us pray for a return to unity someday. It would be unbelievably cool to be alive when a 1,000 year old split finally ended. There has been some promising movement in that direction of late.
Jumping back into our introductory text, we’ll continue on in Ellicott’s commentary at verse 4:
(4) Who gave himself.—Surrendered Himself, of His own free act and will, to those who sought His death. The phrase has a parallel in Titus 2:14, and appears in its full and complete form in the Gospel saying (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45): “The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many “; and in 1 Timothy 2:6 : “Who gave Himself a ransom” (the word is here a compound, which brings out more strongly the sense of vicariousness) “for all.”
For our sins.—In the Greek there are three prepositions, which can only be translated by the single word “for” in English. The first has for its primary sense “concerning,” or “relating to”; it merely marks a connection or relation between two facts. The second has rather the sense “in behalf of,” “in the interests of.” The third means strictly “in place of.” The first, as might be expected, is naturally used in respect of things; the second and third of persons. The death of Christ was a sacrifice for sins, i.e., the sins of mankind stood in a distinct relation to it, which was really that of cause. The sins of mankind it was which set the whole scheme of redemption in motion, and to take away those sins was its main object. The death of Christ was a sacrifice for sinners. It was a sacrifice wrought in their behalf, for their benefit. It was also a sacrifice wrought in their stead. Christ suffered in order that they might not suffer. He gave His life “a ransom for (i.e., in place of) many.” The first of these meanings is represented in Greek by the preposition peri, the second by huper, the third by anti. The distinction, however, is not quite strictly kept up. We not unfrequently find the death of Christ described as a sacrifice for (on behalf of) sins. This would correspond rather to our phrase “for the sake of.” The object was to do away with sins. They were, as it were, the final cause of the atonement.
It is somewhat doubtful which of the first two prepositions is to be read here. By far the majority of MSS. have peri, but the famous Codex Vaticanus, and one of the corrections of the Sinaitic MS., have huper. The two prepositions are not unfrequently confused in the MSS., and the probability in this case is that the numerical majority is right. It will then be simply stated in the text that the sins of men and the sacrifice of Christ have a relation to each other. If there had been no sin there would have been no redemption.
Deliver us.—The deliverance present to the mind of the Apostle appears to be rather (in technical language) that of sanctification than that of justification. The object of redemption is regarded for the moment as being to deliver men from sin, and not so much to deliver them from guilt, the consequence of sin. The Atonement has really both objects, but it is the first that the Apostle has in view in this passage.
This present evil world.—The reading of the three oldest and best MSS. tends rather to emphasise the word “evil”—“this present world, with all its evils.” A question is raised as to the word translated “present,” which might probably mean “impending;” but the Authorised version is probably right. “This present world” is strictly this present age. The Jews divided the history of the world into two great periods—the times antecedent to the coming of the Messiah, and the period of the Messianic reign. The end of the first and the beginning of the second were to be especially attended with troubles; and it was just in this transition period—the close of the older dispensation of things—in which the Apostles regarded themselves as living. The iniquities of the Pagan society around them would naturally give them an intense longing for release; but the release which they seek is moral and spiritual. They do not so much pray that they may be “taken out of the world” as that they may be “kept from the evil.” This the Christian scheme, duly accepted and followed, would do. The Atonement free men from guilt, but its efficacy does not cease there; it sets going a train of motives which hold back the Christian from sin, and constrain him to use his best endeavours after a holy life. The Galatians had lost sight of the power of the Atonement to do this, and had fallen back upon the notion of a legal righteousness, through the vain attempt to keep the commandments of the Law.
According to the will.—The scheme of redemption was willed by God, and therefore all that was done, either on the part of man or of his Redeemer, was a carrying out of His will.
Of God and our Father.—Or, as it might be, of our God and Father. It was the fatherly love of God for His creature, man, that set the work of redemption in motion; hence, in reference to the work of redemption, He is spoken of as “our Father”—i.e., the Father of mankind.
Verse 4 is a very brief summary of the result of Christ’s work on the cross and His resurrection. We’ll finish this opening section looking at verse 5 in TPC:
To whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen (ὧ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων Ἀμήν). This doxology is not introduced as merely a reverential closing up of the greeting, before the writer hastens on to the subsequent words of rebuke. It is rather an indignant tender of homage to the Most High, flashing forth from a loyal, filial heart; confronting and seeking, so far as it thus may, to redress the wrong done to “our God and Father” by the Judaizing spirit uprearing itself among the Galatians. It is similar in tone to the indignant doxology in Romans 1:25. This view of its origin explains the fact that, as connected with a greeting, such doxology is found only in this of all St. Paul’s Epistles. The indignation which pervades the tone of the whole passage favours the suppletion of ἔστω rather than of ἐστίν. Perhaps, indeed ἔστω is in general the more natural suppletion. In 1 Peter 4:11, where ἐστὶν is added by the writer, we have not so much a direct ascription of praise as an affirmation that to God belongs or is due the glory of our performing our several duties with reference to this end. In like manner in the (most probably interpolated) doxology at the close of the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:13, “For thine is the kingdom,” etc., the ascription of praise is not so much expressed as implied. Viewed in themselves, the words simply state the truth which constitutes the ground for our addressing to “our Father” our praises and our petitions. The article is most commonly prefixed to δόξα in such ascriptions of praise, whether δόξα stands alone, as Romans 11:36; Romans 16:27; Ephesians 3:21; Php 4:20; 2 Timothy 4:18; Hebrews 13:21; 2 Peter 3:18; or in conjunction with other nouns, as 1 Peter 4:11; Revelation 1:6; Revelation 7:12. It is wanting in Luke 2:14; Luk 19:38; 1 Timothy 1:17; Jude 1:25. When the article is added it marks the noun as expressing its notion viewed absolutely, in its entirety or universality: q.d. “Whatever glory is to be ascribed anywhere, be it ascribed to him.” Thus ἡ δόξα is equivalent to “all glory.” For ever and ever; literally, into the aions of the aions; apparently a form of expression adopted to denote intensification ,or superlativeness, like “holy of holies” (cf. Winer, ‘Gram. N. T.,’ § 36, 2). It is used where especial intensity is wished to be added to the notion of long undetermined duration; as Revelation 14:11; Revelation 15:7; Revelation 22:5, etc. The same notion is expressed, only with not the same passionate earnestness, by the phrase, “into the aions,” in Luke 1:33; Romans 1:25; Romans 9:5; Romans 11:36, etc.; and by “into the aion,” in Matthew 21:19; John 6:51, John 6:58, etc. Possibly there is a reference of contrast to” this present aion of John 6:4. This, however, is doubtful; for in John 6:4 aion points to a particular condition of affairs subsisting in this aion rather than to a mere mode of duration, which latter is alone in view here. The like observation applies to Ephesians 2:2 compared with Ephesians 2:7.
We will see going forward what this comment means, but it tells us that Paul is going to rebuke – among other things – a “Judaizing tone” that is creeping up and causing problems among the Galatian Christians.
Paul gets right to the point starting in verse 6, and we’ll cover that in the next post.