Galatians contains good doctrine about the Gospel, but it also contains strong rhetoric and personal appeals by Paul to defeat the false gospel of works righteousness.
In chapter 2, Paul recounts a disgraceful episode involving the Apostle Peter. The incident underlines the poisonous nature of works righteousness by law-keeping, and how it divides the church along lines of self-righteousness.
The Judaizers demanded that Gentiles keep the Jewish law, and that they were unclean, unsaved, and not God's people if they did not. Peter succumbed to their pressure, and separated from Gentile brethren when the Judaizers came to Antioch.
Paul states this was not in keeping with the truth of the Gospel, which proclaims that we are free from the penalty of the law by faith in Christ alone, and not by law-keeping.
He then humiliates Peter by exposing his hypocrisy to his Judaizing friends: that before they showed up, Peter wasn't keeping the law either!
Paul asserts that even Jewish believers know that righteousness is imputed by faith, and not by obedience to the law. Since Christ satisfied the law's judgment in our place, there is no more judgment left for us to avoid by law-keeping. We are dead to the law in Christ's death at Calvary!
We are either justified by Christ's work, or we are justified by law-keeping ourselves. We cannot have it both ways.
But Paul's greatest, more personal appeal, is this: that Christ loved him and died for him, and he will not tolerate anybody claiming that Christ's death for him was in vain, and there is still judgment to face.
To embrace law-keeping for righteousness is to count Christ's love and death for us as worthless.
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John Pittman Hey was born in 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi, to Godly parents who from the beginning raised him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. With child-like faith he came to Christ on his fourth birthday at his mother's knee. He received his education at church...
